Author Archives: Ankita Mukherji

Family steamboat

Nationality: Singaporean
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/26/17
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

Background Information: Amanda is a Chinese Singaporean in her 2nd year of college, and she and her family grew up in Singapore. Her family, for various reasons, and as a result do not spend as much time with each other as in the past. As such, eating together — and cooking steamboat together, in particular, serves as an important ritual. I interviewed Amanda about this ritual.

Amanda: Once in a while my grandma will get all of us together and cook steamboat, which is basically cooking soup with a ton of ingredients like prawns and leafy vegetables and all that good stuff in the middle of the table on a tabletop stove, so it was a very involved process because we all had to sit there and wait for the soup to boil and then dish out our own meals, and steamboat dinners end up taking maybe 2, slightly more than 2 hours because we’re all talking while eating. We don’t do them very often, but it’s definitely become a special thing now where if I head home to Singapore after a long time, we’ll probably kind of celebrate it or commemorate it with a steamboat dinner, and it’d be a big thing if I invited someone, like a really good friend, to join us. I don’t even know how it really started, or when, because my grandma just did it one day as a very informal thing when before, we really only had steamboats anytime extended family came over, so like for Chinese New Year or a birthday or something like that, but yeah I like that it’s become an ‘our-family’ sort of thing, like the way we like to set everything up, arrange the table, what we talk about over our food, how our conversation topics transition, and how we’ll always end up sitting at the table at least half an hour after all the food’s gone, and usually it ends up being my dad occupied by the TV so he’ll be at the sofa, and it would be one of the few times my mum’s in a joking kind of mood, so the rest of us will just talk to her and share gossip from our lives and stuff.   

Thoughts: Again, it is very interesting to me how food traditions have many important social functions. Here, not only is the mere act of eating steamboat important, but also the performance of sitting together at a table and cooking it before eating it. This act is a means of bonding for Amanda’s family. Not only that, but it also seems to function as a sort of rite of passage for whoever Amanda invites to join her family It began with her grandmother, and seeing as it holds value for Amanda, it is a tradition that will be continued.

Chinese New Year

Nationality: Singaporean
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/26/17
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

Background Information: Amanda is a Chinese Singaporean in her 2nd year of college, and she and her family grew up in Singapore. Her family celebrates Chinese New Year every year, which is a country-wide festival in Singapore, where Chinese people make up the majority of the population. Usually, it is a four-day holiday, and there are specific ways in which Chinese families celebrate it. I interviewed Amanda about how her family spends it.

Amanda: Chinese New Year is a holiday, I think it’s 12 days, where Chinese people celebrate the Lunar New Year. It’s in February every year, because the Chinese follow a different calendar than the Gregorian one, and I’m speaking from experience as a Chinese in Singapore, because Chinese people in China and in other places celebrate it very differently. We have a Chinatown that’s usually decorated in red lanterns, with these large banners we call couplets because they always come in a pair and they have some kind of prosperous saying on it that we read from right to left and it’s usually 8 words broken up into 2 phrases wishing people good fortune, luck, things like that. But because Singapore is predominantly Chinese, Chinese New Year almost always ends up being a national celebration, and we get a number of days off school and work.

Ankita: What does your family usually do to celebrate?

Amanda: Usually what my family does is visit friends and extended family, so on the first day my grandma always invites her family over, so that would be my grand-aunts and uncles, my parents’ cousins, things like that, and this is all on the paternal side of my family. She would cook a nice, big lunch for everyone with some traditional things like sharks’ fin soup, which I object to but my grandfather buys sharks’ fin every year anyway, or sometimes she substitutes it for fish maw, and also fried chicken wings which everyone likes, some broccoli mushroom with gravy type thing, and bamboo shoots because my dad likes those. And in the mornings, she’ll always cook these, they’re not noodles but they’re weird shapes made of flour, I can’t really describe them because she molds them by hand, but yeah so she’ll cook those in a thick white soup with a lot of cabbage and carrots, and it’s delicious. Then after that we go over to my aunt’s house on the maternal side of family, and then the next couple of days, usually it’s over the weekend, we go to my parents’ friends’ houses. Oh, also the biggest thing about Chinese New Year, and I think the most recognizable and widely celebrated thing is angpao, or hongbao (红包), which literally translated means red packet. Basically, the elders, typically those who are married and those who are working, give the younger ones, those in school, children, etc, red packets with money inside, and the money is always an even number. And in return, the young ones give the elders a pair of oranges, which is supposed to symbolize some kind of fortune, I think because of the Chinese name of oranges and how it sounds like gold – a lot of things that are considered prosperous by the Chinese is because they sound like prosperous things in the language, since there are so many words in the language that sound exactly like each other but are just written differently. I would still be considered a young person, so I do still get angpao every year and my parents keep it for me, just because I’m not out of college yet. I think it’s quite a formal thing too because my parents and grandparents will give me angpaos, and the people who are closest to you tend to give you more money, like I get $100 from each of them every year, which adds up to a lot of money. But I’ve seen my parents budget for angpaos before and it seems like a really stressful thing… like, people can give $100 or even hundreds of dollars…

