Category Archives: Folk speech

“Just a Little Something I Learned in the War”

Text: My good friend KH, who has never been in any war, has installed the line “Just a little something I learned in the war” as a personal signature, dropped after she performs an act of trivial competence. Two recent examples: following up a successful U-turn in her car, “Just a little something I learned in the war.” Another, she twisted off a stuck cap from a soda bottle with some difficulty and said, “Just a little something I learned in the war.” She uses the line straight-faced, without further commentary, which usually makes it even funnier.

Context: KH does not appear to have inherited the phrase from a parent or grandparent; she has identified social media (primarily TikTok) as the point of contact, where the formula has circulated as a stock comic move. 

Analysis: The catchphrase is a piece of folk speech that works through deliberate, comedic over-attribution: KH credits a tiny bit of everyday competence to a vast, unverifiable, fictitious, catastrophic past. The joke depends on both speaker and audience knowing there was obviously no war. The gap between the trigger (a U-turn, a bottle cap) and the dramatic framing is the entire setup. It’s like wider American comic phrases such as “Vietnam flashbacks,” “Back in ‘Nam,” “in the trenches,” and “old Army trick.” All these dresses something small in the language of something terrible and huge, for comedic effect. 

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. 

“打一枪换个地方”: Fire One Shot, Change Locations

Context: My mother, IW, was born in a suburb of Beijing and grew up under the late years of Mao Zedong. Her schooling, from childhood through high school, was dominated by Mao-era “education,” which, following the Cultural Revolutions expulsion of intellectuals from population centers (they were seen as bourgeois), was largely just party propaganda. After Mao’s death in 1976, IW vividly remembers doing significant catching up just to match the academic level of the generation immediately before her, who had received actual schooling. IW’s “schooling” revolved around Mao’s Little Red Book, and the many slogans therein stook with her. She emigrated to the United States in 1995 for graduate school and has lived in California ever since. 

Text: “打一枪换个地方” (dǎ yī qiāng, huàn gè dì fāng) translates literally as “fire one shot, change locations.” Its origins trace back to Mao’s time as a general in the armed communist rebellion, where guerilla tactics led the rebellion to victory. In our household it has long since lost the military reading. IW uses it to mean, in her own words, give it your all and keep moving, do not get hung up on a task, do not chase impossible perfection, do what you can and then move on. IW almost always imbues some humor into the performance of the phrase, often accompanying it with a finger-gun gesture. 

Analysis: Propaganda directed at children produces an interesting folkloric residue. The audience is too young to engage with the ideology behind a slogan, so what survives the years is rarely the political claim and almost always the language itself, the rhythm of the phrase and the situations it was attached to. In fact, it was not until after my mother emigrated to the United States did the political situation that shaped her childhood become clear to her. In using the phrase after so many years, after so much in her life has changed, I sense a deal of irony and humor in the performance. I’ve asked before if IW has any ill will toward the party that caused her considerable strain growing up, she does not. It is her opinion that it was simply the reality of her upbringing, and she’s chosen to make the most of it. The meaning of this phrase is twofold for me personally, of course the wisdom about effort and pace, but also as the manifestation of making the most of a lousy situation it is deeply inspiring to me. 

“Waikao”

Text: ‘Waikao’: spoken in Fiji when you say something that is meant to be understood in an ironic sense. Not literal. Then the listener thinks about what you might mean and it is nearly always a funny meaning. So after ‘waikao’ is laughter. In English we used to say ‘psych!’ for a similar effect, but not quite the same since ‘psych’ is kind of teasing the person you are talking to, but waikao is more a collective fun. We don’t have that expression in English.”

Context: JW served in the U.S. Peace Corps in Fiji in the two years following his undergraduate studies and picked up ‘waikao’ (pronounced “why-cow”) during his time in the village where he taught. He reports that the structure is always the same: a literal-sounding statement, then the marker, then a beat for the listener’s reinterpretation, then, ideally, shared laughter. He noted that the phrase is unlikely to appear in any Fijian dictionary, noting that the dictionaries available during his service were written by missionaries in the 1800s and the living spoken language had drifted considerably from them. He is not sure whether ‘waikao’ remains current today or was simply trendy at the time. 

Analysis: ‘Waikao’ is a discourse marker that retroactively reframes a prior utterance as ironic and invites the listener to construct the joke for themselves. Both ‘waikao’ and English ‘psych!’ are post-hoc ironic markers, but the social geometry differs. ‘Psych!’ involves the speaker pulling the rug from under a particular listener. ‘Waikao’ is collective and constructive, with the speaker handing the listener a small interpretive task and the laughter arriving when the listener completes it. As folk speech the form is stable across speakers (‘waikao’ marker is fixed) while the content varies entirely with what was just said. That JW learned the word from oral use rather than any printed source is appropriate of linguistic folklore: missionary-compiled Fijian dictionaries recorded the formal vocabulary, but casual phrases and terms like ‘waikao’ are exactly what might slip through the cracks of such projects to document a living language. 

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.