I get (nearly) free health care!

... And I have a government I.D. to prove it. As you may well know, in Malaysian, the name Saia (sp. "saya") means "I am" or "me." Here in Taiwan, one must be careful not to reveal to one's students one's last name if it is Saia, because in the local Taiwanese dialect (Fukkianese), the word "Saia" (rhymes with "Hi ya!") is titillatingly close to the word "sai" (pr. sigh), which means, "shit."

But I digress. In fact, my Beijing-ese Chinese teacher in the U.S. had endearingly called me, "Lao Sai," (roughly, "Old Saia") as a friendly gesture. When I mentioned this to a Fukkianese-speaking acquaintance in San Francisco, he cracked up, insisting that I do not go by that name in Taiwan. Why? Although in Beijing-hua "Lao Sai" is simply a kindly buddy-greeting for a person of the common Chinese family name, Sai, in Fukkianese, it means "diarrhea" (literally, 'fast shit.')

This card makes me legal here.

But I've digressed again. I am salad. You see, it's just hard for them. Some Chinese bureaucrats, I mean, to decipher English writing. Someone understandably mistook the "I" in the weird name, "Saia" for an "L," thus renaming me "David Sala." This has happened often in my life, most notably with telemarketers and other business persons who do not love me. Once in fact the Saia/Sala schism resulted in my not becoming a Canadian. "What?!" you say, "how can use of 'Sala' for 'Saia' affect your citizenship status?"

My birthday's off by 1 day

It was 1995, and I had put in all my paperwork for my application for Landed Immigrant status to the Canadian immigration agency. One sleepy morning I received a phone call from a well-spoken man who said, "Mr. Sala?" Considering "Sala" a telemarketer's dead-giveaway, I groggily lowed, "Uhhhb ... Nope." The off-put gentleman, having sought to do me a favour, simply hung up. It wasn't until a couple of weeks later that I realized who that call had been from — when I received the letter from the Canadians stating that I had neglected to include my US$1,000 application fee. Oops! By that time I was just a few days away from my round-the-world trip, and every major $1,000 chunk of budget had already been allocated. Had I realized my oversight 2 weeks earlier, I'm sure I would have gotten it together to send the check.

The deli's in the details!

Wait a minute — have I been redigressing? To make a long story into one that has an ending, today, when I went to the hospital to get my new National Health Insurance card, the busy card-reissuing worker failed to put a space between my last name "SALA" and my first initial, "D," thus granting me my new and most nutritious pseudonym ever.