One of the more interesting traits of my daughter is that she won’t touch meat. Any kind of meat, cooked or raw. Literally, even to give it to the dog. The one exception is chicken in shredded, deep fried form, and then only grudgingly. However, she loves fruit… all types of fruit. Oranges, apples, mangoes, grapes, watermelons, cantaloupes, berries… if it’s in the fruit family, she’ll eat it. Even if it looks like part of the fruit family, like cucumbers, it’s fair game. This has given her the nickname at her preschool of “fruit bat.”
While dining with some of our friends from Shanghai, I asked the question, what is fruit bat in Chinese? Well, here it is: 果蝠, or guǒ fú. Guǒ is fruit, and fú is bat. Or, the HTML representation: 果蝠 (果蝠).
Apparently, fú is also a homonym for 福, which means fortune or happiness. Apparently, during Chinese New Year, it’s written everywhere for good fortune . And, it’s a good sign for the name.
My daughter, 果蝠.