There seem to be quite a few things about living in a different country that I find cognitively taxing in a small way – not enough to stop me doing anything, but enough that I keep finding simple tasks a bit more difficult.

I’m emailing a list of people who attended an event I ran last week, and I have no idea who’s who. Everyone I met that day introduced themselves to me with an English name: every email I have on my list uses a Chinese name. I’ve got the hang of patronymic followed by personal names, but relating that to English names chosen arbitrarily is a little trickier.

I guess that might be one more reason why using handphone numbers as personal identifiers might be appealing.