Category Archives: Proverbs

天时地利人和

Folklore:
天时地利人和 (Tiān shí dì lì rén hé)

Context:
The informant is a Chinese American student studying business at USC. She encountered the saying in situations where when asking for advice from an elder or someone in a more successful position, they would give this saying. She found it used in response to questions like “why are you successful?” She roughly translated it to “The right person at the right place at the right time with the right amount of luck or fortune.” Noting how many things needed to come together in order for the favorable situation to happen.

Analysis:
The folklore saying is used in interactions between elders and youth about success, wisdom, or favorable situations. The saying places credit of the situation on multiple factors, most outside of the person’s control while also celebrating the work and opportunity it took to get there. It may be used to brush off credit from the speaker or the inverse.

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.

Proverb: If you marry a chicken follow the chicken; if you marry a dog follow the dog

Text:

Interviewee:

There is a custom in parts of China in which a bride-to-be holds a chicken. In Chinese, “chicken” (ji 鸡) is a homophone for (ji 吉), which means good fortune. There is also an old saying that goes: “if you marry a chicken follow the chicken, if you marry a dog follow the dog” (Jia ji sui ji, jia gou sui gou嫁鸡随鸡，嫁狗随狗). This saying means that no matter how her husband acts, a good wife should always follow and obey him. In addition, the hen is a symbol of fertility, implying that it is a wifely duty to have children early and often.

Context:
This informant was told of this proverb in her hometown, a rural village in China. She thinks of this proverb as a very out-dated idea about marriage and a woman’s destiny being defined by marriage.

Analysis:

This Chinese proverb reflects a deeply patriarchal ideology that was widely spread in last century China—a time when the informant referred to as “outdated.”
It reinforces unconditional wifely submission to her husband regardless of the husband’s character. The use of animals, chicken and dog—animals instead of humans— is a metaphor that suggests that a wife must follow even a low-status or undesirable husband.

Structurally, this proverb uses parallelism and antithesis—chicken/dog, marry/follow, which makes it easy to spread orally and be remembered.

Hammer and Nail

Text

Interviewee: In a summer camp I attended while in elementary school, my teacher told us about this proverb: “If you are holding a hammer, everything you see is a nail.” In Chinese: “手里拿着锤子，看什么都像钉子.”

Hammer and nail are a perfect duo. However, when a hammer becomes the only tool you reach for, it distorts perception. In this proverb, the message is that if you always hold a hammer and see everything as a nail, you will forever be seeing this world through a single, fixed way of thinking.

It was a simple, concrete way for my teacher to educate me about not being hindered by my preconceived notions—my “hammer”—when seeing the world. It’s about teaching kids to have an open mind and think outside of the box sometimes.

Context:

My interviewee first encountered this proverb in China, shared by a teacher when she was attending a summer camp as an elementary school student.

Analysis:

This proverb is an educative proverb that teaches the audience about cognitive bias using the metaphor of a hammer and nail. It is vernacular because, while this was shared in a summer camp by a teacher, this proverb wasn’t in the textbook, and neither was it formally written down. It’s essentially a metaphor about having an open mindset: it warns against the human tendency to fit problems to our existing solutions rather than seeking solutions suited to the actual problem.

Genre analysis:
Metaphorical structure: This proverb’s metaphorical structure—using a concrete, well-known physical object to metaphorically render an abstract lesson—is characteristic of a proverb.

Sentence structure / phoenetics: In addition, the sentence structure in Chinese—each clause having the exact same number of Chinese characters—makes this proverb rhyme and easier to remember and tell from a structural/phonetic perspective.

Smelling Flowers

Text:

If you smell flowers, but there are none around, it is a sign that death is near.

Context:

This is a superstition the informant was told often at various points in their life, and still moderately believes to this day.

Analysis:

This superstition is actually a variation of a similar superstition, in which smelling flowers when there are none means a departed loved one paid you a visit. It is likely they originate from similar points, as they both relate to the same action and to death in some way.