Author Archives: Michelle Lim

Filipino Food in American Context

Nationality: American; ethnicity self-identified as "half Filipino, half mutt-Caucasian"
Age: 23
Occupation: recent USC Archaeology grad; now works part-time for a CRM firm
Residence: Altadena, CA
Performance Date: 4/17/12
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish, Japanese

Informant: “When our grandmother, my grandmother, was still alive–our Filipino grandmother–I’ll just speak in plural, since she’s sitting here [referring to her older sister]–we were really I think a lot more traditional. She would make a lot of pancit, which is just like Filipino chow mein more or less, and Lumpia Shanghai which is like eggrolls, and various types of Filipino food, and like that kind of became amalgamated with turkey and stuffing and whatever all for Thanksgiving. And so even though we don’t eat so many Filipino food type things, we still eat, like, pancit, and someone always brings at least one dish still so I guess that’s our traditionalized thing. My mom used to put hopia, which is like these white bean pastry thingies, into my lunch when I was a kid–and seaweed in my lunches.”

Thanksgiving is such a major holiday in America that most people celebrate it in some form or another. It’s relatively easy; all you have to do is eat a very large meal with your family. There’s the “traditional” Thanksgiving food–turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie–with a ton of variation. For many immigrant families, this is also an opportunity to indulge in their own traditional foods, even if they don’t make or eat it on a regular basis. In essence, the atmosphere of tradition surrounding this day is what prevails, rather than the specificity of the tradition.

Devil with a head cold

Nationality: American; ethnicity Russian
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/23/12
Primary Language: English
Language: Russian, Spanish

Informant: “There’s a whole hierarchy of spirits in Russian folklore. But probably the most well-known one is the domovoi, and dom is Russian is house, so they’re the house spirits. And there’s a whole tradition about the domovoi who, if you don’t take care of your house, the domovoi comes and screws it up. So you kind of have to be really careful about it, and he’s kind of like a, more like a sprite, I guess. And all the description of him are like big ears, like a big nose, like really comic looking, you know? But like they say if you don’t take care of your house the domovoi will come and cause havoc and make your house a mess and you have to be, uh, really good to it. Apparently he lives under your house.”

[So how do you ‘be good to him’?]

“By keeping your house clean. Yeah, so, that’s another thing about Russian culture–you have to be a good mom, you have to be a good wife, and you have to keep everybody in order and your house.”

[Are Russians particularly tidy?]

“I don’t think so, I don’t think so. But part of that probably comes from necessity, too. Because you don’t really have that much in Russia so you better take care of what you do have.

“There’s, like, spirits of the forest, and everything has its own spirit basically. I don’t know too much about the spirits of the forest but, um, another thing about Russian culture is there’s a whole hierarchy of demons–that’s actually what I wanted to start my research on and it kind of changed to a totally different topic, but that’s what I started on because I found it really interesting that every Russian–every single Russian history or culture course I took had a section on the devil. Which, I thought that was really strange. And I started researching more, and for Western cultures, the devil is like the epitome of everything that is evil, the worse thing that could be on this planet, or somewhere in the universe, you know. But in Russian culture, there’s a whole hierarchy of different devils and there’s a saying that you could have ‘a devil with a headcold,’ just kind of a comical devil, really not that scary. But there’s a whole group of these vaguely evil spirits that they believe in but they’re considered demons, but they’re not really that scary. So there’s three different words that are most common and one is bes [sounds like bee-es], and that means like the possessed. And there’s another one, chort, which is kind of like–that’s the kind of devil with a headcold.

[What does that mean?]

“That’s the devil that’s not really good at being a devil, you know, like a devil with a head cold. [Oh you mean like fuzzy-minded?] Yeah, just kind of like not really that bad. And ‘to the devil with you’ is a common phrase, like if someone is being annoying, ‘to the devil with you!”

 

Russian spirits and demons are earth-based creatures who interact with humans on a regular basis. These were widely held by the peasantry, who spent most of their time working the land and living under simple accommodations. Their situation reflects the belief that anything can have the devil in it, so to speak, when taken to extremes–money or lust can become a force powerful enough to possess someone. The commonness and sometimes frivolity of the devil figure makes the phrase, “to the devil with you” have a lot less gravity than it might in other cultures that greatly fear the devil. Much of Russia is now orthodox Christian but according to my informant this doesn’t deter the belief in the earth spirits. These beliefs fill in where Christianity leaves off. After all the Bible doesn’t say anything specific about why your house gets messy–it must be the domovai.

