Informant: “Never have your back to the door. If you’re in a room and you’re organizing your room, you shouldn’t put a chair or like a couch where like the way you enter the room is behind you.”

My informant learned this principle from her mother and aunt, who are constantly reinforcing the principles of feng shui in their homes. When we first moved into our apartment, her mother insisted on evaluating the premises and informing our furniture placements. Neither of us objected; there is something about the way a room is arranged that definitely affects the way you feel in it, however inexplicably. Feng shui is concerned with ordering a space so as to optimize the ambiance and mental comfort within it–this is achieved by creating balance and harmony among its physical components. This particular principle considers your mental comfort by ensuring that you are never surprised from behind. Having your back to the door, you forfeit control and awareness of the portal which guides flow in and out of the room, and potentially allow yourself to be startled.

Every time you eat any kind of cookies with tea, you had to dunk at least once and say “Good luck”.

I don’t know where it comes from, but dunking a cookie into tea is good luck. When eating a cookie with a beverage, it is bad luck not to dunk at least once. My mother would say she was “dunking for good luck” and that her father did it too. But I only remember it with tea.

Her father was English so it might have had something to do with the tea. Because tea and the tea industry is supposed to have such positive connotations in England, maybe this is a subconscious way of developing and maintaining those positive connotations as an extension of British cultural identity in America.