Tag Archives: chopsticks

Incense and Temples

AGE: 21

DATE OF PERFORMANCE: 4/19/25

LANGUAGE: English, Chinese

NATIONALITY: American, Taiwanese 

OCCUPATION: Student

PRIMARY LANGUAGE: English 

RESIDENCE: Los Angeles 

Text

Interviewer: Does your culture have any stories of superstitions or superstitions themselves?

AC: “Don’t leave chopsticks straight up and down in rice because it looks like incense sticks which are usually reserved for rituals at temples.”

Context

Before the question asked above, I had also asked AC the following question:

Interviewer: Are there any distinct festivals or rituals you grew up around or attending when you were growing up? Are there any now? 

AC: [she lists out] “Chinese Lunar New Year, Autumn Festival, Taiwanese Folk Religion events… [she adds context] FYI my immediate family are 7th day adventist Christians but my family in Taiwan worships a local folk religion, and they’re very religious. My family owns and operates several temples in our hometown Tainan, Taiwan.”

Interviewer: What is it like for your family to own several temples? Are there any distinct rituals or celebrations your family does at the temples?

She then proceeds to answer the question, but this part of her answer is the context of the proceeding text above:

AC: “…what you usually do is…when you arrive at the temple, you light incense and then place it like up and down into this bowl/stand. Then you pray standing up…”

Interpretation

My immediate family and I are the least religious people. Technically, we’re Christian, and when I was younger my mother, sister, and I would go to Korean church, but we stopped going once my sister and I started playing sports. Although AC is not particularly religious herself, and her family is part of a completely different religion than their extended, AC has in-depth knowledge and experience with temples and how folk religion affects and works within smaller communities. The concept of bad luck by placing chopsticks straight up in rice connects with how her family’s temples operate. Why would you pray if it’s not in the proper setting and with the proper intention? My guess as to why it’s bad luck is because it might attract bad spirits or maybe upset the spirits that people pray to. It connects again to what we learned in lecture about the importance or folklore behind up and down.

Chopsticks: The Game

Nationality: United States of America
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 04/25/2021
Primary Language: English

Main Piece:

How do you play?

“Ok, so each player put out their pointer finger on each hand, ok, wait I know this. So… hmmm wait… the goal of the game is to get your partner to have five fingers out on both hands. And then they lose. And the way you play is you stick out your pointer finger on each hand, and you tap one of your partner’s hands, and they have to add a-as many fingers as you currently have out to that hand.”

Do you have any special rules?

“Yes, so let’s say you have three fingers out on one hand and one on the other, and then you want to switch, you can hit your hands and make them two and two. You can transfer as many fingers as you want to your other hand. And even if your hand is out, you can, like, still redistribute fingers to it and bring it back in.”

Context:

The informant is my twin sister. She is Jewish and attended public school her entire life. This information was collected during a family zoom call where we were checking in with each other.

Analysis:

My informant’s account of Chopsticks’ rules was quite difficult to understand, which emphasizes that this game is best taught visually and learned through practice. Chopsticks is an engaging and competitive game that lets children exercise their mental math and strategy skills. It’s complicated enough to warrant fierce competition, but simple enough to master after only playing a few rounds. I even established social groups in elementary school through playing chopsticks and similar games.

Don’t Stick Your Chopsticks Straight Into Your Rice

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 55
Occupation: Registered Nurse, Teacher
Residence: Lake Oswego, Oregon
Performance Date: 2/22/2019
Primary Language: Chinese
Language: English

Context:

My informant is a 55 year old woman that immigrated from China to America in her early 30s. She is a mother, a registered nurse, and also a teacher in nursing school. In this account, she explains why Chinese people never stick their chopsticks straight up and down in their bowl of food. This conversation took place in a hotel one evening. The informant and I were alone, and I asked for the story behind this folklore because I had known of this superstition for a while, but never understood why it was considered bad. The informant told me the she learned this from her parents, and that this taboo is highly integrated into Chinese culture—“no Chinese person would ever be found doing this…” Because her English is broken, I have chosen to write down my own translation of what she told me, because a direct transcription may not make as much sense on paper as it did in conversation (due to lack of intonation and the fact that you cannot see her facial expressions or hand motions in a transcription).

 Text:

“Especially in the countryside, when they bury a person, they stick a stick on top of the section of land that they use to bury a person. On the stick, they tie little white strip of cloth to the stick, and this serves as the gravestone.

Because chopsticks are quite literally sticks, we can’t stick them straight up and down into our food because it too closely resembles the gravestone. Doing this is essentially a call to bad luck, because if you do it, you’ll bring death to both you and your family.

I honestly don’t know if I fully believe in this custom, but because it’s been so ingrained in my culture, seeing people do it makes me extremely uncomfortable, and it just seems safer to not do it and to teach my own friends, family, and kids to not do it.”

 

Thoughts:

This is a taboo that I grew up knowing, but never understood why it wasn’t allowed. I remember my grandmother scolding me when I was around seven years old for sticking my chopsticks straight up and down in my bowl of rice, but when I asked her I couldn’t do it, she told me that it would give me indigestion. It actually wasn’t until this year, in college, when one of my friends that I made here (who also happens to be Chinese) and I were talking about the weird taboos we had grown up, and she mentioned that the chopstick one seemed to be a stretch because it was supposed to resemble a gravestone. Surprised, I decided to ask my informant about this taboo to clarify the reason for its existence.

