Author Archives: pmnazari@usc.edu

The Ironic Suicide

Item (direct transcription):

There was a legend, a tale, about a man who tried to commit suicide. And he tried to use three methods. Ironically, the three methods ended up canceling each other, and he ended up living. Here goes the tale. The tale goes like this:

He’s standing right at the edge of a bridge. [The informant uses a water bottle as a prop. He pushes it to the edge of a counter.] So already, you already know his first method of committing suicide: he’s going to hang himself. So he tries to hang himself. That’s method one. Method two is he wants to blow his brains out, so he has a pistol right by his side. And then in his other hand, he has a poison capsule. So, he has to do it very carefully.

First he puts the poison capsule inside his mouth, swallows it, waits a while, then he gets out the gun, then he jumps! And then, he tries to pull the trigger, but then, the rope yanks his head, and he ended up pulling the gun out of his mouth, but he still pulled the trigger. [He acts out all of these events.] The gun, the bullet breaks the rope, so he ends up not hanging himself and he ends up not shooting himself in the head. And because the water is so not-too-distant away from him, he doesn’t die from hitting the water. Now, the water is salty—it’s sea water, and he ends up—Ugh! [vomit noise]—swallowing a great gallon, half a gallon of salt water. And then he ends up throwing up the poison capsule that was in his stomach. So he ends up canceling out all his suicide methods, by using his suicide methods!

Background Information:

The informant first heard this tale in high school. He has remembered it and enjoys telling it because his audiences tend to respond well to it. In his opinion, the story has a captivating hook and a hilarious conclusion.

He does not believe that the story was true, because he finds it “outlandish.” Interestingly, the gender of the story’s character seems to influence that belief. The informant claims that men tend to kill themselves using simple and direct methods (e.g. jumping from a height or using a gun), whereas women are more likely to use complex and unreliable methods of suicide (e.g. inhaling carbon monoxide or overdosing on sleeping pills). Since the story’s character is a man, the informant finds it unlikely that he would use three methods of suicide, rather than just one.

Contextual Information:

The informant performs the tale in order to entertain an audience. He enhances the performance by acting out the story as he tells it.

Analysis:

The story uses the common Western storytelling motif of threes (i.e. three suicide methods).

The Moon Festival Story

Item (direct transcription):

So a long time ago… long, long time ago… very long time ago… there were twelve suns. When I say “suns,” I mean S-U-N-S, not S-O-N-S. So there were twelve glaringly hot suns a long time ago. So it was very hard to grow things for farmers. They were like, “Shoot, it’s so hot, we can’t grow anything.” So a fierce warrior came amongst them and then shot down eleven of those suns. With the eleven suns gone, he left one sun up there, so now there was only one sun. So you think that’s the end of the story, but it’s not the end of the story!

The fierce warrior was very loved by the people, because now they could grow food, and now people could live not-so-miserable lives. So they made him king. But that started a very bad regime. He was a very bad king. Because he could do anything. And then, one day—he had a girlfriend—and he was chatting with his girlfriend and was like, “You know, I wanna live forever.” So he asked his prime minister: “Find me the medicine that makes me live forever.” So the prime minister knew he had to find it, or else he would die.

So he goes and he scourges and he finds the medicine. It’s two pills. He goes back to the king, and he says, “Okay, here’s how it works. There’s two pills. If you eat one pill, you live forever, but if you eat two pills, you float to the moon.” And the king’s like, “Sounds good. You know, I could eat this pill now, but for the sake of the story, I won’t.” So then he goes to bed.

So he goes to bed, and his girlfriend overhears about these two pills and their qualities. And she knew in that moment that she could not let this man live forever, because there’ll be a bad king that lives forever. So she does the unspeakable. She eats two of the pills—stuffs them into her mouth—and immediately she starts floating towards the window. Before she left, she knew she needed company as she went to the moon, [clap] so she grabbed a bunny, and they floated to the sky. So the king started looking, like, “Where are you going?” And she said [in fading voice], “Try to be a good king.” And then the king’s girlfriend floated to the moon, and legend has it—because she lived forever—she’s still on the moon… with her bunny. And the king heard his girlfriend’s words and decided: “You know what? I should be a good king.” And that’s the end of the story.

Background Information:

The informant was taught this story by his “elders” in the Chinese community. He has heard the story many times from many different people.

The informant made it clear that he does not believe the story is true, and that he does not think the people who told it to him believed it was true. Thus, though it resembles a legend, to this informant the story is in fact a tale.

Interestingly, the informant does not believe that there is any meaning or moral to the story. When his elders taught him the story, it was presented as important not due to its truthfulness or meaning, but due to its ancientness. For that reason, he believes that the story is told simply for the sake of perpetuating a tradition from generation to generation.

Contextual Information:

This story is only told on the day of the Chinese Moon Festival, ostensibly to honor the king’s girlfriend’s sacrifice.

Analysis:

The tale serves as an interesting example of how a story can have different significances to different people at different times. Presumably, this story was at one time believed to be true or at least plausible. It is likely that some active and passive bearers of the story somewhere in the world still believe that it is true. For them, the story is a legend, or perhaps even a myth. However, due to the context in which the story was related to the informant, for him it is merely a tale.

The Impossible Aircraft

Item (direct transcription):

My encounter with aliens was when I was flying back from Bangladesh about two summers ago. In the skies above Canada… um, this might have just been some weird aircraft or some weird, uh, phenomenon with the wind. Anyways, we were flying towards California, right, at a very high rate of speed, and I saw this—looking out my window—very far away I saw this tiny streak of, like… light going in the other direction. And it was flying pretty fast—in the other direction.

