Chinese New Year Festival Foods

Context: AT is a 22 year old student at USC. Her family is Taiwanese, and they celebrate Chinese New Year by cooking a variety of specific foods. AT listed these for me, along with the reasons behind why.

Text: “For one, we eat fish, because in Chinese, there’s a lot of words that sound the same and fish sounds the same as wealth. There’s a saying that every year you get more fish, you get more wealth. We also make this like fortune? cake? Or prosperity cake? It’s called fa gao, you can look it up. We make it because the word for fortune sounds like the word for rise, like bread rising. It’s really good! There’s also sweet rice cake, because it’s sticky, and the word for sticky sounds the same as the word for year. Oh, and of course, dumplings, because they look like the old fashioned coins or like ingots of gold they used to use. Let me think… oranges too, because one of the ways to say the fruit orange sounds like the way to say good luck”

Analysis: AT gave me a list of foods, all that are made and eaten due to a perceived relationship with something they sound or look like. The choice of food seems very sympathetic-magic based, specifically homeopathic magic based. Since the word for the item of food sounds like the word for another preferred item or outcome, engaging with that imitation is thought to produce said item/outcome, in this case, producing fortune in the form of money or in the form of luck. Making a food that either sounds or looks like luck/fortune is equated to making luck/fortune for oneself.

Pan de Muerto

Context: the informant, A.F., is a 21 year old USC student. Her family is Mexican, when asked about rituals or festivals, she brought up Dia de Los Muertos. Before she explained her family customs, she did give me a small disclaimer, saying that a lot of this feels normal to her, and so she wasn’t sure what would/wouldn’t matter.

Text: The informant explained that when her family celebrates Dia de Los Muertos, they always buys a specific bread, known as “pan de muerto”. She described pan de muerto as a round sweet bread with a cross on top; along with this, she explained that her family also makes the favorite foods of their loved ones who have passed. When asked if she leaves some out for ancestors, she told me that they do that alongside eating it. Her family puts up an altar in their house with photos of loved ones who have passed, decorating it with their favorite foods, candles, and a vibrant flower that her family calls “cempasuchil.” She told me she wasn’t sure what flower it was exactly, but she thought it was a marigold. To offer the bread and food to them, her family places it on the altar.

Analysis: Pan de muerto, or bread of the dead, is a typical part of Dia de los Muertos festivities, as is creating an altar for the living to offer things to their dead loved ones. The act of placing food on the altar for them seems like an idea based in homeopathic sympathetic magic, in that items given to photos of loved ones will also be given to their spirits in the afterlife. As the photo looks like the person, affecting it in some way will also affect the person, even once they’ve passed. The bread itself, to the informant, is essentially just a normal sweet bread, but the intent behind offering it is what matters, rather than anything special about the bread.

Korean Toenail-Eating Mouse

Context: The informant is a 21 year old USC student. Her dad is Korean and her mom is American; this story was told to her by the Korean side of her family.

The story goes that one day, a boy cut his fingernails and toenails and didn’t dispose of the clippings properly. He threw them outside, where a mouse came across them and ended up eating them. The mouse turned into an evil doppelganger of the boy and when the boy was out, went to his home and replaced him. When the boy came back, he was confronted with another version of him that had essentially taken over his life. He came to his parents and told them this, and his parents, confused, set the doppelganger and the boy next to each other to figure out which one was the original. Somehow, the parents chose the wrong one, and the boy ended up getting kicked out of the house, never to return.

Analysis: The informant told me that the moral of the story was basically that if you don’t dispose of your fingernail and toenail clippings correctly, a mouse will eat them, become you, and ruin your life. This folktale is one that seems dependent on the concept of contagious, or contact-based, sympathetic magic. Here, parts of the boy are not destroyed and so can be used against him; his nails, having once touched him, are believed to still be part of his body to the extent that affecting them can affect the body. Just as the mouse consumed the nails, the mouse-doppelganger consumes the boy’s life, using parts of him to reconstruct the whole. It’s a cautionary tale, reminding people not to make anything that can be used against them public

The informant was unsure how exactly the nails were disposed of incorrectly or how they should have been disposed of for safety purposes. While neither she nor her family practices this, it is apparently a common Korean folktale.

