Category Archives: Customs

Customs, conventions, and traditions of a group

Finish Your Food, Children Are Starving

Text: My father, JW, was told by his parents in Ohio in the 1970s, whenever he refused to finish his dinner: “Finish your food, there are children starving in China.”

My mother, IW, who grew up in suburb of Beijing in the same decade, was told something similar: “把饭吃完，美国还有小孩没饭吃” (bǎ fàn chī wán, Měiguó hái yǒu xiǎohái méi fàn chī), literally: “finish your food, in America there are still children with no food to eat.”

Both invocations were performed at the dinner table. Both intended to produce guilt in a child sufficient to clear the plate. 

Context: In Ohio, JW’s parents and grandparents drew on a long American tradition of using China as the reference point for starving children. In Beijing, IW’s parents drew on Cultural Revolution rhetoric, in which capitalist America was officially characterized as a place of mass inequality and hunger. My parents realized this surprising symmetry in their respective childhoods after they had married. 

Analysis: The mealtime “starving children” phrase is a textbook example of folk speech functioning as parental disciplinary technique. What is notable here is the mirror: in the same decade, parents in Ohio and parents in a Beijing suburb were deploying the identical rhetorical structure with the other country supplying the sympathetic reference point. In the United States, China is the pitiable other nation filled with hungry children, in China, it’s America. The form is highly stable across speakers, the only thing that varies is which country gets named, which is itself dictated by where you are sitting at dinner. It’s very interesting to me this convergent evolution from two sides of the world of deploying guilt and sympathy against stubborn children. 

Exploding Sodium

Text: During his Peace Corps years teaching chemistry in Fiji, JW would take his students down to the bay every now and then with a chunk of sodium. His school lab had real sodium, kept in oil. He would fish out a small piece and throw it as far as possible into the water. It would skim across the surface and then catch fire and sometimes explode. The students loved it. He had seen it done by another teacher before trying it himself.

Context: JW is my father. He served in the U.S. Peace Corps in Fiji for two years following his undergraduate studies, teaching high school chemistry at a local school. The demonstration is not part of any sanctioned curriculum, but rather an informal reward to a well-behaved class. It is generally considered dangerous, and therefore impossible in a well supervised urban school setting. JW has not seen the practice done outside of his peace corps years in Fiji. He has retold this story to me on several occasions.

Analysis: This is a good example of occupational lore. The sodium demonstration is a chemistry teacher’s vernacular practice: it is not taught in the credentialing program, and the manuals tell you not to do it; you learn it from your own teacher and transmit it to your students. Its status as both pedagogically vivid and institutionally suspect is what gives it folkloric stability: every chemistry teacher who has ever done it remembers their own teacher’s version, and JW’s repeated retelling of the story, with the same opening and the same skimming and the same explosion, is itself an iteration of the form that keeps the practice circulating. The Peace Corps placement adds a second layer. An American chemistry-teacher folkway moved with JW to Fiji and entered a different pedagogical ecology, where his students may now be carrying it forward as their own, possibly without ever knowing whose Ohio classroom it had been picked up from in the first place.

Asking Mom If It’s a Good Day for a Haircut

Text: My friend AH, who has on multiple occasions described himself as “not religious” and does not actively observe Hindu practice, casually mentioned that he needed a haircut and added that he had to text his mom first to find out whether the day was a good day to get one. When I pressed him on what made a day good or bad for haircuts, he was vague and unsure: something his mom kept track of, something about certain days being unlucky. He did not subscribe to the system or the belief but thought it worth it to ask. 

Context: AH’s family is Tamil (South India), and he has been raised in California. He identifies as essentially secular but retains a small handful of inherited practices that he observes operationally even if he doesn’t subscribe to the backing religion. Checking on haircut days is one of them. His mother keeps the schedule, and he checks by texting her. 

Analysis: I became curious of the schedule AH is alluding to, I pulled most of the following from online resources. The Tamil Hindu framework rests on the panchangam, the almanac that maps each weekday to a planetary deity. Tuesday (Sevvāy/Mars) and Saturday (Sani/Saturn) are the days most strictly avoided: Tuesday because Mars is held to govern blood and vitality, and Saturday because of an old rule that a Saturn-day haircut shortens one’s life by seven months. The folkloric move here is AH’s deferral to his mother: a Hindu astrological ritual surviving in California as a text message to mom, with the operational practice shifted from the individual consulting an almanac or priest to a son texting his mom, who functions as a keeper of the schedule. This is a common pattern in diaspora households: the ritual knowledge stays with the older generation of the family, but those born into the new setting struggle to internalize the framework as well. In AH’s case he explains that he is not doing it necessarily because he believes in it, but more out of respect for his mother and her 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. 

Tomb Sweeping Day [Qingming Festival] Rituals

Age: 19

Text:

Tomb Sweeping Day, or [Qingming Festival] in Chinese, is a traditional, nation-wide festival that usually takes place in April. It is typically when we would go to sweep the tombs of our deceased ancestors and honor the family members who passed away by just cleaning their tombs, bringing food to their tombs, and sometimes burning fake money in front of their tombs.

These acts related to this traditional festival carry their own symbolic meanings. For example, burning money—typically, it will be fake paper money—is a gesture of providing basic needs in life, or ensuring the material needs, for our ancestors. We will also put food like fruits, desserts, and nuts, or anything that the deceased loved to eat, on top of their tomb. This, symbolically, allows them to enjoy the food they like to eat and enjoy the material well-being we as descendants provide for them in the afterlife. I think that through these acts of giving, or offering, of material things, we are trying to give back to our ancestors who passed away the way they took care of us before. And so our ancestors wouldn’t have to worry about not having enough food to eat or money to spend in their afterlife.

This, to me, is also a way of expressing reassurance—a way of telling them (the deceased ancestors) that we are having a good, decent, and dignified life, and we are making genuine efforts in our lives as independent and capable individuals—so here’s the proof: we are making our own money, and we are buying you food, so no need to worry about us!

Family members typically gather together to visit the tombs of their ancestors. Some families, like mine, would typically talk to our deceased loved ones in front of the tomb. We would update them about our recent lives, like our progress at school or at work, just like having an everyday chat with them when they were here, right in front of us. Finally, at the end of this tomb sweeping ritual, we express kind words and blessings to them in their own world.

Context:

The informant learned this ritual by participating in this festival every year, visiting the graves of ancestors with his family since he was a child. As time passes by, he begins to remember the important steps of this ritual, such as burning paper money and talking to the graves as if speaking to ancestors. He thinks that this festival is meaningful in the sense that it allows everyone who participates in its rituals to remember their loved ones who have passed away, and show them care.

Analysis:

  • Death and afterlife: The Tomb Sweeping Day (Qingming) rituals reflect the Chinese’s beliefs about death and afterlife in their culture—people believe that when someone passes, they don’t end their life entirely, and instead, they are just living in a different space and dimension, in their afterlife. This belief in “afterlife” has many cultural origins, including, possibly, Buddhism’s impact in China.
  • Performance: This ritual is performed by a family, with all family members, as a group. This makes tomb sweeping on Tomb Sweeping Day almost a familial thing. This reflects unity and family harmony’s importance in the Chinese culture. In addition, the performance of this ritual—showing up, bringing food, and burning money—is an act of showing respect for the deceased ones in a symbolic (not material) way. Even though the “food” and “money” cannot get to the deceased ones on a material level, on an emotional level, it is an effective way of showing love and care.