I did some further research after my conversation with the informant, and I found out that there is more than one way that sticking your chopsticks straight into your food brings death: apparently, Chinese people stick burning incense into rice to honor the dead. Breaking this taboo can bring bad luck to you because no one is dead, so it’s as if you’re summoning death by honoring yourself. This is an example of sympathetic magic: the Chinese believe that if you make a gesture that resembles something bad in the world, you’re making a calling to it. I also noticed that this is not limited to only Chinese culture—in Japan, sticking your chopsticks vertically in a bowl is also considered taboo because it reminds Japanese people of funerals, where a bowl of rice is offered to the spirit of the person who has just died either at their deathbed or in front of the photograph.

 

Don’t Stab Your Food with Chopsticks – A Chinese Folk Belief

Nationality: Chinese, Vietnamese
Age: 49
Residence: Ewa Beach, HI
Performance Date: April 14, 2019
Primary Language: Chinese
Language: Vietnamese, English

Item:

Q: You said how you can’t stab chopsticks into food?

H: 落去飯(lok6 heoi3 faan6), right?

[Translation: Into rice right?]

Q: Yeah, 飯 (faan6) or 嘢食 (je5 sik6) in general?

[Translation: Yeah, rice or food in general?]

H: 嘢食 (je5 sik6) or 飯 (faan6) or whatever.  Why?

[Translation: Food or rice or whatever.  Why?]

H: 你拜神你係唔係插咗兩枝香落去 (lei5 baai3 sen4 lei5 hai6 m5 hai6 caap3 zo2 loeng2 zi2 hoeng1 lok6 heoi3).  It look like 你拜神插嗰啲嘢(lei5 baai3 sen4 caap3 go2 di1 je5).

[Translation: When you pray, don’t you stick the two incense into the holder?  It looks like when you’re praying and you have the two incense in the incense holder.]

 

Context:

I collected this piece in a Cantonese-English conversation about Chinese and Vietnamese folk beliefs.  The informant can speak Cantonese fluently but chose to speak to me in both Cantonese and English for my understanding.  The informant is Chinese and was born and raised in a Chinese community in Vietnam before immigrating to the United States in her late teens.  She didn’t mention specifically where she learned not to stab chopsticks into your food from, but only said, similar to a number of other folk beliefs and customs she knew of, that you would just know or pick up this sort of thing growing up from the community around you.

 

Analysis:

The basis of many folk beliefs is the belief in magic, either sympathetic or contagious.  In the case of not stabbing your chopsticks into food, the idea that like produces like comes into play because as the informant says, the two chopsticks standing up looking like sticks of incense used when praying.  Praying occurs for a number of reasons, death in the family and respecting one’s ancestors included, and it can be highly ritualized in Chinese culture, particularly when praying to the ancestors due to the long-standing tradition of ancestor worship and respect for those who came before you in your lineage.  There are rules about where the incense and incense holder are placed, what kind of offerings should be made, and when to pray.  For example, praying for ancestors has set time frames but praying after an individual’s death is done as appropriate.  As such, standing chopsticks in food not only emulates incense in the physical image, it may be seen as a poor recreation of the ritual and consequently a disrespect to one’s ancestors.  With such emphasis placed on respecting one’s lineage, this is very majorly looked down upon.  Furthermore, considering how like produces like – especially if it is not the correct time to pay one’s respects to their ancestors – someone may bring death or other bad omens to themselves or those around them through emulation of praying at an otherwise inappropriate time.

Deadly Chopsticks

Nationality: Japanese-American
Age: 53
Occupation: Higher-education administrator
Residence: Pasadena, CA
Performance Date: 4/17/16
Primary Language: English
Language: Japanese

KM is a third-generation Japanese-American from Los Angeles, CA. She now lives in Pasadena, CA with her husband and 18-year-old son.

KM gave me some insight on chopstick etiquette that was passed down from her Japanese parents:

“So in Japan, when you’re eating rice with chopsticks, or really anything which chopsticks, you NEVER rest them by sticking them straight up in your food. It looks like the number 4 spelled out, and in Japanese culture 4 is a very unlucky number – it means death. If you go to Japan you’ll never find anything grouped or sold in 4s, it’s just superstition, like how in America people are scared of the number 13. Also, you never point your chopsticks at people, like if you’re talking at the dinner table. It’s rude, and a little threatening.”

My analysis:

Many cultures have different traditions surrounding food and table etiquette, and this folk belief offers insight into utensil practices many American might not be familiar with. While Asian cuisine is not absent here, it’s often transformed over time by the influence of other places, or even other Asian cultures (like common Japanese-Korean fusion). People from all over use chopsticks, but it’s important to be aware of protocol observed by those whose heritage is more authoritative.

Apparently, chopsticks stuck straight-up in rice also imitate incense sticks on the altar at a funeral, another symbol of death or bad luck. Oftentimes people avoid mixing their foodways with death imagery, compounded by the prevalence of rice in Japanese meals.

I also think it’s interesting that the subject is Japanese-American, and three generations removed at that. Seeing which customs are continued when a family emigrates shows both their cultural and individual values, or superstitions that for some reason or another “stick” in places where they’re not observed.