The Mexican ghost who saved my life

Nationality: American; ethnicity Russian
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/23/12
Primary Language: English
Language: Russian, Spanish

Informant: “Well, you know Isaiah is Mexican, and his dad was born in Mexico [Is he fully Mexican?] He’s like 75% Mexican, which I know he’s like the whitest Mexican I know but you know [Where was he born?] Isaiah was born in the states but his father was born–actually I just recently found out he was the only one in his family to be born in a hospital, in Guadalajara, but they’re from Jalisco. And, I don’t remember how old Alex was–Alex is Isaiah’s dad–um, but they went back to visit in Mexico. And, they were, I wanna say like five people in the car? I know for sure it was Alex and some of his brothers and sisters, and I think Isaiah’s grandfather, and someone else. I don’t remember the specifics but I know for sure Alex was there. And they were driving on like a really back road cause they’re from Jalisco and there are a lot of really rural parts of Jalisco. And they were driving at night, and all of a sudden, they saw this old woman run out in front of them. And they swerved the car, and they all got out and looked for this lady, that they all saw and described in the exact same way, and they couldn’t find her at all.

[What did she look like?]

“I mean just sort of like a generic old woman with the kerchief thing and just very Mexican grandmother looking lady. And they all got out–I mean all of them saw the exact same thing–they all got out of the car and started looking for her. And they noticed that a few yards up the road they were traveling on dropped off to a cliff, and the way that they mark um that a road is closed in that part of Mexico is they light candles going towards where it drops off, and all the candles had been like burnt out. So they all think it was one of the protector spirits from Mexico. Cause they all–every single one of them saw the exact same thing–saw the exact same woman, you know? And if they had kept driving they would have gone off the cliff. And Alex said they all got back in the car and just were like, couldn’t even think of what to say to each other. Because they were so freaked out. But they would’ve driven off a cliff.”

[I would think that candles would always get blown out really easily.]

“Apparently they can, but this was probably… probably in the late seventies or the eighties.” [So there wasn’t a lot of infrastructure.] Yeah, especially because Jalisco is not the safest wealthiest part of Mexico, so. Actually, you know the sauce Tapatio? That’s what the people there are called, they’re called the Tapatios.”

 

There is not much information out there about protective spirits of Mexico. However Isaiah’s family was already familiar with the idea of their existence. These kinds of incidents tend to happen in the back roads and isolated countryside, which have an aura of mystery and possibility about them, separate from the logic of the industrial world. There is also more of a need for them here, where perils and uncertainty abound. The old woman, as a matronly figure, seems to fit the bill of protectiveness.

Stop shaking your leg!

Nationality: American; ethnicity half-Korean, a quarter Chinese, a quarter Japanese
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Granite Bay, CA
Performance Date: 4/19/12
Primary Language: English
Language: Japanese

[my own comments marked by square brackets]

Informant: “My mom would tell me if I–like the nervous habit of shaking your leg, or like shaking your foot, whenever you’re not doing anything, gives you financial bad luck.”

[This is a Korean thing right?]

“Yeah it’s a Korean thing. But I mean there’s like no logical reasoning behind it, which I think makes it really Korean *laughs* But like yeah, she would just tell me ‘Don’t shake your leg’ and it’s something that I do now to like other people–not to tell them it’s bad luck but it became like this process of just stopping people from shaking their legs.”

 

This type of superstition arbitrarily equates a certain habit with an undesirable outcome in order to make that habit seem inherently undesirable and thereby prevent people from doing it. It also shows what Koreans consider to be a high stake concern–financial security–by designating it as the negative incentive, of all things that could have been chosen. Idle shaking of the leg is a restless habit that suggests anxiety, restlessness, and impatience, which already makes it unpleasant. Perhaps the superstition is based on rash financial decisions that were made in moments of restless impatience, and then retroactively connected to the habit. Another possibility is that people just don’t like to be around leg shaking for intuitive reasons–its nervous quality can make other people feel nervous just by looking at it–which therefore makes it somewhat easy to adopt the superstition after it’s heard.

How to get water out of your ears

Nationality: American; Mexican roots
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/19/12
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

[my own comments marked by square brackets]

Informant: “One thing that I remember from my childhood is that my uncle would tell me that if you put an onion behind your ear, it would get water out of it. So if you were in the swimming pool and you had an earache from water being in your ear, a way to get that out was to put an onion behind your ear.”

[I’ve never heard of that. Have you ever heard anyone else say that?]

“I’m not sure. I think it’s mostly just from my family though that I’ve heard that. I don’t know why but they claim that it works.”

[Where is your uncle from?]

“From Los Angeles. Born and raised. Their parents too.”

 

Though my informant is Mexican by ethnicity, his family has been so far removed (physically and culturally) from Mexico that I don’t connect this folk remedy to Mexico. Instead I can speculate that it has more to do with the observable properties of an onion–strong fumes and ability to elicit tears from the eyes–which make it seem plausible to have a sensory effect elsewhere, even drawing water out from within the ear.