Baba Yaga as the Bogeyman

Context: The informant is a 22 year old USC student and the daughter of two Bulgarian immigrants. She told me that when she visited her grandparents, they would often tell her stories about Baba Yaga.

In C’s words: “[A]s a kid, my grandmother would bring up the story of Baba Yaga. Baba Yaga is this old witch who lives in a house deep in the forest. She lurks there, skulking the countryside, looking for naughty children to abduct. The only visible sign of her witchcraft is how her house moves around on its own two skinny chicken feet”

Analysis: C told me afterwards that her grandmother told her these stories in order to scare her into behaving, with Baba Yaga functioning much in the same way the Bogeyman would. Here, Baba Yaga is treated as a legend, with C’s grandmother purposefully attempting to make it seem as if being kidnapped by her is a genuine possibility; this is a common tactic to get children to behave.

Interestingly, this version of the story doesn’t emphasize that Baba Yaga is terribly ugly or scary in any way physically — the only way to tell that she’s a witch is to see her cottage, at which point it would be too late for a potential victim. This makes it easier for Baba Yaga’s story to function as a legend, as she could essentially be anyone around you, making it easier to think that she’s real. It seems that because there’s no popular hero/villain story with Baba Yaga’s defeat in it, it’s almost easier to transition her from a fairy-tale creature to what could be considered a legend. In comparison to, say, the Big Bad Wolf, who also seems to function as a manifestation of the consequences of one’s behavior, Baba Yaga is much more believable as a real and present fear because she isn’t clearly associated with a narrative in which she is killed. By this, I mean that saying that the Big Bad Wolf might come after you doesn’t work as well partially because the most popular version of Red Riding Hood today ends with his death.

Part of the associated fear seems almost as if it’s due to an inversion of the grandmother stereotype/figure/character; rather than being maternal, Baba Yaga steals children. As mothers or grandmothers would typically be the ones telling these stories, it would only further that feeling of discomfort due to some sort of transgression upon the traditional concept of an older maternal figure.

Lunar New Year Origins

Context: the informant is a 21 year old USC student with two Taiwanese immigrant parents. She told me that this was the story behind Lunar New Year. I was unable to record her exact words, but I was given permission to paraphrase.

The story goes like this: a long long time ago, there was a village that was attacked on the same day every year by a monster named Nian, which is the Chinese word for year. Year after year, people would die and they couldn’t do anything about it. Somehow, the people found out that Nian was afraid of fire, and so before he came to attack the village that year, they hung up red lanterns, tapestries, and banners outside their doors, hoping the monster would mistake the red color for fire and leave them alone. That year, when Nian came, he saw the decorations and was frightened away; that was the first year that nobody died. Every year after that, on that specific day, they would put up red decorations, hang red lanterns outside the walls, and set off firecrackers at night to make sure that the monster would never come back. During the day, children would also be given red envelopes to put under their pillows for protection. After that first year Nian was driven away, he never came back, too scared of the red colors that he thought were fire. Now for Chinese New Year, everyone wears red and puts up red decorations as a tradition, but this is the way it started.

Analysis: From the definitions we work off of in class, this would be classified as a legend because, while it’s an origin story, it’s an origin story for a tradition rather than a people or a land. It’s clearly set in our world and isn’t necessarily sacred, so if anything, it would be a legend, considering its veracity cannot be verified and it seems like something that, though supernatural, has the potential to be true.

Considering the red is supposed to mimic fire, it seems in theory very similar to some points that Francisco Vaz da Silva made about chromatic symbolism. He argues that the use of the black/white/red tricolor symbolism was “part of a general encoding of cultural values in sensory based categories” and while his argument was in relation to womanhood, I would say that some of might still apply. Red, in his example, was more of a sign of blood or maturation in Europe, but he goes on to reference a paper on African color symbolism that considers red as associated with activity or life-giving, much in the same way that blood might function.

Here, it represents similar concepts — red is a marker of life-giving in the way that it is a symbol of protection and its presence means the continued existence of life. Fire, and by extension, red, are both connected to the idea of life, resulting in an association of fire with vitality. Fire also brings light, driving away darkness and fear, creating another association with life-giving and continued success/safety.

Fire is also among one of the first things children are taught about (usually in the context of safety) and considering few things in nature are that color, I wonder if there’s more association of red with fire rather than blood for children who grow up hearing this story.