Author Archives: Shirley He

Ramayana

Nationality: Singapore
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Singapore
Performance Date: Apr 13 2017
Primary Language: English
Language: Hindi

 

My informant AM is an international student from Singapore, and her family is originally from Bengal, India. She goes back to Bengal every year, and spends most of the time in the capital city Kolkata.

 

Main piece:

AM: “Ramayana is an Hindu epic. The basic outline of the epic is that, there is a married couple, Ram and Sita. One day, the wife, Sita is kidnaped by a demon, Raavana … he’s a guy. After realizing that his wife is kidnaped, Ram goes on a journal to rescuing her. On the sixth day, Ram prays to the goddess Durga, and gains the power to defeat Raavana, which takes him 10 days in total. So the tenth day in Durga Puja is also seen as the day when Raavana is defeated.”

SH: You said that the festival’s name, “Puja” in “Durga Puja” means “prayer”, right? So do you think this is the festival that actually come from this epic story?

AM: “Most of the festivals in India are in someway all related to prayer or pray to the God. So many festivals have the name of ‘something something Puja’. But, yes, I think praying to God is definitely a large part of many Hindu stories.

SH: How do you know about all these stories about God and Goddess?

AM: “I just know them! [laugh] I think they are something that you know as a kid, whether is from TV or from books. I might learn all these from my grandma. She have countless stories to tell to kids, and lot of them base on those epic.”

 

Context of the performance:

This is a section from a conversation with my informant AM about how Indian culture and traditions are practiced in Singapore.

This epic story is told when AM wanted to explain one of the reason people celebrate Durga Puja festival.

 

My thoughts about the piece:

I mentioned about my discussion with AM about gender in Indian culture in my post of “Durga Puja”. However, though we both noticed that the goddess, the mother is the figure who are respected and prayed to, the two explanations of the festival – Durga goes to visit her mothers’ home and Ram prays to Durga and defeats the demon to save his girl – all indicates both how powerful women can be and how women still need to be bounded with men. Durga has to go back to her husband’s home at the end of the tenth day, and Sita is kidnaped by demon and has to be rescued by her husband. There is a tension between matriarchal and patriarchal in Indian epics and stories, which need to be further discussed.

Durga Puja

Nationality: Singapore
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Singapore
Performance Date: Apr 13 2017
Primary Language: English
Language: Hindi

My informant AM is an international student from Singapore, and her family is originally from Bengal, India. She goes back to Bengal every year, and spends most of the time in the capital city Kolkata.

 

Main piece:

“Durga Puja” is a traditional festival of India. People celebrate the festival for 10 days. “Durga” is the goddess Durga, and “Puja” means “prayer”. The festival is in different time every year, but is around October and November.

 

AM: “We’re celebrating several things in this festival. Firs of all is Durga. We call her “the mother”, she is very respected, because she’s really powerful. She has ten hands, each of the hands hold a weapon. She is known as defeating an evil Buffalo demon. Thinking about Indian Gods, there’re so many of them. So Durga have so many forms, that she shared the same identity with some other gods and Durga is one form. In Bengal, we celebrate this incarnation of the goddess, which is Durga. She is married to one of the three main gods, Shiva.

“During a traditional Indian marriage, there’s a whole ceremony in the wife goes to the husband’s home. So during Durga Puja, these 10 days are believed as the time when Durga come back to her mother’s home. And at the last day of the festival, she goes back to Shiva’s home.

“The festival in total is 10 days, but the celebration starts at the 6th day. I don’t really know the reason behind this, but I do think we celebrate Durga Puja differently in Singapore than how people do it in India. So on the 6th day in Singapore, we have food fair for the festival. But there’s one common thing. Just to clarify, during the festival, it is Durga and her four children come to visit us, and we have statue of the five of them – Durga in the middle and her children aside. At the tenth day, in India, people will rewrap the statue of Durga and float it into the Bengali Rive. But we don’t do it in Singapore, cause it’s illegal, so we just rewrap the statue and send it back, which symbolizing she goes back to her husband’s home.”

 

Context of the performance:

This is a section from a conversation with my informant AM about how Indian culture and traditions are practiced in Singapore.

