Author Archives: Sara Hua

Krampus

Informant: I went to a Christian middle school, and one day before Christmas break my teacher was like, “Beware of the Krampus!” So I asked him what the Krampus was… and it’s like this mystical beast thingy that comes on Christmas. It has horns and looks like a devil.  It’s like… you know, a man-goat thing. And it takes children back to it’s lair.

Me: All children?

Informant: No, just the naughty children! Like kids who were naughty… you know how Santa knows if you’re naughty or nice? The Krampus eats children who are naughty. And he goes with Santa Claus and picks up all the bad children and ties them up with chains that he carries.

Analysis: It seems that the Krampus appears as a more extreme Christmas day punishment.

 

Wedding Ring Test – Pregnancy Gender Predictor

Nationality: Chinese-American
Age: 51
Occupation: Manager
Residence: Shanghai, China
Performance Date: 4/20/13
Primary Language: Chinese
Language: English

Informant: “This is how you do it. Take a pin, needle, or wedding ring and attach it to a thread. Then you hold the dangling item over mom to be’s belly while she is lying down. If the needle or wedding ring swings in a circular motion, you will be having a girl. If it moves in a to and fro motion like a pendulum, you will be having a boy.”

Me: “Did you try it?”

Informant: “I did and it worked for me! But it’s just an old wives tale.”

Analysis: This is a very common thing to do when one is eager to know the gender of one’s baby. It was thought to originate in Italy, except instead of a wedding ring, they used needles on threads. Due to female roles back in time, needles and threads were more common in an expecting woman’s life than nowadays. Using the wedding ring as opposed to the thread was thought to originate in Ireland.

Pregnancy is one of those exciting events, and the gender prediction always arouses the curiosity of others. There are several “old wives tales” on predicting the gender of a baby, however some of them contradict each other. According to testimonials online, people will often end up with an even split of results -50% of the tests will predict a boy, and 50% will predict a girl. This suggests that there is little truth or evidence to support the effectiveness of the tests, which may be why the informant was skeptical to believe in it despite the fact that it worked for her.

Blow a dandelion, make a wish.

Nationality: USA, Israeli
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Huntington Beach, CA
Performance Date: 3/23/13
Primary Language: English

The informant told me that when she was younger (age 4-5), she would pluck a dandelion and blow on it to make a wish. She learned this practice from her friends in preschool. “It was a lot of fun! We would run around looking for dandelions to blow on and fight over them sometimes.

Me: Do you have to get all the dandelion seeds off in one blow?

Informant: I think so!

Me: Do you still play this game?

Informant: Hmm… I think it’s second nature to pick up a dandelion and blow now. You don’t really think about it.

Analysis: This is a common practice in the United States, where dandelions are abundant in the grass. It is similar to blowing out all the candles on a birthday cake. It most likely stems from the belief that if you blow out all the seeds, they carry your wishes and dreams and eventually blossom. It is unclear where the origin of this game came from, however there are variations, such as if you blow a dandelion and all the seeds come off, your lover loves only you. If some seeds remain, he is not loyal. This may have come from the daisy petal-plucking “He loves me, he loves me not”, game.

For the informant, this game or ritual has become so common-place that it is almost innate for her to want to pluck a dandelion and blow the seeds into the wind.

Greek Initiation Ritual

Nationality: USA, Israeli
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Huntington Beach, CA
Performance Date: 4/20/13
Primary Language: English

The informant is a member of a sorority on campus and was bound to the secrecy of the sisterhood. However she was able to tell me that all sororities have a similar process in which they wear all white – no jewelry, no embellishments, no makeup, no nail polish. In the end of the ritual, they were all pinned with the flower that is the symbol of their sorority.

Analysis: This may have to do with the bridal customs of wearing white. The bridal hue usually symbolizes purity and chastity. Especially with the no-makeup and embellishments rule, it allows the sisters to bare themselves almost literally and accept each other for who they are.

The flower being pinned on their bosom at the end of the ceremony suggests that they are ready to bloom, so to speak, and embrace the sisterhood with open arms.

Bamboo Cutter and the Moonchild

Nationality: Japanese-American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Primary Language: English
Language: Japanese

Informant: “There was an old man and wife who wanted a child, because they didn’t have one and couldn’t get one someone. The old man chopped bamboo for a living, and one day he was chopping bamboo and there was a weird light coming from the bamboo stalk. So he chops it down and he finds a baby in the bamboo stalk. He fed her and raised her. Then another day came and he just went about cutting down bamboo trees and this time he found gold inside. There’s gold and jewels and stuff like that. So he and the old women build a nice home and are really happy with their daughter.

But then she grows into a full women in like three months, and everyone is stunned by her beauty. Um… So she has all these people trying to win her hand, but she gives them impossible tasks because she doesn’t want to get married. She’s so beautiful even the Emperor hears word of her beauty and wants to see for himself, so he visits the bamboo cutter’s home. He wants to make her his wife but she is unhappy about it, so he consents to just like writing her songs and letters.

What happened next… Then she gets really sad and stared at the moon and told her foster parents that she was a moonchild and her people were coming for her. This made the foster parents really sad so he tol d the Emperor to assemble an army to fight the moonpeople so they couldn’t take her, but she told him that it was her… like her destiny to go back to the moon. The cloud descends from the moon with her moonpeople and they tell the bamboo cutter how she was put on earth to be punished for a wrongdoing. They give her the Elixir of Life, and she only drinks half and sends the rest to the Emperor in a letter and leaves on the cloud.

The emperor is too scared to drink the Elixir because he doesn’t know what it is so he sends his royals to burn it on the tallest summit in the land. But because it is the elixir of life it never stops burning. And that’s why people see smoke coming up from Mount Fuji to this day.”

Analysis: The original tale is called 竹取物語, or Taketori Monogatari, which translates into The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter. It originated in Japan in the 10th century.

This story mostly follows the general traits of a Marchen tale, but the ending has a quality of a myth. With the Elixir of Life, some variations have the Emperor deciding the burn the Elixir at the closest place to heaven, which is Mount Fuji. It is thought that the word immortality (不死 fushi, or fuji) became the name of the mountain itself.

My informant was retelling this story from a picture book she had as a child.

Many Asian fairy tales have been related to people on the moon. The Chinese story of Chang-E has a similar theme in that the girl goes to the moon in order to escape marriage from a man she didn’t love. In other tales there is a man in the moon, or more commonly, a rabbit. This has to do with the emphasis Asian cultures put on the lunar calendar.

The tale of finding a child in a plant relates to the story of Thumbelina, who was given to an old lady who couldn’t have children of her own in a flower.