A warning to people named 单, 覃, and 解.

The Beijing Times reports that a tourist booked plane tickets with a travel agency only to find that the phoneticization of his wife's name on the boarding pass was incorrect. Her surname, Xie (解), had been written using the much more common reading Jie, despite the fact that as Jiě, it is not a surname at all. Xiè ranks somewhere close to 200 in the list of common surnames.

Worried that she might encounter problems during boarding, Mrs. Xie asked the travel agency to escort them to the plane, but the agency refused. An argument ensued, and before long the six men with the travel agency had started shoving the protesting familly members. As situation escalated, the men knocked a 62-year-old grandmother to the ground and beat other family members with poles for ten minutes until ten policemen arrived to take control of the situation. Three of the travel agency employees were arrested.

Out of ten family members, only a seven-year-old child escaped injury. The BT report doesn't mention whether or not Mrs. Xie and her family were eventually able to board their plane to Sanya.