 

My thoughts about the piece:

I later discussed with AM about the how Indian culture regard women, and gender difference in general. I remember a ethnographic film Mardistan (2014) directed by anthropologist Harjant Gill, which talks about how patriarchal order is controlling over both women and men, specifically in the city of Chandigarh. I mentioned this to AM and she told me this is a really tricky thing to say, because there’re really modern cities like Mumbai but there are also many rural areas. But it seems to both of us that, due to the fact that there are so many festivals celebrating goddess, mother gods, Indian is not as what people would stereotypically regard as the typical patriarchal country. The part of Indian identity is really matriarchal, that people respect to the mother figure, but there’s also sexism in society too.

 

See the ethnographic film Mardistan here: https://vimeo.com/120182667

Styles of Sari

Nationality: Singapore
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Singapore
Performance Date: Apr 13 2017
Primary Language: English
Language: Hindi

My informant AM is an international student from Singapore, and her family is originally from Bengal, India. She goes back to Bengal every year, and spend most of the time in the capital city Kolkata.

 

Main piece:

AM: “For me, I only wear Sari in certain time, like in the festival ‘Durga Puja’. We have this Indian festival in Singapore and we celebrate it every year. I got my own Sari at the age of 17 or 18, and then, I learned how to wear it, since there’re certain ways and so many ways to wear it…

“There are women who wear it everyday, like my grandma and people at her age. They have home Sari, Sari for sleeping, and Sari for going out. And my mom’s generation is more modern. They have Sari, and also a more modern style of clothing.

Sari is consisted of one drape, you wrap it around the waist and shoulder. And normally, you wear a blouse and a petticoat underneath the Sari drape. While the more popular modern style is you wear a Kurta, the long top, and below is pants like Patiala, or just like straight – Kameez, or skinny pants like Churidar. Most of the time, when we’re at home, my mom would just wear normal clothes, top and panyts, but if we go out to visit someone, she will wear those. And if it’s a really special occasion, she’ll wear Sari.

As for me, I never wear Sari since I come to the State. [laugh]”

 

Context of the performance:

This is a section from a conversation with my informant AM about how Indian culture and traditions are practiced in Singapore.

 

My thoughts about the piece:

I find Indian as the culture that remains its traditional clothing the longest among many old civilizations. Two weeks ago when I went to Regal LA Live to watch movie, I saw many Indian-looking people wearing Sari (for women) or Achkan (for men) having some kind of open ceremony for a film. Wearing traditional clothing in this modern time is really new to me, especially because China has so many traditional clothing styles but people don’t wear them and don’t know how to wear them.

At the same time, modernization is again reflected in this piece, that according to AM, the younger the generation is, the less people wear Sari in less occasion. This also reflects on globalization, that people in different culture all over the world wear similar cloth, T-shirt and pants. It seems that all these traditions are dying out.

Manneken-Pis

Nationality: Belgium
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Brussels, Belgium
Performance Date: April 1 2017
Primary Language: French
Language: English, Spanish, Dutch

Background of informant:

My informant YF is an international student from Brussels, Belgium. He spent the first two years of high school in Los Angeles, and the last year back in Brussels. He lived in Wallonia in Belgium, which is the French-speaking region that accounts more than a half of the country.

 

Main piece:

YF: “There’s a really famous thing in Brussels, I don’t know why, but Chinese tourists are always like: ‘I wanna see Manneken-Pis!’ So Manneken-Pis is a statue in Brussels, it’s like the most recognizable thing in Belgium. ‘Manneken-Pis’ is directly translated as ‘Little Men Pissing’. It’s a small statue beside a fountain.

“So there are so many stories about this little guy pissing, so for example, one of the would be that this evil witch set a bomb to destroy Brussels, and Menneken-Pis saved Brussels by pissing on the witch that was going to set up the bomb.

