Category Archives: Folk Beliefs

年年有余: A Fish for the New Year, and Not to Flip It

Text: On Chinese New Year eve my family eats a whole fish for dinner. The rule, as enforced by my mother IW, is that we must eat the fish from the top down. We never flip the fish over. To flip the fish, 翻 (fān), invokes 翻船 (fānchuán), to capsize a boat. If you flip the fish, you’re putting yourself at increased risk of capsizing your boat in the following year (valid for car analog also). Halfway through the meal, once the top side has been eaten down to the bone, we carefully lift out the spine in one piece and lay it aside, exposing the meat of the underside. The fish doubles as a pun in Chinese: 年年有余 (nián nián yǒu yú), translating to “may every year have surplus,” works because 余 (yú, surplus) sounds like 鱼(yú, fish). Hence “may every year have fish”. The fish must remain partially uneaten at the end of the meal, leaving leftovers for the next day (the first day of the new year) to literalize the surplus. 

Context: My mother, IW, grew up in a suburb of Beijing and has not deviated from the tradition since. She has done it every Lunar New Year I can remember. We typically have two fish over the holiday: one served on New Year’s Eve and another on New Year’s Day, we call the second fish leftovers even though I’m not sure that’s how it works traditionally. The fish at our table is most often halibut, this is tangential to the tradition and just a habit my family has fallen into (I think Costco has a good deal on halibut around that time), the strict tradition would call for carp or sea bass. 

Analysis: Two folkloric mechanisms run in parallel inside one piece of food. The first is homophonic word-magic: 鱼sounds like 余, so the fish itself becomes a small, uttered wish for surplus, and the requirement that some of it remain for the next day extends the wish across the new-year boundary. Homophonic mechanisms like this are common in Chinese culture, an artifact of the language’s limited distinct syllables that lend to a high density of homophones. The second: flipping the fish, enacts, in miniature, the boat-capsizing it warns against, and the taboo presumes the small gesture is continuous with the larger outcome. The careful spine-lift halfway through dinner is the practical accommodation of the rule, with the skeleton removed in one piece so every side of the fish can be reached without ever turning it over. The capsizing prohibition is, in origin, a coastal-fisherman’s taboo that has been carried into Lunar New Year practice throughout China, and in our household, a boat-less one, it has been extended to cars. Strict tradition can involve carp (鲤 puns with 利, profit), the species drift to halibut in my family is folkloric variation. 

Ghost Pressing on the Bed

Text:

Interviewee: When I was young, my mom and dad would say it’s “Ghost pressing on the bed” that made me unable to move my body, despite being mentally awake.

I was 7 years old. One day, I woke up early in the morning —I think it’s around 4 or 5 o’clock—I was mentally awake, but I just couldn’t move my body. I thought I was stuck by something, but it was invisible, so I could not really see what happened on my body. This kind of like situation stayed with me for around 10 minutes. And then I fell asleep again, and then the next time I woke up, I could move properly.

When I told my parents about this, they said, “Oh, it’s a ghost. He or she was pressing down on your body so you could not move.”

It’s kind of like a common belief or way to explain this in China. Scientifically speaking, it’s about your mind—maybe you are being too mentally stressed or, like, too tired, and that will happen to you.

But the tricky thing is that after that happened, I kept dreaming about weird things. I would dream of being in a playground, like a theme park, and riding a rollercoaster without any security belts on. And then, I saw someone sitting next to me, but I couldn’t really see her face, though I somehow knew it was a woman. It was just so scary that I almost peed (and I was young, only seven years old.)

I never told my parents that I had this dream after the “Ghost pressing down on my bed” experience because I didn’t know how to tell them, or maybe I was too ashamed to tell them. Now, when I think back on this experience, I think it’s funny—it’s something that not everyone will experience, and it’s something that is both very tricky and very unique.

Context:

My interviewee was told of this ghost by her parents when she was 7 years old, when she experienced sleep paralysis. She was then told of this monster that pressed against her on her bed, which made her uneasy even after that experience.

Analysis:

  • Folklore filling an explanatory gap: before scientific understanding of sleep paralysis was widely understood and accessible, the supernatural was used by folks to provide culturally acceptable explanations of this symptom.
  • Psychological pressure: The ghost that presses down can be read as a projection of psychological weight: stress, anxiety, repressed fear, made into an external, physical force in the form of a supernatural ghost. This is an example of using an “external being” to explain what’s inside people’s minds—their unconscious, inexplicable feelings and anxieties.
  • Memorate: this story is also an example of a memorate: a personal encounter with a legendary figure or spirit.

To Keep a Child Healthy: Chinese Proverb on Restoring Balance in Yin and Yang

Age: 57

Interviewee:
My father, who used to be a vet when he was younger, always said this Chinese proverb to us:
“If you want a kid to be healthy, you need to let them be a little hungry and a little cold.”

“想要小儿安，三分饥和寒”

This proverb basically tells us about the importance of restoring balance in order to have a healthy body from the perspective of Chinese Traditional Medicine [zhong yi]. The main idea is that for a child to stay healthy and safe, they should not eat until hungry (a slight sense of hunger is ideal), and they should not be dressed too warmly (a slight sense of cold is actually best for their body).

