Author Archives: Lilian Min

Soviet military joke

INFO:
A Soviet soldier and an officer are chilling together at the base. The soldier goes to the officer and says, “Comrade/captain! Can you tell me why is your shirt red?” The captain says, “Well, comrade/private, if we go into battle and I’m shot, I don’t want you to know that I’m bleeding out and I want you to keep on fighting.” And the private goes, “Oh, okay, that makes so much sense! That must also be why your boxers are yellow.”

BACKGROUND:
He was told this joke by his Russian friend, about ten years ago. They were just talking about military stuff, maybe playing a video game together, when unprompted, the informant’s friend shared the joke. The informant still thinks the joke is funny, but

CONTEXT:
I spoke to my informant during an on-campus event.

ANALYSIS:
Clearly, there are some attitudes about the Soviet military, and perhaps the entire Soviet political structure, being expressed in this joke. It takes the idea of the “cowardly officer” but expresses it in the faux-egalitarian framework of the Communist regime. Even though I don’t completely understand the joke in and of itself, I can still feel the upwards-directed anger within the officer/private confrontation.

Zorthian

INFO:
The informant lives in a house in Altadena — behind her house is a trail that leads into the woods. At a certain point on that trail, there are a bunch of abandoned-looking houses that are actually occupied. This area is collectively known as Zorthian. People go there to scare themselves, but it’s rumored to be a meeting ground for local members of the KKK. There are other legends surrounding the area, but the informant isn’t clear on those.

BACKGROUND:
Because the informant’s house is so close to Zorthian, she can sometimes hear the screams — and subsequent laughter — of the people who go there to scare themselves. She also frequently sees cop cars in the area, as Zorthian’s residents call in police to take care of trespassing people in the area.

At night, the entire area is tree-lined and very dark. People, especially teenagers, go there to drink and smoke. This practice is clearly despised by the people who actually live there, but because of the creepy, strange associations of just the buildings and where they are themselves, people still go to the area to scare and be scared.

CONTEXT:
The informant, one of my housemates, shared the story with me in conversation.

ANALYSIS:
What I find really interesting about this story is how even though it’s generally acknowledged that there’s nothing especially haunted or out of place in Zorthian (besides its ridiculous name), locals still treat it as such, even if only in a joking way.

Gravity Hill

INFO:
In Altadena, California, there’s a hill called Gravity Hill. When you go on its downward-facing slope in a car in neutral, the car starts going uphill.

Gravity Hill is situated next by a reservoir; there are trees everywhere, but it’s a pretty open space otherwise.

BACKGROUND:
The informant first heard about when she was 12 — she’d heard that it was super creepy and that there were ghosts and spirits pushing you up the hill, and that the “magic” worked better at night.

When she first went on it, she thought that the entire scene was an illusion of angles. Later on, she would walk around in that area all the time, climb the fences that surrounded the area and hang out there with friends. Hanging out in Gravity Hill was very much “a thing” to do when you were a kid or a teenager in Altadena.

Altadena in general is, in the words of the informant, an Altadena native, “hippie dippy.” She describes the locals as “sort of weird,” so something like Gravity Hill seemed right at home there.

CONTEXT:
The informant, one of my housemates, shared the story with me in conversation.

ANALYSIS:
The existence of these sort of geographical anomalies, where the perceived tilt of the earth doesn’t match how things actually move, is not that rare — I recently traveled to a similar place in NorCal named Confusion Hill. In both cases, the existence of spirits was taken as granted, not necessarily because people strongly believed in them, but because it was just seen as another weird thing to add onto the already weird location.

That said, the fact that the residents in the area are known for being a little off kilter as well makes the existence of and continued legendary presence of Gravity Hill more understandable.

Fort Monroe – Confederate ghost stories

ITEM:
(1) The informant’s father’s family had just moved into Fort Monroe — her father was visiting from his undergrad (Purdue) and was almost 20 at the time. The night he came home, everyone in the family heard the sound of heavy chains dragging across the floor of the upstairs attic. The next day, her dad and his dad went to investigate. They saw nothing, and it never happened again, but everybody agreed on the sound.

(2) One time, a bunch of the army wives got together and they were talking about their houses. They ended up comparing ghost stories. One of them was saying that she walked into the kitchen with her husband and there was a cat there — they didn’t have a cat. The cat looked at them, and then turned away and walks through a wall. Eventually, the family looked up the plans for the building in the engineer’s office and originally there’d been a door in the space the ghost cat walked through.

BACKGROUND:
The informant’s ethnicity is half-white, half-Filipino American. Her father, who is white, was in the army, and his father flew helicopters in Korea and Vietnam — their family grew up moving from army base to army base.

Fort Monroe, in Hampton, Virginia, was where they kept the really important POWs from the Civil War, like Jefferson Davis. For those POWs, they would build quarters for their wives. It was widely understood that the town ghost was the ghost of a woman whose face sometimes appears in the widow at Mrs. Davis’s old quarters, waiting for her husband to come back.

CONTEXT:
The informant, who is one of my housemates, told me the stories, which originated from her father, in conversation. Her father actually recently visited her (4/30/14), and later corroborated details of her stories with him, the primary source.

ANALYSIS:
Whenever people live in older areas, or areas with a lot of history, it seems much more common to encounter ghost legends, and for people to be more comfortable with the idea of ghosts. This is of course helped along by my informant’s father’s religious upbringing. His family was Catholic — it was totally normal to talk about ghosts, and nobody talked about them as if they’re inherently scary.

Additionally, Fort Monroe is an area so closely tied to the Civil War, the bloodiest and one of the most traumatic events in American history. The distance in time between then and the modern day isn’t as far as people might think, and one way to tie these two eras together is by passing on legends about local history.

For more information about Fort Monroe’s ghost sightings, click here.

Filipino ensaymada (cheese bread roll)

ITEM:
Dough: flour, melted butter, whole eggs, yeast?, cream of tartar for texture
Form the dough
Let it rise once
Separate it into clumps
Roll it out so each clump is very flat
Brush it with semi-soft butter — very, very buttery
Flat piece of dough is rolled into a cylinder and then coiled into the roll, adding parmesan cheese and sugar to the inside of the coil
Afterward doing that with all the rolls, let them rise again
Left to bake — afterward, brush with more melted butter and roll with more cheese and sugar

BACKGROUND:
The informant ate it growing up whenever she went to her lola’s (grandmother’s) house, who would make it as snack food (symbol of hospitality). It was one of the many snacks she’d make whenever the informant and her sister would visit amongst the summer.

Ensaymada is definitely a Filipino dish, found in bakeries both big and small. Everywhere has a different take on it but obviously, “my grandmother’s is the best.” When the informant got older, her lola would try teaching it to them by making it in front of them and they’d help mix the ingredients and form the rolls, but she doesn’t exactly know what goes into the dough. Her lola would even mail these rolls to both the informant’s mother and her, because she said “You guys don’t do it right.”

CONTEXT:
The informant is one of my housemates. She isn’t really involved in Filipinio cultural practices, but does have deep connections to family who are. She told me the story of her lola in conversation.

ANALYSIS:
Filipino culture, like many Asian cultures, is very food-centric — additionally, it’s fun to collaborate and plan meals together, but these meals also symbolized hospitality and, in the informant’s case, grandmotherly love, a way to keep her there even when she wasn’t physically present. In the informant’s words: “It’s one thing to share your meal times with us, but it’s another thing to have a physical symbol of ‘your house is my house’.”