Author Archives: Christina Li

Chinese Ritual-Tomb Sweeping Festival

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 52
Occupation: Postman
Residence: Goleta, CA
Performance Date: 19 March 2012
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese, Spanish

Qingming Jie is a public holiday in Taiwan and parts of China that translates to Tomb Sweeping Festival. It is also known as Pure Brightness Day. My dad tells me that the Chinese take death and funerals very seriously. So, on this holiday, which usually occurs sometime in April (it changes based on the lunar calendar), relatives of the deceased must go to their graves and clean them. So, kids and their parents have to go to the graveyards and sweep the tombs and decorate them with Chinese charms. They also leave food at the tomb for their ancestors to eat.

My dad said that even though it was a day of respect, it could be fairly scary when he was little. He said that most the times the graveyards would be dingy and dirty and it was your responsibility to go and clean the tomb and make it look acceptable. So, as a little kid, he did not like Tomb Sweeping Day. After cleaning the tombs, they would pray for their ancestors.

The Qingming Festival originally started as a way to honor a man named Jie Zitui. Supposedly, Jie had cut a part of his leg meat off to save his lord from hunger, since his lord had had to go into exile when the crown was in jeopardy. After 19 years, the lord came back, and decided to reward Jie. However, during that time, Jie had hid away in a mountain with his mother and in order to find Jie, the lord ordered that the mountain be set on fire. Both Jie and his mother were found dead and from then on the lord ordered that only cold food could be eaten on the day that Jie died. Other traditions involved with this festival is kite-flying and spring outings. Both are done after the tomb sweeping is finished as a way to then celebrate life and prosperity.

Source URL: http://www.travelchinaguide.com/essential/holidays/qingming.htm

Chinese Custom: Wearing White

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 55
Occupation: Lecturer-UCSB
Residence: Goleta, California
Performance Date: 18 March 2012
Primary Language: Chinese
Language: English

Last month when I was home for Spring Break, my mother once again berated me for wearing a cream colored hair bow. She says that in China, wearing white in your hair means that someone in your family has died and it is taboo to wear white in your hair when that is not true. In Chinese culture, the color white is the color of mourning and death. So, a lot of the times people wear white to the funeral.

This has always been interesting to me because in American culture, people wear all black to funerals and white is the color of pureness and innocence. Then, a woman wears white at her wedding to represent her final transference into womanhood. In Chinese culture, brides often wear red and gold because red is the color of happiness and gold represents wealthiness. I feel that color is always such an interesting kind of symbolism in today’s culture. In each society, certain colors mean different things and can transfer different messages. I know that roses are always a big deal because if a guy gives a girl yellow roses, he only wants friendship, they have to be deep red to be romantic.

Dyeing the Chicago River Green

Nationality: Caucasian, FIlipino
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Chicago, IL (currently studying at USC)
Performance Date: 25 April 2012
Primary Language: English

My informant grew up in Chicago, IL and he says that every year on St. Patrick’s Day, they dye the Chicago River green. He explained that every year, he would be celebrating St. Patrick’s Day with his family and “one second it’s blue, or grey…it’s nasty, and then 30 minutes later, it’s green.”

For 43 years now, a private company has been “dyeing” the Chicago river green. Supposedly, the tradition got started in 1961 when Stephen Bailey saw a plumber with a splendid emerald green color all over his white coveralls. Bailey asked the plumber how his coveralls got that color and he explained that the dye they used to detect leaks turned the water green. So, Bailey saw this as a start of a tradition and from then on without fail they turn the Chicago river an bright emerald green on St. Patrick’s Day.

St. Patrick’s Day has always been an interesting holiday to me. It falls right around my birthday and I never liked getting pinched when elementary school boys were not able to tell the difference between blue and green.  The holiday derived in Ireland as commemoration of Saint Ireland who was associated with the start of Christianity in Ireland. Supposedly, Saint Patrick was originally associated with the color blue, but then later was set to green. There we have the addition of leprechauns, shamrocks and pots o’ gold. The holiday in Ireland set a day for church services, parades, and lifted the “Lenten restrictions” on eating and drinking alcohol. Holidays now have become less focused on its origins and more on the feasting and jovial activities.

Here is a video link: Dyeing the Chicago River

Source URLs: http://greenchicagoriver.com/story.html, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Patrick’s_Day

Slenderman

Nationality: Farmer
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Brea, California
Performance Date: 15 February 2012
Primary Language: English

My informant told me about the urban legend of Slenderman, who is a tall, lanky man with extra long limbs that wears a black suit. Slenderman has no face and is very reminiscent of the men in black. The legend of Slenderman is very interesting because he is always seen around children and then after that the children will disappear. The way that she found out about Slenderman was through a youtube series by a channel named Marble Hornets. In the videos, the kid that created the channel explains that his roommate had increasingly gotten crazier while making a student film he called Marble Hornets. While making the film he would get very temperamental and one day he said he was transferring schools and told his friend to burn all the reels of his film. The kid did not what was going on and since he felt bad about throwing away the film reels, he kept them and did not watch them until months after his roommate had left. When they finally watched the reels, the kid realized there were no shots of the Marble Hornets movie, it was all short clips of his roommate; there were also sound clips of heavy breathing. In certain clips, they supposedly see Slenderman and realize that the kid’s roommate feels like he is being followed or haunted.

