英语阅读：What's in a number? No great fortune
Last Thursday, China Daily reported a bizarre story about the owner of acheap automobile who "spent a fortune on a lucky license plate" in Foshan,
Guangdong province.
The man bought the license plate with the number of 88888 for his
40,000-yuan ($5,882) compact car. The report did not reveal how much the man
paid for the plate but it was estimated at more than 200,000 yuan ($29,412),
according to local sources.
Figure eight, pronounced as "ba" in Chinese, is believed to be a lucky
number because it is homophonic to the Chinese character Fa, which means getting
rich. Five eights definitely symbolize tons of wealth.
However, it is only wishful thinking. Things evolve along natural or
logical courses or are occasionally diverted by some fortuity but will never be
affected by some numerical sphinx that sounds pleasant to the ears.
The belief that numbers will bring good or bad luck simply because of their
homophonic pronunciation is even more stupid than superstition. Anyhow,
superstition is based on some telling reasoning. For instance, nine was thought
to represent the highest level in Chinese ancient mythology. That is reasonable,
because one, two and three represent good, better and best respectively;
triple-three, or nine, is naturally the highest. Ancient Chinese believed that
heaven had nine levels.
The origin of the idea that figure eight stands for good luck also reveals
its absurdity. Number eight was never regarded as representing good luck in the
annals of Chinese superstition. It was only in the early 1980s that some
Guangdong locals began to favor it as an auspicious symbol because ba and fa are
homophones in the local dialect and that time happened to herald Chinese
people's awakening to the justification of pursuing wealth.
Ironically, many people who had ridiculed the idea also began to believe it
later on. It has since become popular across the country. Even some government
departments accepted the theory. For example, the traffic and telecommunications
authorities auctioned "lucky numbers" at exotically high prices. Beijing chose
eight o'clock eight minutes pm on the eighth day of the eighth month of 2008 as
the opening day of the Beijing Olympic Games, though the authorities denied the
assumption that the timing was made out of the eight-standing-for-luck
theory.
In contrast to eight, four, pronounced as si, is thought to be unlucky
because another character homophonic to it means death. This phenomenon caused
many people to shun the number in their daily lives. For instance, phone numbers
involving digit four have to be sold at low prices.
This is also ridiculous. There has never been statistics that cars with
four in license numbers have a higher road accident rates or those with eight on
the plate have lower rates. One of my home phone numbers had two fours and my
personal ID number ends in 14, which sounds like "want to die," but I never came
upon any serious accidents.
A real incident that happened two years ago in Chengdu, Sichuan province,
contradicted the number-luck theory. A man quarreled with his wife and
threatened to commit suicide by saying "wo qu si" (I'm going to die"). Later he
used the phrase's homophonic figures 574 in his lottery attempt and won 8
million yuan ($1.18 million).
Isn't this an amusing rebuttal of the absurd theory?
E-mail: liushinan@hotmail.com
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