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Salmon chaos: Taiwan pleads with people to stop changing names for free food

WION Web Team
TaiwanUpdated: Mar 19, 2021, 12:04 AM IST
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Sushi Photograph:(Reuters)

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Considering that Taiwan allows its citizens to change their names thrice, people — mostly young people — decided to take advantage of the rule and the promotion offer

Taiwan has a unique crisis to handle. While the world is battling with rising coronavirus cases, Taiwan is having to fight against an increase in requests for name change.

Being termed as "salmon chaos" by local media, Taiwan officials received more than 150 applications for name change in the last two days.

The peculiar thing is that majority of these people want to add "gui yu" to their names in some way. 

Reason behind this sudden demand for the name change is a chain of sushi restaurants. The Chinese characters "gui yu" stands for 'salmon'.

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A chain of sushi restaurants had started a two-day promotion offer under which anyone who had "gui yu" in their name could enjoy an all-you-eat sushi meal along with five other people.

Considering that Taiwan allows its citizens to change their names thrice, people — mostly young people — decided to take advantage of the rule and the promotion offer.

However, this hilarious demand was not well received by the officials who said it only leads to more work. 

"This kind of name change not only wastes time but causes unnecessary paperwork," the deputy interior minister, Chen Tsung-yen told reporters. "I hope everyone can be more rational about it,"

Locals are rushing to the administrative offices to change their names and many of them have jokingly told the local reporters that they will "just change our names back afterwards".