New in-laws

Our son George got married this week at the registry office in Sydney. It was a deliberately low key affair, nothing like the big wedding Chris and I attended here in Ottawa last summer. George and Sha had nine guests, a round of beer at the pub afterwards, followed by a Sezchuan supper. 

George's new parents-in-law are called 杜玉奎 (du yu kui) and 虞秀华 (yu xiu hua), names that we'll have to practise writing and saying before we meet them in Beijing next year!

Sha, with her parents, photo by George

I read an interesting point in the Wikipedia article about Mandarin Chinese:

The written language, called "classical Chinese" or "literary Chinese", is much more concise than spoken Chinese, the main reason being that a single written character is often just what one wants to communicate yet its single syllable would communicate an ambiguous meaning if spoken because of the huge number of homonyms. For instance, 翼 (yì, wing) is unambiguous in written Chinese but would be lost among its more than 75 homonyms in spoken Chinese.

That tallies with what I'm finding when I try to remember the vocabulary. I look up a word like hua, for example, and here is the sort of page I get when I search for its meaning. Not that I'm complaining; I love this sort of challenge, and I know some people who can help me.