Eva Chin writes for RECATOOLS on the practical side of running a household and a business in Southeast Asia: the arithmetic of a tropical home, Chinese naming and cultural practice, education and qualifications across the region, and the commercial decisions small businesses actually face. Coverage of cultural practice is educational — it explains what a tradition holds and where it came from, and does not make predictive claims.

8
Articles
Business
Primary beat
Jul 2026
Writing since
~70 min
Total reading
All 8 Business 5 Chinese Culture 3

Articles · Chinese Culture Showing 1–3 of 3

A calligraphy brush drawing a broad ink stroke on white paper.
Chinese Culture

How Chinese Given Names Actually Work — and Why Everyone Picks the Same Ones

A person could once carry four names: a milk name, a generation character shared with every cousin, a given name, and a courtesy name conferred at twenty. Three are gone or going. What is left is the freest naming decision anywhere, producing some of the most uniform results — every name in the reported 2021 top ten is two characters, drawn from the same small pool. Plus the stroke-count bug this audit found in our own suggester.

1 Aug 2026 · 10 min read
The Khoo Kongsi clan house in George Town, Penang — a Hokkien clan association of the kind that keeps surname and dialect-group records.
Chinese Culture

Tracing Chinese Ancestry in Southeast Asia: Start With How Your Name Is Spelled

Tan, Chan and Chin are the same character. Which one is on your IC records which dialect group your family belonged to, and that narrows the province, the clan associations and the language of the records. Plus the 1966 Indonesian name change that breaks most trails outright — and the honest limits of what any of this can deliver.

1 Aug 2026 · 10 min read
A thin new crescent moon in a deep navy twilight sky above the silhouetted rooflines of tropical shophouses, a minaret and palm trees.
Chinese Culture

Dates, Calendars and Holidays Across ASEAN

Ask our working-days calculator how many working days Singapore has in 2026 and it used to say 252. The answer is 251 — it had Hari Raya Puasa on the wrong day and was missing two in-lieu Mondays. Those are small errors with one cause: scheduling anything here means running three calendars at once, and only one of them stays where you left it. Why Chinese New Year wanders inside a fixed window while Hari Raya has no season at all, why the replacement day rather than the festival is what removes a day from your working year, and why a two-day holiday produces a two-month disruption window.

29 Jul 2026 · 10 min read
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