Monthly Archives: April 2017

Hot Water Cure

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 4/19/17
Primary Language: Chinese
Language: English

Informant: Hannah is an 18-year-old student, born and raised in China before moving to Los Angeles for college. Her parents now live in Japan, but they return to China to visit family during the summer.

Main Piece:
Hannah: “My mom always used to tell me when I was sick to drink hot water. It’s a thing in China that you see people carrying around like bottles of warm water. Nobody brings around cold water.”

Interviewer: Is hot water just healthier than cold, or does it actually help heal you?

Hannah: “Well, yeah, it’s supposed to be healthier, but it can also heal you. Like, if you have a headache or a stomachache. Even if you have a fever.”

Background Information about the Performance: The informant’s mother informed her of this folk medicine. The informant noted that even when she travels, she tries to drink warm water rather than cold water, and feels off if she does not.

Context of Performance: This is performed when people are feeling sick, or just to stay healthy.

Thoughts: I thought it was interesting that the informant felt ill if she drank cold water.

ʻaʻohe mālama, pau i ka ʻiole

Nationality: Hawaiian
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Kaneohe, HI
Performance Date: 4/19/17
Primary Language: English
Language: Hawaiian, Spanish

Informant: Uluwehi is a 21-year-old student from Hawaiʻi. She is from the island of Oʻahu.

Main Piece:

Original: “ʻaʻohe mālama, pau i ka ʻiole”

Translation: “None take care, gone to the rat”

Transliteration: “If you’re not careful and you don’t take care of your things, they’ll disappear”

Background Information about the Performance: The informant was taught this piece in school. It is important to her because it reminds her to care for her belongings and not lose them.

Context of Performance: The piece was taught in school to remind children to keep their belongings neat.

Thoughts: The informant mentioned that proverbs were taught every week in school, which I found interesting as proverbs were never a formal part of my learning when I grew up.


This piece can also be found here:
“‘Ōlelo No’eau.” ‘Ōlelo No’eau. Aha Punana Leo, n.d. Web. 19 Apr. 2017. <http://www.ahapunanaleo.org/index.php?%2Fprograms%2Fohana_info%2Folelo_noeau%2F>.

Creepy Clown Story

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Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: NY
Performance Date: March 22
Primary Language: English

Informant is USC sophomore born and raised in Amherst, NY.

He tells me the story of a “deranged clown” he and his friends came across in the summer of 2016.

He tells me:

“Yeah, we were walking in the forest by my house. I was going to shoot some pictures and my two friends were with me. It was like noon, a perfectly normal day.

So I was going to take some portraits and then we were going to go see a movie. It was so normal, but as we’re walking down the path in the forest— it’s behind the school, we went all the time so this was no different— I saw this color out of the corner of my eye.

And this was happening right around the time when all those clowns were showing up in videos. So my first thought was “oh god, a clown.” And so I turned and there he— it— was, a clown standing in the forest. It looked like he was holding a knife, I saw a glisten which could have been a knife, but also maybe a phone or something. A watch glistening or something, but I’m pretty sure it was a knife.

He wasn’t looking at us but immediately I had a flash back to a video I saw where a clown started chasing someone at like, full speed. So I wasted no time and we high tailed it out of there.

Usually I don’t believe in this kind of stuff. Honestly I thought those clown videos were just all faked. But when you see one yourself, and you think that somebody’s crazy enough to go stand in the forest dressed like that, you don’t care what’s faked. You get the fuck out of there!”

Personally I’m also skeptical of this “killer clown” thing. It seems a little too “Hollywood” to be true to me, it kind of taps into this scary movie fear we have as a society. I don’t know if I actually believe he saw a clown, or if he even believes he did. Part of me thinks he’s just playing off of the trend and wanted to have a creepy clown story of his own.

I also wonder about the “scary clown” thing— why is it true? What’s so scary about clowns, or as a society did we choose to make the clown scary because it’s a better narrative?

Pointy Thing Joke

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Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: LA
Performance Date: March 22
Primary Language: English

Informant is USC sophomore in the film program.

The subject is the “Pointy Thing” meme which has circulated through the USC student body this year. I ask informant to pull up his Facebook account and log into a group with about 15,000 members where students make and share memes with each other, usually about the school or the different majors.

Scrolling through a number of posts liked between 500 and 3,000 times, he arrives at one which depicts a man in a white T-shirt with one arm in the air. The president of the University is photoshopped in place the face, and “Pointy Things” are raining down across the image*.

“Pointy Things… they’re legendary. What can I say?” he tells me. “They just got put up this semester. They’re these pointy obstacles by all the USC gates. And they’re a waste of money because they don’t have a purpose, but we all got together to make fun of how ridiculous it is.”

The image has about 5K reactions in the Facebook group. I think it’s cool how all these USC students can come together in a group to make jokes with one another about the school they share. In a way, it’s kind of unifying.

“Yeah, they went all out. Pointy things in the Matrix was done, somebody 3D printed a pointy thing. Beating a dead horse at this point but people will like it if you make it” he tells me.

*The image was based on the popular Salt Bae meme, in which Turkish chef Nusret Gökçe is seen sprinkling salt in a fancy manner.

Kill, Kiss, Marry

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Nationality: American
Age: 11
Residence: NJ
Performance Date: March 18 2017
Primary Language: English

Informant is my 11 year old sister who goes to middle school in NJ. This game is called “Kill, Kiss, Marry” which is a familiar concept if not more PG than the “Kill, F**k, Marry” that I usually hear it called. But she’s 11, so I’ll gladly take “Kiss.”

“You probably know this game already. What you do is take three people and ask your friends to rank them in order of who they would want to Kill, Kiss, or get married to. Even if you like all three you have to kill one, so that makes it hard……….. also, it’s best to play it to make your friends awkward. So if the three people are in the room or if you know they like one of them, that’s a good time to play.”

I asked her if it was customary to give reasons for the ordering. “You can if you want, but you don’t have to,” she told me.

It’s interesting that this kind of game exists on the adult and kid levels. I wonder where she heard it from originally. I think at their age, these kids play the game as a way to rank their friends or make each other uncomfortable— not because they actually want to kill, kiss, or marry one another.