It had a smoke trail behind it. No, not behind it! In front of it! Which was the weird part. Like, then I guess you can’t call it a smoke trail, exactly. It looked like something was being emitted from the front, and it was, like, following that. It was so weird! But it was also very far away… there were no clouds in the area, though, so it couldn’t have been a cloud.

At the time, I had no idea what it was! Because no plane flies like this! I thought it was some kind of, maybe like, alien craft, or something. I don’t know. Maybe some secret government experiment.

Background Information:

The informant was very insistent in the validity of his testimony. He is certain that he saw this impossible aircraft. He thinks it must have been a high-tech craft built either by aliens or by a top-secret government project.

Contextual Information:

The informant accompanied his story with a simple drawing to illustrate the aircraft.

Analysis:

This story matches the format of a typical memorate. The informant has linked his experience to common American folk beliefs in aliens and top-secret government aeronautical projects.

Apple Pie Hill

Item (direct transcription):

There’s a hiking trail [in New Jersey] that I went on a couple times with a group of friends. It was about eight of us. And there’s a place called Apple Pie Hill. And it’s along the Appalachian Mountains. Like, the very beginning of it. And the trail that’s like the biggest trail that’s most popular and closest to where we live… when you go up it—it’s a couple of miles—um, when you go up on it, at the very, very top—at the top of Apple Pie Hill—there’s like a tower. And, uh, it’s abandoned. But there’s like a bunch of writing on it. People visit it all the time. They would leave like locks on it, or whatever, like “I love you” locks and stuff. People write on it a lot. I wrote down “USC Fight on! Class of 2019” on it.

There’s a story, though, behind that tower. That tower, you can go up on it—you can spiral up. Um, it’s like, it’s like a metal tower, but then there’s like a little box—like a room—on the very top. And the only way that you can get in is up a ladder there’s a little latch. Kinda like how you would get into an attic. But it’s locked. And there’s a story on why. And it’s because that tower, that place, that certain area is haunted. Because that tower is a… back in the old days—you know, when they didn’t have satellites and just didn’t have the technology that we have today—the way, uh, they would, uh, look out for wildfires was there was literally a guy watching from a tower like that. It’s a really old tower. Like, it looked really unsteady.

But, um, there’s a legend saying that the place is haunted by this one guy, ’cause he was a park ranger and there was a forest fire going on. But he was sleeping on that tower. So by the time he saw the fire and he wanted to, like, alert people, uh, the fire was, like, engulfing the mountain around him. He died there. He was burnt to death in those mountains. So they think his ghost still wanders around those mountains to this day.

Background Information:

The informant was told the story by his friend’s mother. He suspects that she was embellishing the story.

He’s not sure whether it’s true that a park ranger died on Apple Pie Hill, but he thinks it’s possible. He says he would be scared to visit the tower at night.

Contextual Information:

The informant treats this story as a cherished memory. Evidently, his visit to the tower and the story associated with it had a significant impact on him, as he was eager to share photos of him and his friends at the tower.

Analysis:

This legend seems to match common American stories about haunted locations. It has the usual motif of someone dying in an unusual way, then becoming a ghost and haunting the site of their death.

Djinn Attacking a Boat

Item (direct transcription):

So my mom tells me that, uhh, my grandma once told her of a story of something she saw when she was coming back from visiting her parents in their hometown. And this was before the Independence War in Bangladesh, so most of the traveling was done by boat, because Bangladesh used to have lots of water, lots of waterways, and traveling by boat was actually faster than actually going by land.

So, anyway, my grandma was coming back from her hometown, and she was on a boat. And it was, like, around midnight, right? So, dark everywhere and she’s on this boat with some other people who are also traveling. And they’re going along slowly. So then they see this, like, light up ahead. It’s coming towards them. And suddenly it defines itself into, like, a saucer shape. The way my mom said my grandmother described it was that it was like an upside-down pan. You know, something you cook with. Just upside-down. And under it was just fire, just fire coming out.

And, umm, apparently it attacked their boat! And… and like it circled around the boat, and made like waves, like, come up toward the boat, and, like, rock the boat quite a bit. And after, like, harassing them, like, a bit, it, like, flew up into the air, and, like, came down at them as if it was going to crash into the boat and, like, kill everyone. But then it just swerved away at the last second. It did that a couple times, and then it just flew away.

Background Information:

The informant was told the story by his mom, whom was told it by her mom, the informant’s grandmother.

The informant’s grandmother and her fellow passengers believed that they were attacked by a djinn. The informant elaborates that Islamic literature describes djinn as creatures of fire that can fly and assume any form. The informant says that Muslims are more likely to attribute strange occurrences to djinn than to aliens. He believes that what Americans think of as aliens, Muslims think of as djinn. Also, he says the that djinn are believed to come from a separate planet, so they are really quite similar to a modern American belief in aliens.

The informant himself wouldn’t hazard a guess as to what his grandmother saw, though he insisted he believed that the incident did actually happen.

Contextual Information:

The telling of this particular story seems to be mostly constrained to the informant’s family. The informant had not told it to anyone outside his family before, and only thought to tell it to me when I asked about stories of supernatural encounters than he knew of.

Analysis:

This story matches the format of a typical memorate. The informant even seems aware of this, realizing that his grandmother only thought her experience was caused by a djinn because that was a dominant folk belief in her culture.