“Another thing about the name ‘Menneken-Pis’ is that, ‘Menneken’ is a dialect from Brussels, … Brusselly [laugh]. It’s just the dialect that combine both French and Dutch and it is spoke by people in Brussels. So we have different dialects in different regions of Belgium, in the southern part, the dialect is Wollo, because the regions Wallonia. But wollon can be entirely different in different cities or town in the southern part too. Dialect is never taught at school, but it’s spoke in home. However, dialects are dying now. My grandma speaks it and my mom speaks it. But my mom doesn’t really talk Wollon to any one other from my grandma. Honestly, it’s only old people who speak it, because there’s a period when kids were required to speak only French in everywhere, since Wollon was considered as vulgar. It’s dying now, because of urbanization, is killing the culture.

“Back to the little man pissing, it is located very near to the Grand-Place, which means ‘Big Plaza’ or in Dutch as ‘Grote Markt’.

“For the version about the witch that I heard of, about Manneken-Pis, I might learned it from a camp that I went to when I was younger.

“What funny about Manneken-Pis is that, during certain times of the year, there’s this place that makes costume for Manneken-Pis. So like if it is Christmas, he wears a Santa Claus outfit. Or sometimes, there are fashion designers make clothes for Manneken-Pis.”

 

Context of the performance:

This is a part of the interview I had with my informant YF.

 

My thoughts about the piece:

The conversation started with YF said, “I don’t know why, but Chinese tourists are always like: ‘I wanna see Manneken-Pis!’” And when we looked at the street view of it using Google Map, there are always a bunch of tourists surrounding by the Manneken-Pis, whether is on a sunny day or a rainy day.

Also, YF told me that there’s another similar statue called Janneke-Pis. Since Manneke means little man where the suffix “-ke” is a diminutive, Janneke means the similar ting, except it’s a little girl that’s pissing, and Jan doesn’t mean girl, Janneke means little Jane. It is located in a dead end street next to a really famous bar called “Delirium Tremens” in Brussels, which is the bar that has the most beers available in the world at any given moment (their menu offers more than 300 beers).

Tourte Binchoise

Nationality: Belgium
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Brussels, Belgium
Performance Date: April 1 2017
Primary Language: French
Language: English, Spanish, Dutch

Background of informant:

My informant YF is an international student from Brussels, Belgium. He spent the first two years of high school in Los Angeles, and the last year back in Brussels. He lived in Wallonia in Belgium, which is the French-speaking region that accounts more than a half of the country.

 

Main piece:

YF: “‘tourte binchoise’ is the food that only being made during the Carnival week, of the entire year. ‘Tourte’ normally means a sweet pie, and ‘Binchoise’ means ‘from Binche’. It’s basically a pie, with … just piecrust, made with sponge cake, as the vessel containing the cream. The filling is orange custard, with a layer of marzipan. That’s something made of confectioner sugar, you know, the really fine sugar, and almond meal. You can only find it during the Carnival. Because it is so limited in time and location, the recipe is so secretive, and it’s so hard to find one.”

Two weeks later, I asked about this pie again, and YF was trying to find a recipe of it online.

YF: “You will notice that the name of this pie is ‘Plus Oultre’. Plus Oultre comes from Latin ‘Plus Ultra’, meaning literally ‘More Far’, or ‘further in good’ in English. It is the motto in Spain, or the city where this pie is from, Binche, that is the name that backery gave its pie. [showed me a picture] This is a similar thing to ‘tourte binchoise’. This is the scandalous orange Tarte. It lloks a nit different than the one that I had in the carnival, but it has the same elements! So I believe it would taste the same!”

 

Context of the performance:

The first part was within a general conversation about the Carnival of Binche, within a interview I had with my informant YF. The second part was done two weeks later when I tried to acquire a recipe of the pie.

 

My thoughts about the piece:

After YF first talked me about this pie in our first conversation, I didn’t really pay attention to this pie. However, when I was transcribing the interview, I started to be really curious about the recipe of the pie. I then reached out to YF but he told me this pie is so rare and secretive, and it turned out that he couldn’t even find a recipe of it on the Internet, in 2017…

 

The orange Tarte recipe that YF showed me is online, here is the URL:

http://www.lacuisinedebernard.com/2010/10/la-tarte-scandaleuse-lorange.html

The recipe is in French.