Author Archives: Jeremy Bradford

Chinese New Year in Shanghai

Nationality: Chinese/Canadian
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: February 19, 2015
Primary Language: English
Language: Mandarin Chinese

Informant Data:

The informant is an 18-year old student who was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1996. He moved from Canada to Shanghai, China when he was in middle school. Both his father and mother have Chinese ancestry. He is a freshman at the University of Southern California and thus currently resides in Los Angeles, California.

 

Contextual Data:

My informant was Skyping with his family on Chinese New Year, which in 2015 happened to be in mid-February. Once he finished Skyping with his family, I asked him if he could tell me a little bit about Chinese New Years and specifically how he celebrated Chinese New Year in Shanghai. I asked if I could record his response and he agreed.

When asked what he liked most about the traditions he does on Chinese New Year, he said his favorite part of it was definitely lighting the fireworks at midnight and watching them with his family as they exploded in the sky above.

 

Item:

(Audio recording transcribed)

“So what we do is we go and buy a ton of fireworks early on in the week. It’s like we’re celebrating the arrival of spring. So then on the day before Chinese New Year,  my whole family including my extended family, get together usually at my family’s house. And all the kids, my cousins…they get these little red envelopes which I guess symbolize good luck. And then we all have dinner, which includes dumplings, which I guess are eaten for good luck too. And then, once it gets to midnight, we always light a bunch of these fireworks and set them off right in the backyard.”

 

Analysis:

I can note there’s an interesting emphasis on good luck in the Chinese New Year customs in Shanghai, so it seems that good luck is an important belief in that society. There also seems to be an importance in celebrating with fireworks every year, which might speak to the importance of Chinese New Year as a holiday in that society, since at least to the informant, one usually celebrates Chinese New Year with big festivities like firing off many fireworks at midnight at one’s home with one’s entire family.

Because the wind will come

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: April 15, 2015
Primary Language: English
Language: Romanian

Informant Data:

The informant is a 19-year old American student who was born in Santa Monica, California in 1996. She’s lived in Los Angeles County all her life with the exception of when she lived in Paris between late August 2014 to mid-December 2014. Her father’s ancestry is American as far as back as the founding of the Plymouth Colony in 1621 (but before that, the family is originally from England), and her mother’s ancestry is Romanian. She is a freshman at the University of Southern California and thus currently resides in Los Angeles, California.

 

Contextual Data:

Over lunch, I was talking to my informant about her experiences in Europe for the first semester of the school year. My informant eventually began talking about how over Thanksgiving break she visited family in Romania. She eventually told me about some folk speech she kept hearing when she was visiting her Romanian cousins’ house.

 

Item:

“It’s this belief that a wind can cause…so much bodily harm to a person and like kill them…so they would blame everything on the wind. I mean, they’re like ‘don’t do this because the wind will come’ or ‘don’t walk around barefoot because the wind will come.’”

 

Analysis:

This folk speech seems like it’s just another way for adults who want to tell their kids to not do certain things and want their kids to listen to them. The reason they might specifically say not to do something “because the wind will come” may perhaps be because Romania is known for having very cold winters, and so the idea the wind will come if a kid does something bad is truly a scary, ominous message in that society.

Iele

Nationality: American/Romanian
Age: 57
Occupation: Real estate agent
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: April 11, 2015
Primary Language: English
Language: Romanian

Informant Data:

The informant is a Romanian American who was born in Bucharest, Romania in 1957. At age 19, my informant left Ceausescu’s Romania and arrived in the United States in 1976. She is a real estate agent who currently resides in Los Angeles, California.

 

Contextual Data:

My informant told me the story of the Iele at the dinner table during a family get-together. Several of my family members and family friends (all originally from Romania) were recounting memories from their childhood. My informant began speaking about how her grandma used to tell her all sorts of stories as a child (as early as when she was around 6 or 7). Her grandmother lived in Bucharest, Romania, but had parents that lived in a village about 15 kilometers outside of Bucharest, that told her stories about the Romanian countryside. At some point in the conversation, my informant mentioned the Iele. I asked my informant if she could speak more about the Iele, which resulted in the below piece of documented folklore in the “Item” section of this post.

When I asked her why she thinks she believed in the Iele, my informant told me how as a kid, the thought of Iele sounded so beautiful and thought it made sense that one would be tempted to get up and dance with the Iele. She also mentioned how she grew up in Bucharest and that she would never see anything like the Iele in the city, but only in a remote and beautiful place like the countryside. Furthermore, whenever as a kid she went on vacations to the countryside, there would often be a fog that would rise from the ground up, and that also convinced her as a kid that it was true.

