Author Archives: Jason Wiemels

Fan Death

Text: “In Korea you cannot sleep with the fan on in a closed room. You will die. My mom would come into my room at night and turn the fan off, and if she found me sleeping with it on, she would wake me up and get mad.” IW explained that some say the fan creates a vacuum and you suffocate, some say it lowers your body temperature too much and you get hypothermia and die. The fans they sell in Korea come with a built-in timer for this reason.

Context: IO is a Korean American student whose parents are first-generation immigrants from Korea. She heard the belief from her mother growing up. Within South Korea the belief is widespread enough that mainstream Korean newspapers have historically reported “death by electric fan” as a cause of overnight death, that the Korean Consumer Protection Board has issued formal warnings. IO does not really believe the fan can kill her, but she will not sleep with one running and still uses one that features a timer. 

Analysis: Fan death is one of the cleanest cases of a modern technological folk belief. Electric fans are 20th-century technology, so the belief cannot be ancient, yet it has matured remarkably quickly. Already a namesake of parent-to-child transmission at bedtime, multiple proposed mechanisms (of death) that vary by account, and a thick web of social and material reinforcement, from newspaper death reports to government warnings to the physical timers built into the fans sold in Korea. 

Don’t Give an Umbrella as a Gift

Text: I had mentioned to KH that I had gotten someone an umbrella as a gift, and she stopped me. “You’re like not supposed to do that, right?” she said. The word for umbrella, 伞 (sǎn), sounds nearly identical to 散 (sàn), which means to scatter. To give someone an umbrella is to wish the two of you scattered, dispersed. There is a workaround: if the recipient gives the giver a coin, even a penny, in return, the umbrella becomes a transaction rather than a gift, and the negative implications no longer apply.

Context: Told to me by my friend KH, a Chinese American student, after I mentioned that I had bought an umbrella as a gift. She had heard the rule from her parents, who emigrated from China. The homophone pair is 伞 / 散: 伞 (sǎn, umbrella) and 散 (sàn, to scatter) differ only by tone. 

Analysis: This same homophonic logic shows up commonly in Chinese culture, where a linguistic sign is read as a small contagion that invokes the outcome it names. The umbrella case is a good example because the prohibition attaches to one ordinary household object and to one specific verb. An exchanged coin transforms the gift into a purchase, and the relabeling alone is held to neutralize the linguistic risk. It’s not always the case that these homophonic folklores have such convenient workarounds. The changing “gift” to “purchase” suffices to break the spell.

How the Chipmunk Got Its Stripes

Text: A chipmunk and a bear once had an argument. The bear was bragging that he was the strongest animal in the forest, and that he was so powerful he could stop the sun from rising. The chipmunk didn’t believe him. The bear stayed up all night telling the sun not to rise, but the sun came up anyway, as it always does. The chipmunk laughed and mocked the bear. The bear got angry and chased the chipmunk. The chipmunk dove into a hole at the base of a tree, but the bear caught its back with his claws just as it disappeared, leaving five long scratches. That is why all chipmunks have stripes today. 

Context: EL is a 22-year-old USC student originally from Maryland. She could not identify the specific source she had heard the tale from, only that it was encountered somewhere in childhood, as it took some effort to recall the entire story. 

Analysis: This is a classic tale whose function is to explain a natural phenomenon, in this case the chipmunk’s striping. The bear-and-chipmunk version is the most broadly disseminated version in American children’s literature. The tale’s structure is highly stable: large boastful animal versus small clever animal, the boast humiliated, the chase, the claw-marked stripes. The folkloric interest is in how a tale rooted in Indigenous oral tradition has been absorbed into a generic American children’s literature canon, where it now circulates among non-Indigenous children largely without sense of its origin. 

牛郎织女: The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd

Text: There was once a poor cowherd, Niulang (牛郎), who lived alone with an old ox. One day the ox spoke, telling him that seven heavenly maidens were coming down to bathe in the river, and that if he hid the youngest one’s robes, the Weaver Girl Zhinü (织女) would not be able to return to the sky and would become his wife. He did, and she did. They had two children and lived happily.

The Queen Mother of the West discovered that her granddaughter had married a mortal. She came down and pulled Zhinü back into the heavens. Niulang followed, with his two children carried in baskets on a shoulder pole. The old ox had told him before dying to wear its hide so he could fly. He came close. But the Queen Mother pulled out her hairpin and drew a line across the sky, and the line became a river of stars: the Milky Way. 

Niulang and Zhinü are now two stars on opposite banks of the river, unable to cross. Once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, all the magpies in the world fly up to form a bridge across the heavenly river, and the two of them meet for one night. This has become China’s equivalent to Valentine’s Day. 

Context: Told to me by my mother, IW. She has told it to me in some form since I was small, sometimes as a bedtime story. The story even became a tool to teach me Chinese as I vividly remember reading it from a book of fairytales. For most of her life and for most of mine, the Milky Way that the story turns on has been invisible: we have always lived in areas too light-polluted for it. On a family vacation to Fiji several years ago, on a beach far from any artificial light, we saw the Milky Way clearly for the first time. It did look like a river. 

Analysis: ‘The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd’ is one of the four great Chinese folk tales, with attestations reaching back to the Han dynasty. It explains a visible celestial phenomenon (the Milky Way as a river, with Niulang as Altair and Zhinü as Vega on either side), supplies the etiology for the Qixi festival on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, and exists in clear regional variation across Han Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese traditions. IW’s telling is a standard northern Chinese version. What stays with me about hearing it for years and only later seeing the Milky Way clearly, on a Fijian beach, is that the myth was composed by people who could see the river every clear night. To stand under a sky where the river is visible was to recover the perceptual ground that produced the story. It was a powerful moment for us both. 

Finish Your Food, Children Are Starving

Text: My father, JW, was told by his parents in Ohio in the 1970s, whenever he refused to finish his dinner: “Finish your food, there are children starving in China.”

My mother, IW, who grew up in suburb of Beijing in the same decade, was told something similar: “把饭吃完，美国还有小孩没饭吃” (bǎ fàn chī wán, Měiguó hái yǒu xiǎohái méi fàn chī), literally: “finish your food, in America there are still children with no food to eat.”

Both invocations were performed at the dinner table. Both intended to produce guilt in a child sufficient to clear the plate. 

Context: In Ohio, JW’s parents and grandparents drew on a long American tradition of using China as the reference point for starving children. In Beijing, IW’s parents drew on Cultural Revolution rhetoric, in which capitalist America was officially characterized as a place of mass inequality and hunger. My parents realized this surprising symmetry in their respective childhoods after they had married. 

Analysis: The mealtime “starving children” phrase is a textbook example of folk speech functioning as parental disciplinary technique. What is notable here is the mirror: in the same decade, parents in Ohio and parents in a Beijing suburb were deploying the identical rhetorical structure with the other country supplying the sympathetic reference point. In the United States, China is the pitiable other nation filled with hungry children, in China, it’s America. The form is highly stable across speakers, the only thing that varies is which country gets named, which is itself dictated by where you are sitting at dinner. It’s very interesting to me this convergent evolution from two sides of the world of deploying guilt and sympathy against stubborn children.