Category Archives: Foodways

Sticking Chopsticks into the Rice Bowl

Nationality: China
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Tsingtao, Shandong, China
Performance Date: 5/1/2021
Primary Language: Chinese

Backgrounds:

DerShann is currently a student at USC, majoring in Philoshophy. His family are from Tsingtao, Shandong, China. He likes to play the game League of Legends, and the following folklore is collected during some of the games we played together via the voice chat chanel.



The Main Piece:

DerShann: I’ve got this one super popular belief: you cannot stick your chopsticks into the rice in your bowl.

Me: I’ve heard of it. But why is it?

DerShann: Because that makes the chopsticks look like incense, burned to serve the dead. So sticking the chopsticks into the rice means the rice is for dead people.

Me: So what do you think of it?

DerShann: I kind of believe it. Like, there’s no certain, immediate consequences, nothing happens if you do that. But it might still bring around bad luck, it’s not a good sign. And, I wouldn’t do it because it kinda makes people uncomfortable.

Analysis:

I think this reveals how people are afraid of dying. They feel uncomfortable when they are using things that are similar to things designed for the dead. Or they don’t like to behave like a dead person. I think being afraid of death is a universal sentiment, but only in East Asia do this piece of folklore exist. Our traditional chopsticks has some similarity with incense that are used to serve gods or ghosts or souls.

Most of the people I know are aware of this taboo, and most of them follow it, although a large portion of them don’t really believe in ghosts or superstitious powers of the rice bowl. But people just follow it because this is the tradition, or the cultural norm.

Chamorro “Titiyas”

Age: 23
Occupation: director
Residence: LA
Performance Date: may 2 2021
Primary Language: English

Context: My informant is a 23 year-old woman who is of Chamorro descent. She grew up in San Francisco and moved to L.A. for college. She described a common practice for her family growing up surrounding food, particularly a snack called “titiyas”. Her Chamorro family passed on this recipe throughout the generations. She loves them because they remind her of her grandma. 

Transcription

Informant:

“So I’m really close with my grandma, I’m the favorite and vice versa hahaha. But, growing up we would always make different Chamorro food and one of my favorite snacks to have is called “titiyas” and they’re basically..  like sweeter and a little bit thicker than tortillas. Me and my grandma would have it with cheese or butter usually. Recently, I moved away from home and asked my grandma what the recipe was. She couldn’t give me any measurements or anything and said I just had to watch and taste. I mean that is how she learned and she was the oldest girl of 11 kids so she just learned by watching her mom. Sometimes she still sends me “titiyas” in the mail to eat the next day, I love it.”

Thoughts:

I loved this story from my informant! It reminded me a lot of how my Cuban grandmother makes “arroz con pollo” (chicken with rice), a popular dish for Cuban people. My grandma never has the right measurements and just goes off of how it looks and smells. It is so sweet how her grandma is able to send her “titiyas” still. My grandma also packs me the Cuban dish every time I go to her house.

It is interesting how this recipe had been in her family for so long and it had still not been written down. This shows how important oral tradition has been as well as how important sharing in person human experience is. Now with technology, you can talk to more people than ever before, but you lose the opportunity of experiencing all the senses with that person. Cooking together at home with family, there is nothing else like it.

The Lucky Coin in New Year Dumplings

Nationality: China
Age: 72
Occupation: Painter
Residence: Shenyang, Liaoning, China
Performance Date: 4/18/2021
Primary Language: Chinese



Backgrounds:

YZ was born in the family of a high ranking military official of the Republic of China. After the Communist Party defeated the Nationalist Party, her family did not flee to Taiwan. Instead, they settled in a village in the northeastern part of China and became farmers. During the Cultural Revolution, her father was executed, and her mother married another man, also a farmer. YZ grew up and had a family in the village, and spent a large amount of time in her life as a farmer, until her grandson was born. Her son had a job and created a family in the city, and when her grandson was born, she moved into the city to help take care fo the kid.

YZ couldn’t recall how exactly did she learn of this piece of folklore. She says many other people she know are doing similar things.

The informant shared this piece of folklore during a family dinner on Sunday.



The Main Piece:

In YZ’s family, they will put a “lucky coin” randomly in one of the dumplings they make on Chinese New Year. And whoever eats the dumpling with the coin in it is considered to going to be super lucky in the coming year.

Analysis:

The context here is Chinese New Year, and the whole family gathers together making dumplings. The performance is putting one coin in one of the dumplings, and whoever eats that dumpling is going to be super happy for that good luck. The context and performance together form a special New-Year spirit, meaning that this folklore only works on Chinese New Year. In any other occasion, if you find a coin in your dumpling, you feel like the cook was making a mistake, and your food gets polluted by something that shouldn’t be there. If there’s only the context but no performance, meaning we’re simply making dumplings for Chinese New Year without the lucky coin, it gets boring.

“Then we burn them and it is thought to go to the afterlife”

Nationality: chinese
Age: 26
Residence: LA
Performance Date: may 2 2021
Primary Language: English

Context: My informant is a 26 year-old woman who is of Chinese descent. She grew up in Hong Kong and lived there until she moved to Pasadena at the age of 7. She described common practices for her family over holidays and how those were carried out at her buddhist grandfather’s funeral. She knows and loves these stories from personal experience.

Informant:

“For every holiday, we never celebrated like “Christmas”, we would celebrate my grandma’s lunar birthday or a special dragon boat holiday like all these random holidays that I grew up with. A lot of Chinese people will have an altar to honor their ancestors consisting of a little red box and red candles with a little sign. Sometimes there are little figurines. Before everyone eats you put out a table in front of it with specific dishes (tea, wine, chicken, rice, fruits, vegetables) and incense. You pray to your ancestors at the altar. They sell these papers that have gold foil and you ball them up then burn them to help the things get into the afterlife. This would happen on every Chinese holiday. Then when my grandpa passed, he was Buddhist, so we had all these traditions of when you go up and honor the body you go up in generations and bow a certain number of times, eldest to youngest. There would also be all of these elaborate paper items like iPhones or houses. Then we burn them and it is thought to go to the afterlife. There’s all these different chants that we would recite at the end as well.”

Thoughts:

I found this story really beautiful and moving. The symbol of burning these paper items in order to send them to those in the afterlife is one of the biggest things that stood out to me. Even the concept of having ancestors in the afterlife that you can easily access is a really intriguing concept that I had never thought of before. I also loved the idea of having this spread of different foods to offer as well. This shows how important food is in their culture and how much they honor and acknowledge those who have passed. 

Origins of Tea

Nationality: chinese
Age: 26
Residence: LA
Performance Date: may 2 2021
Primary Language: English

Context: My informant is a 26 year-old woman who is of Chinese descent. She grew up in Hong Kong and lived there until she moved to Pasadena at the age of 7. Listed below is an account of where the word tea comes from and its pronunciation in different regions of the world. She learned these facts from her mother who is interested in history.

Informant:

“There’s only categories of how you pronounce the word tea, there’s tea and ta. The different countries that say tea, you can tell how they originally source the tea from China. In China they call tea, ta. Ams there’s this one province that called in te. The dutch would travel around Africa to get tea from that specific spot and that’s the only place that says ta. So you can tell where these places got their tea by how they say it. Like Persia says it che and more of the western countries say things more like tea.”

Thoughts:

I found this information really interesting. Being that the informant was 26, her mom, who taught her this, is about 52. It is cool to see how the older generation can bring about knowledge like this from their origins. I had never thought about the pronunciation of different words and how they came to be, but I am intrigued by language and am excited to learn more.