fluke²[ flook ]

noun

1. an accidental advantage; stroke of good luck: He got the job by a fluke.
2. an accident or chance happening.
3. an accidentally successful stroke, as in billiards.
4. what my friends from my teenage years might call me.

(from dictionary.com)

They don’t actually call me “fluke”, but rather, they would call me fluke in Cantonese. So if you want to speak Cantonese, sometimes you just need to break up an English word into separate syllables. For example, fluke would become… “fu look”. The meaning remains, but now it’s Cantonese.

Let me digress: a lot of terms and slangs in Cantonese came from Hong Kong people making an effort speaking an English word. My favorite of these terms is “屙拔甩”. “屙” means defecate, and “拔甩” is blood. So “屙拔甩” is used to describe… a very bad situation.

Anyhow, fluke was my nickname until I came to U.S. for college. It just seemed silly introducing myself to others as “fluke” in college. But I enjoy having a name associated with my childhood/teenage year. Only my dearest friends from home call me fluke now.

But why? What does fluke have to do with me? I actually had no idea about why I was called fluke for at least 10 years. It wasn’t until my early (or mid?) 20s that my dear friend Roger Chung reminded me, he was the one who dubbed my nickname. When I was in primary school, I played a lot of table tennis, and apparently I would always win by making “edge shots”. You could just stand there and be frustrated and helpless.