Author Archives: Ruochong Zhang

Marching Band Traditions and Hazing Narratives

This narrative was shared during an informal conversation about marching band culture and traditions. The informant was reflecting on differences between past and current leadership within the marching band, particularly in relation to hazing and disciplinary history. As the discussion turned to rumors, traditions, and institutional memory, the informant recounted a series of stories that have been passed down within the band, ranging from absurd misconduct to a fatal hazing incident. These stories are commonly referenced to explain the band’s current zero-tolerance stance toward hazing.

Informant (MB):
“I’m in the marching band. We’ve changed directors now, but under the previous director, the band members, especially the brass players, were known for being pretty wild. I’m not saying this very formally, just repeating what people usually say.

From what I’ve heard, the band was once banned by an airline. They were told they were no longer allowed to fly with that company. They were also banned by a chain hotel. Things like that really happened.

As far as I know, the airline ban came from a tradition on airplanes where two people would stand at opposite ends of the aisle and then run toward each other as fast as possible. It sounds really ridiculous. But on one flight, too many people were doing it, or they were being too aggressive, and the plane actually started shaking. Apparently, there were real technical concerns with the aircraft. After that, the airline banned the entire band. I heard the airline was United, which is why we never fly United for away games anymore.

There’s also a story about getting banned from a hotel. From what I’ve heard, and no one knows for sure if this actually happened, everyone agreed to rush the bathrooms at the same time and ended up clogging the sinks. After that, the band was banned from the hotel.

Those two stories feel lowbrow and chaotic. They’re stupid and absurd, maybe inappropriate, but they don’t feel truly dangerous compared to what came next.

There’s another story that’s much more tragic, and this one is probably real. I think it happened in the 1980s or 1990s. The band was traveling by bus to an away game. The trumpet section had a tradition where they lined up the freshmen outside the bus, blindfolded them, and then hit them symbolically with trumpets. They called this ritual ‘retreat,’ but it was really another form of hazing.

One time, there was an accident. It was extremely hot, and people weren’t feeling well. Among the line of trumpet freshmen, there was also a drum major. A drum major is the student who leads the band at football games, the person out front with the sword. Even though he had that position, he was standing with the freshmen.

Everyone hit him once. After that, he collapsed. He was taken for emergency medical care and was initially resuscitated, but later he died.

I don’t understand how hitting someone with a trumpet could lead to something that serious. But the result was that someone died. It feels like one of those situations where everyone does something small, but no one knows which action caused the fatal injury. We don’t know how hard people hit him or exactly how it was done. But it was undeniably a tragedy.

What makes this story feel more real is that one of our directors actually witnessed it. People say he saw it happen with his own eyes. Because of that, he absolutely hates hazing.”

My Thought:
Hearing these stories makes it clear why hazing is treated so seriously in the marching band today. The lighter stories about airline and hotel bans function almost like jokes or rumors that bond the group, but the fatal incident transforms these traditions into warnings rather than entertainment. What stands out to me most is how responsibility becomes collective and unclear, with no single person identified as the cause of the death. This ambiguity makes the story even more unsettling and reinforces the idea that hazing can become dangerous not because of one person’s intent, but because of unchecked group behavior. For me, this story explains why institutional memory is powerful and why certain traditions are not just discouraged, but completely rejected.

Gender Appreciation Days at Tsinghua University

Age: 53 Performance Date: 04/19

“Every year on March 7th — the day before International Women’s Day on March 8th — people started calling it 女生节, Girls’ Day. That’s when the guys in class buy gifts for the girls. And then on November 10th, the day before Singles’ Day on the 11th, that becomes 男生节, Boys’ Day, where the girls are supposed to buy gifts for the guys. This has been going on for maybe ten, fifteen, almost twenty years now. It’s just one of those things everyone does.

And there’s another thing that goes along with Girls’ Day on March 7th — the guys in class will make these big banners. Like, they’ll write stuff on them about how great the girls in their class are, how much they like them, and then they put them up all over campus. That’s always been part of it too.

I think it’s a nice tradition. It’s a way for guys and girls to show appreciation for each other, which feels meaningful. And it’s kind of fun. I think people genuinely like having a day like that. It’s already become semi-official at this point. Kind of like how in Japan, Valentine’s Day became this thing where girls give chocolate to guys — it grew into its own custom over time. I think this one will stick around too.