Ankita: Are there like, typical decorations and stuff involved?

Amanda: When we were younger, the house would always be decorated for Chinese New Year, we’d have a lot more sweets out, I know friends who’ve gone to Chinatown to buy flowers and lanterns and things like that. And we used to also follow the pre-Chinese New Year rituals a lot more like spring cleaning, which was supposed to help usher in good fortune by purging all the things we don’t want. So it’d be a big family thing where we cleaned the house together and donated all the things we wanted to give away, and we’d always go shopping for new clothes, kind of keeping in line with the ushering in the new sort of mentality. During Chinese New Year, we’d always wear new clothes to these sorts of house parties, and we even used to buy new jewelry, like my grandma would give us these gold fish necklaces and my parents got us gold bracelets with our names engraved on them. But I think it was after the first recession in 2009 or something like that where my parents’ income decreased, because it was around that time that both my parents changed jobs that had substantially lower incomes, we started saving a lot more money, and that cut back our spending on Chinese New Year substantially. We’ve since kind of bounced back financially, but Chinese New Year has never been celebrated the same way, and I don’t think it’s just for us, but also it does feel like less and less people are committed to making it to the house parties even, because I don’t see the same people as often. I don’t know if these elaborate sort of social gatherings and rituals are things my generation and I would bother to keep up with, because I feel like it’d be too much of a hassle for me to, and it’s also difficult now because we’re all overseas so it’s not like we can really meet up with each other.

Thoughts: While Amanda’s experiences and memories of celebrating the festival are specific and individual to her, she describes the commonalities in how the general population does things. For example, the exchanging of hongbaos and oranges, and the family visits, seem to be common. I have encountered friends exchanging stories on these family gatherings, which generally happen once or twice a year on such a large scale. Some basic customs, stories, and rituals, therefore, seem to be in the collective consciousness of the community, and everyone knows to do it. It is also interesting to note her description of the slow shift in traditions, and in how many people (in her family at least) do not celebrate the festival as extravagantly anymore, or how she does not show up as often to gatherings. Perhaps because of the fluid nature of folk practices, it is often subject to change, and what is commonly practiced or accepted shifts with social or economic context, as Amanda has described.

Grandma’s secret recipe

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/22/17
Primary Language: English

Background Information: Justin is a senior at college, and he grew up in San Francisco. His family on his father’s side is from Hong Kong, and they used to run a noodle stall while they still lived there. Now, his father works in real estate, but some family recipes still live on. I interviewed Justin about a ‘secret recipe’ passed down from his grandmother.

Justin: So, um, there’s… So my dad says a lot of like, “secret recipe this, secret recipe that”, but usually he’s making it up, but, one time, during I think, Thanksgiving dinner with like, my extended family on my dad’s side, two of my uncles brought some kind of, um, zha jiang mian (炸酱面), um, that they’d made. And, I thought it was pretty good and I was wondering where they got it, and my dad tells me that… “oh this is actually like a family secret recipe, like for real this time”. Um, and… they actually made it like, buying the ingredients and putting it together, and… whatever else you need to do to make the sauce. And, apparently it’s passed down from my grandma, who used to make it, or… she and, um, the rest of my… the rest of her kids, including my dad I suppose? Used to make it, because they ran a noodle stall in Hong Kong before they moved here. And so they made that, and it’s pretty good. And so when they came to America, and they were looking for work, um, one of the restaurant owners that my dad ended up working for as a waiter, offered my grandma a job? But, she couldn’t take it, because the sauce is really labor intensive, and you—you couldn’t make restaurant quantities of it with just one person, but she wouldn’t teach anyone else how to make it. So, she had to turn down the job.