 

Item:

(Audio recording transcribed)

“So in small villages in Romania, they…have this story about what happens in the summer. During the night, when it’s really nice and warm out, and sometimes people like to stay out late on their porch…you have to be very careful because close to midnight, sometimes you can see this beautiful…groups of beautiful girls with long, flowing hair, dancing to beautiful music. They all dance like they are in a hora. And as they dance, they do such a…it’s like they’re floating in the air, and they invite you to go dance with them, but you have to be careful not to do that because if you do, you’ll never be able to speak or see – you go blind and mute. And the one way you know that they’re not real…you have to look really closely when they’re dancing in the grass, and you’ll see that you won’t see their feet because…it all looks as if they’re floating, and that’s because you can’t see their feet, and that’s how you know whether they’re real or not. And their names are Iele. And I actually believed it when I was little.”

 

Analysis:

The story of these legendary creatures known as Iele seemed to appeal to my informant because it seemed to speak to her fondness of the countryside, that she liked this beautified, mystic ideal of the Romanian countryside. My theory is that on a larger scale, the legend of the Iele might speak to a desire of those who live in the countryside to pass on their belief in the beautiful and mystical quality of nature, passing it on in the face of more Romanians moving to the city, more Romanians acclimating to modern society, and the phenomenon of the culture of industrialized society become the dominating culture.

One should also recognize that the legend of the Iele is strikingly similar to the legend of the mermaids, which is worthy of noting as it speaks to the nature of folklore to have multiplicity and variation as it’s collected throughout the world.

 

For another version of this, please see:

“Haunted Forest/Alux.” Destination Truth. Writ. Neil Mandt and Michael Mandt. Dir. Neil Mandt. NBC Universal Television Distribution, 2009. DVD.

The Evil Eye Proverb

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: April 15, 2015
Primary Language: English
Language: Romanian

Informant Data:

The informant is a 19-year old American student who was born in Santa Monica, California in 1996. She’s lived in Los Angeles County all her life with the exception of when she lived in Paris between late August 2014 and mid December 2014. Her father’s ancestry is American as far as back as the founding of the Plymouth Colony in 1621 (but before that, the family is originally from England), and her mother’s ancestry is Romanian. She is a freshman at the University of Southern California and thus currently resides in Los Angeles, California.

 

Contextual Data:

Over lunch, I was talking to my informant about her experiences in Paris for the first semester of the school year. My informant eventually began talking about how over Thanksgiving break she visited family in Romania. She eventually told me of something she thought was bizarre that happened when she was eating dinner at her Romanian grandfather’s house: that her grandfather accidentally spat on her, after which he said what could be considered a Romanian proverb. I recorded this proverb below with her permission.

 

Item:

(Audio recording transcribed)

“If you don’t spit on people that are beautiful, the evil eye will get them.”

 

Analysis:

My theory about this proverb is that it seems to be a way of saying that if you don’t teach beautiful people to not be egotistical, then they will be taken over by a mindset that lacks morals and empathy. If this is what it means, then this would speak to a valuing of having morals that holds some importance in Romanian culture.

The Undead of the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: April 15, 2015
Primary Language: English
Language: Romanian

Informant Data:

The informant is a 19-year old American student who was born in Santa Monica, California in 1996. She’s lived in Los Angeles County all her life with the exception of when she lived in Paris between late August 2014 and mid December 2014. Her father’s ancestry is American as far as back as the founding of the Plymouth Colony in 1621 (but before that, the family is originally from England), and her mother’s ancestry is Romanian. She is a freshman at the University of Southern California and thus currently resides in Los Angeles, California.

 

Contextual Data:

Over lunch, I was talking to my informant about her experiences in Paris for the first semester of the school year. My informant eventually began talking about a strange ballet teacher she had in Paris, and when I asked what was so strange about the teacher, she told me about one of the teacher’s belief in a legend about the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. She also mentioned how the teacher freaked her out so much that for some time my informant believed the teacher.

I asked my informant why she thought the legend impacted her and she responded that there is something about she supposes that there’s just something about cemeteries that makes it feel creepy enough that something like the dead coming alive at the Père Lachaise Cemetery could happen.

 

Item:

(Audio recording transcribed)

“Somebody told me that the Père Lachaise Cemetery is haunted by all the dead writers that rest there. And if you go there at night on Halloween, weird stuff happens like their ghosts come and talk to you and then try to kill you. They’re evil…well, only on Halloween they’re evil. And they’re always alive at night, but they’re only evil on Halloween.”

 

Analysis:

This folk belief would likely be one that only those who live in Paris or have visited Paris would only know about. There seems to be a sort of underlying sense that the people who believe in this folk belief want to keep the dead famous writers who lived in Paris alive in their memory, which seems to speak to a desire to honor the writers in albeit a strange way. Also tied to this belief is the idea that Halloween is a night of the dead coming alive, which brings to mind how this belief might have perhaps come from other traditions in the world like the Celtic tradition of Winter’s Eve, a day on which it was believed the dead would come back to Earth to kill people and take over their bodies.