Category Archives: Folk Beliefs

Taiwanese Superstition

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Berkeley, CA
Performance Date: 3/12/17
Primary Language: English
Language: Mandarin

Informant Description/ Context of performance: My friend’s grandparents immigrated to the Bay Area from Taiwan in the 1960’s. Her mom is a Taiwanese American, and her dad is American, so growing up her main connection to her Taiwanese heritage were her grandparents. This is a superstition her grandma passed down to her, and it’s become a tradition she carries on every year.

Original Script:

Interviewee: I remember my grandma always talking about how it’s important to eat noodles on your birthday because it means you’ll have a long life.

Me: Is there a particular reason why it’s noodles?

Interviewee: Oh yeah because long noodles equals long life in Taiwan!

Me: Do you actually have noodles every year on your birthday?

Interviewee: Yeah… one year I forgot and it was 11:48PM and I ran to the cornerstore to get some cup noodles so I could have noodles before my birthday passed.

Conclusion (written by Interviewer): Every culture has its own superstitions for birthdays. In my culture, it is superstitious to ask for your elders’ blessings as soon as you wake up the day of your birthday. In my experience, each culture has its own practices for auspicious practices on one’s birthday.

Japanese Dinner Etiquette

Nationality: Japanese
Age: 57
Occupation: Professor
Residence: Kansas
Performance Date: 01/27/17
Primary Language: Japanese
Language: English

Informant Description/ Context of performance: My friend and I were having dinner with her mom in our living room. We were having a traditional Japanese dish called shabu shabu. We were sitting on the ground around this small table with dinner served family style when my mom’s friend looked at her lovingly annoyed.

Original Script:

Me: Is everything okay, Mrs. Mizuno?

Interviewee: Yes, yes. It’s just she knows she should not sit like that at the dinner table.

Me: Huh?

Interviewee: In Japanese culture, it is very rude to sit with your knees popping about the table. It is a form of disrespect to others you are dining with, so put your knees down!


Conclusion (written by Interviewer): Every culture I know has unique food etiquette. I had never heard this one before, so I found it particularly striking. Apparently having your knee above the table in Japanese culture is disrespectful to the people you are dining with, so maybe it shows laziness or a lack of interest by sitting like that.

March Madness Mania

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Florida
Performance Date: 03/22/17
Primary Language: English
Language: Mandarin

Informant Description: My friend grew up watching March Madness religiously. By the age of 7, he was creating his own brackets and knew every player on every team. Even now he never misses a game, and he has some pretty funny ways of making sure his team wins. (He has never won the bracket).

Interviewee: So this is pretty simple. Every time someone from the team I want to win makes a shot, I have to switch to the other side of the couch. I think it helps the “fung shui.”

Me: How did this start?

Interviewee: It started so long ago, when I was 6 maybe? It was a Duke game, can’t remember who they were playing. But basically, I had to get up to pee a lot or go get food, and every time I got up and moved around, they would score! So my mom made this joke. “Guess you have to move every time if you want them to win!” And ever since… it’s just been a thing.

Me: Have you passed this on to other people or is it just you?

Interviewee: Funny actually I have all my friends do it too. It was rough during the playoffs when there were 7 of us to one couch/. It was like playing fucking musical chairs!

Conclusion: I think there are a bunch of sports traditions and superstitions that people have, and I always wonder how it gets started. A personal example is my dad and I refuse to watch football unless my mom is upstairs in her bedroom. That started this one time when every time my mom came in the living room with the TV, my team would fumble or lose possession.

Drink Water

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Saratoga, CA
Performance Date: 04/10/17
Primary Language: English
Language: Hindi

Informant Description/ Context of Performance: One time I got the hiccups, and my friend told me an unconventional way to get rid of them.

Interviewee: Just drink water but make sure you’re upside down when you’re drinking it.

Conclusion: I had never heard of this way to get rid of hiccups before. Everyone goes with a few main methods: drink water, surprise you/ scare you, have a spoonful of sugar, etc.. This way, much like the others, absolutely did not work but it was interesting to add to the collection of folk remedies for hiccups.

Chlorine Eye Irritation Folk Remedy

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: student
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: April 16, 2017
Primary Language: English

Sports has a lot of unconventional medicines for quick remedies for small aliments during games or tournaments. My informant is a long time water polo player, and so I asked her if there was any remedies she learned from other players.

CB: “So when you play water polo you don’t wear goggles in the pool and the chlorine is very bad for your eyes, and there are a lot of water polo tournaments where you play more than one game in a day, and so your eyes will hurt a lot. A lot of people use eye drops but they don’t necessarily work that well so when I was a 14 and under a lot of my friends noticed some older girls putting milk in their goggles and putting them on their face and rinsing their eyes in the milk. We asked them why they were doing that they said it rinsed the chlorine and soothed their eyes and the recommended the fullest fat milk possible. I’m not necessarily sure if it works, but it does soothe your eyes in the moment and we kept doing it, everyone does it all the time, and it wasn’t only my team, but others teams from out of state using milk.”

 

Analysis:

Usually folk remedies turn into scientific remedies and vice versa. Or often they are placebo effects, and people believe that what they are doing will cure them. Neither are truly the case here.  Sports folk medicines are usually for quick remedies during a game or long tournament as there isn’t a lot of time for treatment for minor ailments. So either the ailment, like sore chlorine eyes, will go ignored or have such a quick remedy such as this. It’s a folk remedy that works for this team and many, but is not a part of conventional western medicine. However, someday it may evolve into western medicine, or evolve into conventional eye drops. Milk isn’t sold to alleviate eye irritation, it re-appropriated for medical use by teams and then spread around team to team or player to player through these tournaments or from older player to younger player. It is a remedy quite particular to this sport, so knowing it or performing it may also have to do with one’s belief in their identity as a water polo player. Believing in this remedy and performing it has a lot to say about wisdom passed down from generations of those who have played the sport before them.