I really enjoy driving my car, I do, but over the last two and half years that I have owned it, I have had some really bad luck. In an effort to excise some of my bad car karma, I'm changing the license plate number.
I never really thought about it much, but the last 3 digits on my car are quite inauspicious -- the number 624 in chinese sounds like it means 'road, easy death'. or, if you take the cantonese meaning, 6 or 'luhk' sounds like the word for 'deer', which is the symbol for longevity -- so the 624 in that case becomes "long easy death"... Of course, not only do i have a 4 at the end of my plate, but my plate starts with a 4 as well -- beginning and ending in 'si' or death.
This morning, I put in a request for a personalized plate, with some Chinese lucky numbers. Hopefully the plate will get here soon, and the karma wiill reverse itself.
I spent a good part of the day translating this week's dialogue in my Mandarin textbook and now I'm off to relax by reading more of Lirael.
I actually didn't know that you would believe in this superstition, but this "rule" is still followed by a large number of Chinese who also happen to be superstitious i.e my parents, grandparents, elders and other relatives. Hehe. =)
Yeah. Usually, if you see a car with any combinations of 8 or 9 (9 in Chinese sounds like "long", which is why 9 is usually taken to mean that someone will have a long life) with any number other than 4, the owner of the car is probably Chinese. I'm not saying that the owner is definitely Chinese, but that it could be just by looking at the arrangement of the numbers on his/her license plate. This also applies to addresses and phone numbers.