As for whether it goes beyond Tsinghua — I honestly don’t know. I can only speak to what I’ve seen on campus.”

Context: This account was shared in a casual recorded conversation with a college student who attended Tsinghua University. The informant spoke entirely in Mandarin, recalling these campus customs in a relaxed and reflective tone. The interviewer prompted the informant to share their own thoughts on the tradition and whether it might evolve further, which led to a brief comparative discussion touching on Japanese Valentine’s Day customs and the semi-official status these days have already taken on within the university community.

Analysis: The campus holidays described here — 女生节 on March 7th and 男生节 on November 10th — represent a grassroots form of calendar folklore, where unofficial commemorative days are created by students to mirror and playfully subvert existing holidays. Girls’ Day slots itself in just before the officially recognized International Women’s Day, reframing a political holiday into something more personal and celebratory among peers. Boys’ Day, meanwhile, carves out space the day before the wildly popular Singles’ Day shopping holiday, turning a commercial phenomenon into a moment of reciprocal social gesture between genders.

The banner-hanging tradition tied to Girls’ Day is especially worth noting — it transforms private sentiment into a public, communal performance, filling the campus with visible declarations of appreciation. This kind of collective display is a hallmark of student folk culture, where participation in the ritual matters as much as the content of the message itself.

The informant’s comparison to Japanese Valentine’s Day customs reflects an awareness of how gender-coded gift-giving traditions can evolve organically into something institutionalized over time. That these days have already achieved what the informant calls “semi-official” status at Tsinghua suggests they are well along that trajectory — beginning as informal student invention and gradually becoming part of the campus’s cultural calendar.

Pre-Performance Rituals in a Chinese High School Drama Club

“Back in high school, I was in this drama club, and whenever we had anything to do with performing on stage, there were always these rituals before the show. Like, unwritten rules. You couldn’t cut your hair the day before a performance, you couldn’t shave either. And then there were certain colors you weren’t allowed to wear — which ones depended on whatever show you were doing at the time. None of it really had an explanation. It was kind of… random? Like, rituals that were made up just for the fun of it, almost like a joke.

Oh, and there’s another one — this one’s more universal in drama circles — you can’t say ‘Macbeth’ onstage. Like, you just don’t say his name. Because supposedly it’ll bring bad luck to your whole company. Because Macbeth is a traitor, right. Yeah. So that one’s more of a real thing.

But the other ones, like the hair and the colors, those were just ours. No real reason behind them.”

Context: This piece was collected in a one-on-one interview with a college student who was a member of a drama club during high school in China. The conversation happened casually and organically, with the informant recalling these customs in a relaxed, amused tone. At one point, the interviewer drew a comparison to the folk belief that athletes should abstain from sex before a game for physical reasons — the informant acknowledged the similarity but pointed out the difference: the athletic belief has a concrete physical rationale, whereas the drama club rules had none at all, which almost seemed to be the point.

Analysis: The pre-performance rituals described here fit into a well-documented tradition of occupational folklore among performers. These kinds of customs are common in theater communities worldwide, serving to build group identity, mark the mental shift into “performance mode,” and give people a structured way to deal with pre-show nerves. What’s interesting here is that the informant herself doesn’t fully buy into them — she describes the club-specific rules as arbitrary, almost comedic. And yet they were still followed. This speaks to how folk practices can persist even without belief, because the ritual itself becomes part of what it means to belong to the group.

The “Macbeth taboo” is one of the most widely recognized superstitions in Western theater, often traced back to early modern English stage tradition. The fact that it showed up in a Chinese high school drama club is a small but telling sign of how theatrical culture — and its accompanying folklore — has traveled globally. The club-specific rules, on the other hand, represent something more local and invented: customs that don’t need history or logic to survive, just a group of people who keep doing them together.

The Hidden Meaning Behind Spring Festival Customs in Northeast China

Age: 53

“During the first fifteen days of the Lunar New Year, there are certain things you’re not allowed to do. No sweeping the floor, no needlework. When I was young I just thought these were old rules, traditional customs that everyone followed without much explanation. But later I heard it from your grandfather. He said the real reason behind it is actually for the women. Women are busy all year long, doing every kind of housework you can think of. So those fifteen days of not sweeping, not doing needlework, it was actually just a way to give them a break.