This youtube series, though fictional, introduced the legend of Slenderman to the mass public. No one actually knows where the idea of Slenderman came from, but there are many pictures online where he is supposedly in the background lurking around. And then, the kids in the photographs have been said to have mysteriously disappeared. Nowadays, my roommate and I often kid around that Slenderman causes the mysterious mishaps in our lives, like lights flickering or mysterious texts that we receive. It seems that ghost stories are always so popular in our modern society. I think that the reason the Slenderman legend might have been made was to scare children into staying with their parents and keeping safe. Supposedly, Slenderman has a hypnotic effect on children like the Pied Piper and kidnaps them that way. If we pair that similarity then with his Men in Black physicality, it is almost like a satirical myth about the secret government and Area 51, a tall man capturing children.

Annotation/Additional Comments: These are current sources for information on Slenderman: http://www.mythicalcreaturesguide.com/page/Slender+Man, http://www.youtube.com/user/MarbleHornets?feature=watch: Marble Hornets is probably the most well known sharer of the Slenderman legend. The Slenderman legend started out from nowhere, but is now so widespread that there are tumblrs and twitter accounts dedicated to him.

The Bunny Man Myth

Nationality: Irish
Age: 30
Occupation: Exec. Assistant of the Dean of USC School of Architecture
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: 25 April 2012
Primary Language: English

“Halloween Night comes around. Nothing happens until midnight. Right before midnight supposedly a bunny or two enters the bridge. Right before midnight his soul (a dim light) walks the tracks above the bridge. When Midnight hits, his soul stops right above the bridge (dead center), and disappears, only to reappear inside the bridge. From then on it’s his soul which lights up the whole area, so brightly that you can’t even see him. That’s when he instantly kills you by slitting your throat and slashing your chest, only to hang you at the edge of the bridge. You can even see the rub marks that have worn away at the rock where the body’s were swinging. Who ever is inside the bridge ends up dead.” -Forbes

This informant grew up in Washington D.C., she would always hear about the urban legend of The Bunny Man Bridge in Virginia, which she claims was also the inspiration for the bunny in Donnie Darko. There is a very old tunnel with an overpass in Virginia. She says that in the early 19th century, an accident occured over the tunnel and it was transporting all these convicts, violent types. Some of the passengers escaped and the police were eventually able to find all of them except for one men. When they were searching for these men, they kept finding half eaten rabbits. So, they named him The Bunny Man and now that tunnel is called The Bunny Man Bridge. Also, my informant said that she heard from her friends if you go to the bridge and you walk halfway through and then turn around you will see The Bunnyman standing there. She had never tried it, but many of her friends had.

The legend of the Bunny Man is actually a very prominent legend in Virginia. The tale goes back to 1903 in Clifton, Virginia where there used to be an asylum, which was later relocated and is now called “Lorton Prison”. In Fall of 1904, many convicts were put on a bus and to get sent to the prison, but an accident happened and many of them fled to try to escape into the woods. They actually had trouble finding two of the convicts, Marcus and Douglas. However, they never found, Marcus, whom they later named The Bunny Man. Then, that October, people started seeing dead bunny’s along the roads again. On midnight Halloween night, a few kids that had gone to the bridge saw a bright light in the tunnel and then were murdered by the same kind of tool that they found in Marcus’ hand almost a year before. “Not only were their throats slashed, but all up and down their chests were long slashes gutting them” and then both guys were hung from the bridge and then the woman on the other side. This then happened for many years in the same way.

So, for this piece of folklore there was a legend component as well as a myth. My informant told me that many teens today still go and try to see the Bunny Man, but the murders only occurred around midnight on Halloween night. Some of the variations on the legend also involve the murderer wearing a bunny suit. Although this story seems farfetched, many of the articles regarding it swear on its truth. I think that these kinds of myths represent the country’s fascination with ghost stories and mysterious unknown. Also, by creating haunting figures and urban legends like the Bunny Man, it could be an attempt to stop teenagers from going to the bridge at night or partying on Halloween Night. In my research about this story, there was actually one girl who stayed away from the bridge at midnight while her other friends stayed to see if the Bunny Man legend was actually real. Supposedly, at midnight, she heard the screams of her friends and by the time she got to the bridge, all her friends were hung. In fact, she was later accused of their murders and ended up being put in an insane asylum for shock. Like other sinister figures, such as Bloody Mary, it seems like each folklore has a myth component as well as a legend behind it and they get more complex in variation as the stories get spread around.

Annotation/Additional Comments: This legend and myth can be found at this source: http://www.castleofspirits.com/clifton.html and http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/library/branches/vr/bunny/

Supposedly, the Bunny Man had been reported in a few other towns in 1973 and the Fox Family Channel series “Scariest Places on Earth” did a segment called “Terror on Bunnyman Bridge’ in 2001.