Thoughts: It is interesting to me how protective Justin’s grandmother was over her family secret recipe. She was unwilling to relinquish ownership of it to the restaurant. This is reminiscent of the discussion we had in class about authorship and folklore. If Justin’s grandma had taught the restaurant her secret recipe, it would then belong to the restaurant and become standardized and institutionalized as a dish of that restaurant. Instead, it remains within Justin’s family, and can have variations and different forms.

Kain na (come eat with us)

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/22/17
Primary Language: English
Language: Tagalog

Background Information: Vanessa is a Filipino American who grew up in Texas. She speaks primarily English, but also Tagalog. She told me about this Tagalog saying that her family uses — kain na, which means “come eat with us”, and is pronounced “ka-in-na”.

V: Honestly I’m not sure if this is just my family, or if it’s like, all Filipinos, but I’ve noticed that my parents do this, and like people in the Phili— like, my relatives in the Philipines will do this even if we’re on the phone with them… When I read my grandma’s letters to people in the Philippines from way back when, she had this stuff written out too, where it’s like, even if we’re not gonna eat with these people we say kain na, which is like, “come eat with us”, basically. Like, inviting people to come eat with us basically, but it’s not like a… we’re not like actually telling them to come eat with us because they’re like in the Philippines and we’re over the phone…haha, so they’re not gonna like, take a plane to come over and eat with us. It’s like um… I don’t really know! It’s like, it’s just a thing it’s like saying hi.    

A: So it’s like a greeting, sort of?

V: Hmm, it’s just like, if food is happening. If we’re about to eat, or we’re on our way to eat, if we’re at the table and we’re on the phone with our family members from the Philippines, we just say kain na, like, as if they actually are eating with us… I think it’s like a connecting thing… like we try to use it to connect us to people in the Philippines and pretend they’re here. Or it’s like, we invite people to come eat with us even though they’re not going to, because it’s like, polite? It’s hard to say really what it is for… It’s something that’s not very translatable.

A: Does it means literally “come eat with us”?

V: Well like, directly if you translate it, kain na just means “eat now”. So actually it can be used like that too. Like, if a parent is kind of giving a command to their child to eat now or something. But then in another context it becomes more like a request or greeting sort of thing meaning “come eat with us”.

Thoughts: This example of folk speech gives us insight into the role that food traditions play in Filipino culture, or at least the culture within the folk group of Vanessa’s family and extended family. Even if the physical act of eating together does not take place, the simple request itself serves as a connection between two geographically distant places. Alternatively, in a different context (with people outside of one’s family, perhaps), it is also a way of being “polite”. The act of eating together, therefore, acts as a bonding agent between people, and an invitation to eat together shows solidarity on one hand, and courteousness on the other. 

Dragon Boat Festival

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/22/17
Primary Language: English

Background Information: I have been on the Dragon Boat team at USC for one year, and I have been to multiple dragonboat festivals. I interviewed one of my friends on the team, who is of Taiwanese descent, and grew up in Hong Kong. At her school in Hong Kong, she heard many folk stories about the origins of the dragon boat festival, which is an important part of the culture in both Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Sabrina: “So, legend has it that a long time ago, there was a really famed scholar, who was like, really important in the king’s court, and um, he was like, one of the king’s top advisors. And like, one day a lot of other people were out for his position, and they didn’t like the way that he was controlling the king. But like the way he was controlling the king was like, he was like, making him really benevolent and like, generous. But then, um, like so the other advisors wanted to control the king to give themselves more power, right, so they like, murdered him? Like they told the king that he lied about something, and then the king like, ordered his execution. And then they dumped his body in the river. So um, but like, since he was beloved to all the people, like since he made the king really nice to his subjects, um everyone like took a boat, and like paddled out to the middle of the river and threw like, these like rice… like… they’re called like glutinous rice wraps? We call them like zòng zi (粽子). They threw them into the river so that the fish would eat that instead of his body, and his body would rest in peace. Yeah. And so like, that’s like the origin story of the dragon boat festival, way back in China. And like, to this day people still have like, festivals every year, during the summer, to like, remember that tradition.”

Thoughts: I enjoyed hearing this story, especially because when I asked Sabrina where she had heard it, she told me that it was a story that many people simply knew about, or just came to learn as they grew up. As we have learned about folklore, it is knowledge that is widely known within a folk group, but that is not institutionalized or ‘official’.