Category Archives: Folk Beliefs

Facial Blemishes and Leftover Rice

Nationality: Taiwanese
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/29/14
Primary Language: English

Text:

“If you don’t clean your plate of food, typically rice, then your spouse’s face will have a lot of blemishes.”

Background:

My informant was told this belief by her mom. She would tell it to all of her siblings when they were kids. She thinks that her mom just used this to motivate her kids to not be wasteful with their food.

Context:

Usually, parents would tell their kids this at the dinner table when they said that they were done eating, but still had food left on their plate.

Personal Thoughts:

I think this belief or saying represents the values of not being wasteful, and the importance of marriage in Chinese culture. I’ve also been told a variation of this by my parents, but instead of my spouse’s face having blemishes, she told me that my face would have blemishes, in exactly the pattern of the rice that was left on my plate.

UC Berkeley Superstitions

Nationality: Taiwanese
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/29/14
Primary Language: English

Text:

“At UC Berkeley, there’s a 4.0 hill that if you roll down it, you’ll get a 4.0. It’s near the middle of campus that’s called The Glade. There’s also a university seal on the ground that you can’t step on or else you’ll get bad grades. It’s also next to the glade, and it’s hard to miss because it’s really big. But people are actually scared of stepping on it, and go out of their way to go around it.

Background:

My informant heard this from a Berkely student when she was visiting in high school. She doesn’t know when the superstitions started, but she thinks it probably started as a joke.

Context: 

This superstition is passed around the Berkeley campus from students.

Personal Thoughts:

I think this superstition really shows Berkeley’s culture that’s centered around grades, and the effort that students will go through in order to earn good grades. There’s a lot of academic competition there, and students are almost obsessed with earning high grades. Because of this, I think it’s natural that superstitions were started surrounding this obsession.

Guru Nanak Dav Ji: God’s Omnicience

Nationality: Indian
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/29/14
Primary Language: English

Text:

“The founder of my religion (Sikh) was a guru, Guru Nanak Dav Ji, there’s 10 gurus. It’s been told that he’s walked hundred of thousands of miles from India to Asia and the Middle East. He would happen upon people with different religious beliefs, and one day he ran into a bunch of moguls who were muslims. They were upset because when he was pointing his feet to the east. They believed that God was in the east, so it’s disrespectful to have their feet pointing that way… the some way it would be disrespectful to have your feet point towards a religious text. And the guru responded, ‘then point my feet towards a place where God isn’t present.'”

He was god is formless, shapeless, you can categorize him. It’s about the omniscient. God’s not in the East he’s all around you.

Background:

My informant heard this legend from his grandma. He likes this one and stories like this because it’s essentially not just a story, but theres a deeper meaning behind it. A lot of these stories illustrate the practicality of his religion, and he likes that his religion tries to be as practical as possible. There’s a trend about doing things you really need and not just doing things for the sake of doing things. This legend shows their main belief that there are many paths to God, and he is all around us.

Context:

This legend is commonly passed down through families, and taught in Sunday Schools for Sikhs.

Personal Thoughts:

I felt like this legend was a great story that shows the Sikh’s main belief that God is omniscient and that there are many paths to Him. It was very clear that the story meant a lot to my informant, and he found a lot of identity in his religion. I also think it’s interesting that this story is not written down in any religious text, but instead it’s purely passed down through word of mouth, which is very different from Christianity.

Cure to Song Stuck in Head

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: San Jose
Performance Date: April 5th, 2014
Primary Language: English

Information about the Informant

My informant is a college student at a community college in San Jose. He’s an avid amateur photographer, and we know each other through going to the same online high school. His family’s very closely-knit, with his parents very involved in the lives of their children. I collected this piece of folklore that him while he was visiting me on campus at USC. I mentioned having a song stuck in my head, and that reminded him of this piece of folklore that he had heard from his father.

Transcript

“My dad has said that, uh, the cure to having a song stuck in your head is the Beatles. It might have been because…that’s an easy one to get stuck in your head and replace whatever else was there before. And it…it’s good, but I’m not actually sure.”

Collector: “Did he just make that up?”

“I don’t know. I think so, but he might have gotten it from one of his more-musical friends.”

Analysis

My informant and his father share a common interest in music, largely fostered through his father sharing his collection of CDs and records with him since my informant was a child. His father constantly shares interesting music and trivia about music with my informant, and this piece of folklore is one of them. The Beatles, in addition to being an English band that’s well-known in America, is also a band that both my informant and his father enjoy, which is probably why my informant’s father decided to share this with him. There are various supposed “cures” for a song that’s stuck in one’s head, usually involving engaging oneself in a mentally strenuous activity, such as a sudoku puzzle or a crossword. This “cure” however isn’t really a cure at all, as it merely replaces one song with another, making it more of a joke with regards to how easily Beatles songs will stick in one’s mind rather than an actual cure.

Mal de Ojo

Nationality: Columbian/American
Age: 18-22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 19th, 2014
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Information about the Informant

My informant is an undergraduate student majoring in Philosophy at the University of Southern California. He is half-Columbian and was raised in the Jehovah’s Witnesses Christian denomination. This is one of three stories that his mother told him when he was a child.

Transcript

“I Googled this one too, and this is derived from the Assyrians; it’s really really old. But it’s called, um, “mal de ojo,” which means, like, ‘the evil eye.’ And, um, she [meaning his mother] said that it was–it, like, watches you. And, um, if you have, like, bad thoughts or you…you wish ill will on somebody, um, it knows. So it’s kinda like, um, a way to keep your thoughts, or your conscience clean. Although, you know, as a little kid, you start to feel guilty about thinking about, like, ‘Oh, I hate that other kid,’ or, ‘He just took my cookie,’ or something like that. ‘I hate him; I wish he was dead,’ or something like that. You know, like, ‘Oh god, the Eye is watching me; it knows.'”

Analysis

This is one of many, many tactics that parents around the world employ to teach their children morality, or at least govern them until they develop a sense of morality. Sigmund Freud himself believed that children do not automatically have a superego, but that for the first few years of children’s lives, they behave not because of internal forces that govern their behavior, but because of external forces. They behave not because they know it’s the right thing to do, but because they fear being caught or being punished. It is only eventually when these external forces are internalized that the children can govern their own behavior when unwatched. Whether or not this is true, it is undeniable that children at a young age follow a different set of moral standards than adults do. This may be why my informant’s mother told him about “mal de ojo” as one of many parents who do. It’s a faux internal way of governing the child’s thinking and teaching him positive ways in which to interact with the world in a space which the parents cannot reach–the mental, private space. Knowing that some entity who, unlike a child’s parents, can hear the child’s thoughts forces the child to re-evaluate the thought that he or she just had and think about whether or not it was a “good” thought to have had.