From the perspective of Chinese Traditional Medicine, the reasoning goes like this: children are believed to have an abundance of “Yang” energy, the one in “Yin” and “Yang”, which runs their body hot and active. Because of this, giving a child too much food can cause internal heat buildup. In Chinese, this is called getting too much fire, which metaphorically says about how it’s like your internal organs are on fire, which can lead to irritation or illness. Similarly, giving a child too many layers of clothes to wear traps heat and makes them prone to fever. This saying, to me, reflects a core philosophy in Chinese Traditional Medicine about health. It’s about how balance is restored by restraining oneself from taking in anything that is “too much” for your body. And this balance is what Chinese traditional medicine really revolves around.


Context:

The interviewee learned this belief in folk medicine from his father, who used to be a vet. My informant’s interpretation of this folk belief is that it is reflective of the Yin and Yang elements crucial to Chinese Traditional Medicine.

Analysis:

This belief about the restoration of balance in Yin and Yang is a folk medical belief transmitted through familial oral tradition.

Cosmological Framework: This belief echoes the Chinese cosmological framework of Yin and Yang—Yin and Yang are evenly divided in half, and imbalance, or having too much of Yang, can make one unhealthy.

Genre Analysis: This proverb in Chinese has an even number of characters in its clauses, which makes it easy to remember and pass down orally. In addition, the last character of each of the clauses is rhyming with each other, adding to this trait from a phonetic perspective. This proverb is also notable for how it encodes complex Chinese Traditional Medicine theory into a compact, easily transmissible form, where people who do not know Chinese Traditional Medicine well can capture the essence of it by hearing this proverb, which is in plain language and is easy to understand.

The Gold that Has Legs

Text:

Interviewee:

My grandparents told me that “gold has legs” when we were in a jewelry shop. There were many things made of gold: gold rings, gold bracelets, gold necklaces… When they saw the gold, my grandparents told me, “Do you know that gold has legs and can run?”

I was very surprised and confused at first. I was like, what? Gold can run?

My grandma then explained that when my father was younger, he tried to hide gold underneath the floor of our house as a way of keeping it safe. However, he failed—after several years, when he tried to dig it out, he was unable to find the gold he had previously stored.

This then led to my grandparents’ conclusion: since it was hidden at home, and nobody has ever taken it or checked it—everything seemed to be very secure—it must be that the gold has run away by itself.

Context:

My informant learned of this folk belief last year, when he and his grandparents were browsing gold jewelries in a jewelry shop in his hometown. He was then told of this belief when his grandparents started telling him how his father used to use the soil to “store” gold underneath their floor, while failing to find it later after time passed.
My informant’s interpretation: He believes that by telling him of this belief, his grandparents were telling him, “Don’t try to hide your expensive things in a place for too long.”


Analysis:

This is a folk belief (and a superstition) shared by the elderly generation in China.

This folk belief exemplifies the use of folklore to fill an explanatory gap: The belief that “gold has legs and can run” is a way to explain the seemingly weird, inexplicable situation that happened to the informant’s father when he tried to store gold underneath the ground. The scientific reason, in reality, is that the ground shifts over time due to geological reasons and crustal movement. In addition, gold has weight, so it is reasonable from a scientific aspect that the gold has either changed its location or sunken into deeper parts of the ground (soil).

Lake Monster

Age: 19

Interviewee:

This story was told by my father when both of us were swimming in a lake in my hometown, a town in China. My dad told me that there was a lake monster who dwelled in this lake. This lake monster will punish travelers who have done something evil recently, and the way that the monster acts out this, sort of, punishment, is that they will kill them in the water. According to my father, victims often described that something held on to their legs and pulled them down to the deep water. They were either killed or deeply injured.

Interviewer: Does this monster only haunt you if you have done something wrong? And if you are a morally good person, it will not haunt you?
Interviewee: According to the myth, yes.

Interviewer: Has this story been used to explain, or was it proved to be “real” in any real incidents?
Interviewee: Yes. A few years ago, a person in my hometown died in that lake, and his family explained this as him being killed by the water monster. That day, he went to swim in the lake near a reservoir. When they found the deceased person, folks in my hometown believed it was the lake monster who caused his death. While scientifically speaking, it’s seaweeds. He couldn’t really swim well, and it was wild water, so some seaweeds must have trapped him from the bottom.

Interviewer: When you’re swimming in the lake, are you scared of the monster?
Interviewee: No. Cuz I didn’t do anything bad (laughs).

Context:

In the words of the interviewee: “This story was shared by my father, a middle-aged man who grew up in a small town in China. He told it to me while we were actually swimming together in the very lake he was describing—it’s a lake in the wild, without much protection and very close to nature.”


Analysis:

  • Vernacular transmission: This story was told to the informant by his father when they were swimming in a local lake in his hometown. The monster is very specific to that lake. The way the informant’s father tells him of this monster legend makes it very vernacular—informal, local to their hometown, a small town in China.
  • Moral story and cautionary tale: This legend serves the purpose of “education” under Bascom’s functionalist framework. The informant’s father, by telling this legend, educates the informant to be a good person and live with integrity—when being asked if he was scared, the interviewee said he wasn’t scared “because he hasn’t done bad things.” This mirrors exactly what this legend is used for—to caution people not to do morally bad things, or they will get into trouble. Thus, certain moral ideologies are reinforced by telling a scary story. This makes this legend a mixture of a cautionary tale and a moral story.