And then there’s the dumplings. In families like your grandfather’s, before the New Year even starts, everyone would get together and make huge batches of dumplings, enough to fill these enormous vats, about waist-high, big wide ones. In the Northeast you can just leave them outside to freeze, so they keep. The idea was the same. So that during the holiday, the women wouldn’t have to be in the kitchen cooking big meals every day. You just boil some dumplings. It’s like a fast food solution, really.

Looking back at all of this now, it’s actually a set of practices designed to protect women, or at least give them a little breathing room.”

Context: This account was shared in a casual family conversation, with the informant recounting customs observed during the Spring Festival in a northeastern Chinese household. The informant recalled being told the reasoning behind these practices by an older family member, specifically the maternal grandfather, who reframed what had always seemed like arbitrary traditional rules as deliberate, if unspoken, gestures of consideration toward women in the household. The conversation had a warm, reflective tone, with the informant noting that this interpretation only became clear in retrospect.

Analysis: What makes this piece especially compelling is the gap between how these customs are experienced and what they were apparently designed to do. On the surface, the prohibitions against sweeping and needlework during the first fifteen days of the Lunar New Year look like straightforward ritual taboos, the kind of rules passed down without explanation, simply because that’s how it’s always been done. But as the informant’s grandfather reframed it, the logic was never mystical. It was practical and protective: a built-in rest period for women whose labor was otherwise unceasing.

The mass dumpling-making tradition carries the same quiet logic. Filling enormous vats with pre-made, freezable dumplings before the holiday begins is, as the informant puts it, essentially a form of meal prep, a way to reduce the domestic burden during a period officially designated as celebration. The fact that this required collective effort before the holiday, and yielded convenience during it, reflects a kind of community-level care that operated below the surface of festive ritual.

Together, these customs illustrate how folklore can encode social values in ways that aren’t immediately legible, even to the people practicing them. The meaning doesn’t disappear just because it goes unspoken. It gets carried forward in the practice itself, waiting to be named.

This entry was posted in Calendar Custom, Festival, Domestic Life, Folk Belief and tagged Spring Festival, Lunar New Year, Northeast China, women, dumplings, household customs, folk practice.

Ancestral Halls and Overseas Ties in Southern Fujian

Speaker: “My family is from Quanzhou in Fujian, which is part of the Minnan region. The customs there are actually pretty similar to places like Chaoshan.

For example, during festivals like Qingming or Lunar New Year, family traditions are really important. We have a strong sense of clan identity. Each family usually has its own ancestral hall. During holidays, my parents would always take me there to burn incense and make offerings.

We would bring things like food or fruit as offerings, just to show respect to our ancestors. It was something we did regularly growing up, especially during important festivals.

There is also this saying about Fujian: ‘eight parts mountains, one part water, one part farmland.’ Most of the land is mountainous, and only some coastal areas, like southern Fujian, have flat land. Because of that, development in the past was pretty limited, especially on the mainland.

So a lot of people from that region went overseas, what we call ‘going to Nanyang,’ to places in Southeast Asia. Many went to the Philippines, Malaysia, Myanmar, and other places to do business.

Because the clan identity is still very strong, even after people moved abroad, they stayed connected to their hometown. After making money, many of them would come back during holidays to visit their families and their ancestral halls.”

Interviewer: “So even after leaving, they still feel tied to their hometown?”

Speaker: “Yeah, definitely. That connection does not really go away. Even if they live overseas for a long time, they still come back during important festivals. It is not just about family, but also about honoring their ancestors and keeping that connection to where they came from.”

Context: This conversation took place during an informal interview about regional customs and family traditions in southern China. The speaker described practices in the Minnan region of Fujian, particularly the importance of ancestral halls and clan identity. He also connected these traditions to patterns of migration, explaining how economic limitations in the region led many people to move to Southeast Asia, while still maintaining strong ties to their hometowns.

Analysis: This account illustrates the close relationship between geography, migration, and cultural identity in southern Fujian. Limited agricultural resources and mountainous terrain contributed to a long history of overseas migration. At the same time, strong clan structures and ancestral traditions helped maintain a sense of identity across generations and distances. The continued practice of returning home for festivals and participating in rituals at ancestral halls reflects how cultural traditions can persist even in diasporic communities. These practices reinforce both family bonds and a broader sense of belonging tied to place and ancestry.