This is another piece commissioned by Dave Taylor. Dave had been talking about this with a coworker named Beth Caylor, and she provided him with the hand-written representation shown above.
Dave asked me if I was able to turn this into a piece, and I was more than willing to do this for him. I shared Dave's idea with my girlfriend, Carolina Luiz, who can speak and read Mandarin and Cantonese. She said whoever did the translation for Dave was very good, but that it wasn't quite how a native speaker would have said the same thing, so she modified it for me and gave me the characters to use.
I learned a lot about Chinese from doing this piece, and I realized some important lessons. For example, I was trying to learn what the upside down looking duck head part of several of the characters meant? Carolina explained that they did not mean anything, they were just strokes. This would be similar to someone asking what the lower leg of the K or the R meant. They don't mean anything, they are strokes. I also learned that the characters for David don't literally translate to David like Edward would translate to Eduardo in Spanish. The characters represent the sounds Da and Way which is as close to the sound of David there is in Chinese. The Da character actually literally translates to "Big" .
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