I was a student in 1976 at the Peking Languages Institute, in a class of students from Iceland, Canada, Nigeria, Oz, New Zealand. If any one of us had a name that sounded odd or funny or rude in Chinese, we changed it. Simple. End of story.
This is a bit of a non-story, TBF. I reckon the company, Fok Hing Gin are happy with the publicity. Brill. “Fok the haters”, they’ve tweeted. Though saying “haters” to people who are just having a laugh, tipsy at the bar, is a bit rich, I reckon.
ADDED: the characters are 福興氈 Fú xìng zhān in Mandarin. Fok Hing Gan in Cantonese. Literally “Happy, prosperous, carpet (or felt)”. By the way, I lived and worked on Fu Xing Road in Shanghai in 1989-90. There were some who joked about it even then. Joke which quickly paled. It’s a major street in the old French Comcesssion of Shanghai.
