Monthly Archives: May 2016

王八蛋 Son of a bitch

A “wángbādàn 忘/王八蛋” is the offspring of a woman lacking virtue. Another meaning of 王八 is 鼈 biē, fresh-water turtle.[4] Turtle heads reemerging from hiding in the turtle’s shell look like the glans emerging from the foreskin, and turtles lay eggs. So a “wang ba” is a woman who has lost her virtue, and a “wang ba dan” is the progeny of such a woman, a turtle product, but, figuratively, also a penis product.

This profanity term has actually been widely used in China for many years, and it is a pretty offensive one to use. I find in both western and eastern culture, it is considered to be very offensive one when the subject is related to close family members.

 

Play house game

Nationality: China
Age: 48
Occupation: Housewife
Residence: Shenzhen, China
Performance Date: January 27, 2016
Primary Language: Chinese

My informant is a 48 year-old woman who has lived her whole life in China by now.

“Girls always like to play the ‘play house game’ in a group of two or more when they’re little. We usually play it at home. Hold a doll in arms like our baby, and we also have role playing, like mom and dad. And we even have teacher, doctor or nurse sometimes. It’s funny that we feed food to those babies, take them to ‘doctors’, and tell stories to them. All like the scenario of taking care of kids, pretending that we were adults.”

“I think we just learnt this from girls older than us, saw them playing and we imitated. I think this shall be the game that almost every girl all over the world has played before haha.”

I find it really interesting that people always want to grow up faster when they’re kids, whereas many adults feel nostalgic to their childhood when they were much happier with less stress. Actually, I’m wondering is there really a clear line between kid and adult? Maybe people won’t really become adult until they have kids.

 

Vision before death

Nationality: American
Age: 60
Occupation: Director, Animator, Professor
Residence: Brooklyn, New York
Performance Date: March 23, 2016
Primary Language: English
Language: Polish

My informant is an American from New York, whose family originally came from Poland 100 years ago. His grandfather was a baker and his grandmother was a peasant girl.

“In my family, when my relatives are dying, they will always see someone who is dead before them, like they’re calling them. Like when my grandmother died, she saw her husband. (But how do you know about that? They’re dying right?) Yeah, but you know, like, when my grandma was dying, she would say ‘did you see grandpa? Grandpa was here.’ It’s within a few days, that week. And my aunt did that too, ‘I saw Raman’, which is her husband, who died 20 years before. I don’t know, who knows?”

There might be some other scientific explanations on that phenomenon, but I think it also make sense to me that when people are dying their brain uses this way of reasoning to release their fear toward death: there is still a good side about death that you’re gonna meet with your beloved one who has also been dead.

 

Ghosts at your waist

Nationality: American
Age: 60
Occupation: Director, Animator, Professor
Residence: Brooklyn, New York
Performance Date: March 23, 2016
Primary Language: English
Language: Polish

My informant is an American from New York, whose family originally came from Poland 100 years ago. His grandfather was a baker and his grandmother was a peasant girl.

“It was back to the time when I was at Oxford University in England. The library there is about 800 years old. All these very serious professors, scientists and scholars they all studied there, but the library has its own ghosts. It’s interesting that everybody says that ghosts were like floating “ooo ooo ooo”, you know, appeared like that, but they only come up to your waist. These were short. One scientist figured it out was he said that as the world gets older, the ground shifts, and there is more stuff piled down, and the level of the ground is actually higher now than it was in 1200, so he’s walking like on his ground. He’s walking at his time period. Isn’t that interesting? It’s like a snapshot, a photograph from thousand years ago. It’s just a guess from the scientists. Well people who saw them said they can’t see their feet. You could believe it or not, I don’t know!”

I think there’s a very interesting relationship between science and these mysterious phenomenon. Since science started with bunch of people with strong curiosity to those strange phenomenon that hasn’t be explained at that time, and then after they have used series of experiments to prove their hypothesis right in their way, they become a sort of authority to many people nowadays. However, there are still so many strange things in the world now that could not be explained with a solidified answer that majority people could agree with. It’s like what been implied in Akira Kurosawa’s movie “Rashomon” (1950) that the same event could be phrased in totally different ways by the people who have actually involved in it, and there is no way to prove the fidelity of their words and thus there is no truth at all.

 

 

Legend of Mae West

Nationality: American
Age: 60
Occupation: Director, Animator, Professor
Residence: Brooklyn, New York
Performance Date: March 23, 2016
Primary Language: English
Language: Polish

My informant is an American from New York, whose family originally came from Poland 100 years ago. His grandfather was a baker and his grandmother was a peasant girl.

“There is a hotel in Hancock park called Ravenswood, where the old actress Mae West used to live. Mae West was a very popular actress during 1930s. She is very sexy. she always challenged censorship. The story is that she wrote a play, she a very good writer, and put it on the broadway, and she called it “Sex”. which in the 1930s that was very shocking, very forbidden. There was a lot of censorship. She said ‘people say I’m against censorship, I’m not, I’m for it, cuz it makes me rich, cuz everybody wants to see what I do.’ So there is a story about once she showed up at the hotel with her new boyfriend in Santa Barbara, she wanted to register for the night. The hotel manager said this is a very moral place, we don’t allow for things like that, cuz you just gonna stay here for the sex. and we don’t do that kind of thing. that’s very naughty. So she said, can I borrow your phone? so she borrowed the phone and she called her agent, and she told the agent to buy the hotel. It’s okay, I own this hotel then.”

“It’s a good story, a story that had been told by people in the Hollywood industry.”
I think this legend very explicitly explains how money plays as the crucial role in this Hollywood industry along with this highly commercialized world even back to 30s, that the one who holds the most money would be the game changer. My informant comments with a neutral attitude by viewing it from a storyteller’s point of view without any moral judgement to the events.