Category Archives: Material

Birthday Soups

Nationality: Korean
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Performance Date: 4/25/2022
Primary Language: English
Language: Korean

Background: The informant (J) is the son of two Korean immigrants. He moved to a city on the west coast when he was two years old and grew up there, but he was born in Korea and spent many summers there with his family.

J: On new years you eat this soup called tteokguk. Basically the reason why is that you don’t age by your birthday, you age by the year. Which is why when you’re born you’re like already one year old technically. It’s just different in Korea, like you just age every new year instead of on your birthday. I don’t know exactly why you eat it but it just symbolizes how you’ve aged a year. So according to tradition if you didn’t eat tteokguk on new years then you wouldn’t age, like, as in you have to eat it so you can age.

Me: Do you guys celebrate the new year with the western calendar or lunar or something

J: Uh… I don’t really know but I think it’s the same as Chinese New Year.

Me: Oh that’s the lunar calendar then.

J: Oh also tteokguk is rice cake soup, it’s a pretty light soup. And there’s also another birthday food, it’s called seaweed soup. Or i mean it’s not called seaweed soup it just is seaweed soup

Me: Do you know what it’s called in Korean?

J: Miyuk guk.

Me: Why do you eat that for birthdays?

J: It’s supposed to symbolize all the hard work your mom goes through like, birthing you.

Me: Why does it symbolize that?

J: Cause like, it’s supposed to be like your mom ate the soup when she had you and was recovering, so you eating is supposed to be like you honoring that and remembering…if that makes sense

Me: Wait so do women always eat it while they’re recovering from giving birth? Is it like a healing type soup or something?

J: Uhhh I don’t know…I think they just eat it because it…goes down easy? Like you don’t really have to like…chew a lot cause it’s really light and it’s just seaweed and soup. It’s probably kind of…nutritious too I guess.

Me: Do you eat seaweed soup on your day of birth or also on the new year when you’re like…considered to have aged?

J: No, I eat it on my day of birth. Because we don’t age on our birthday but the soup symbolizes your actual birth and like..the…struggles…of your mom

Me: I assume that everyone eats the rice cake on new year since everyone ages at the same time but does everyone eat the seaweed soup or just the person whose birthday it is

J: No only the..birthday person. Like my mom would eat it on her birthday and my dad would eat it on his birthday.

Context: This was told to me and recorded during an in person interview.

Korean Chopstick Etiquette

Nationality: Korean
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Performance Date: 4/23/2022
Primary Language: English
Language: Korean

The informant (J) is the son of two Korean immigrants. He moved to a city on the west coast when he was two years old and grew up there, but he was born in Korea and spent many summers there with his family.

J: When you eat rice or something you’re not supposed to stab your fork or chopsticks into the rice because it’s the symbol of like…you’re killing someone.

Me: Like it resembles the motion of stabbing someone?

J: Or no like, it’s…an incense funeral thing. Cause at a funeral you have an incense candle thing that you stick into this bowl and it sticks out and you light it

Me: Why do you do that at funerals?

J: I think it’s just to like…honor the dead I guess.

Me: Where’d you learn about the chopstick thing and the incense?

J: Um… I think my parents probably just told me not to like…stick my chopsticks into my food like when I was younger. I went to Korean school when I was a kid too and I’m pretty sure they told us about funerals

Context: This was told to me while we were in the living room of the informant’s apartment.

Coins for Styes

Description (From Transcript): “I don’t know if you know what styes are but like they’re an eye infection sometimes, and what they would tell us to do, or what my grandpa would tell us to do is to get either like a cold penny, or a cold spoon that you would put on the ground first (which I don’t know why). And then you would put that on your eye, and it would somehow help it go away. He (my grandpa) would leave it (The penny or spoon) outside and then put it on the stye to heal it. There were other things they (my grandparents) did. If they had like cuts, or like burns, they would wrap it in like banana leaves, or things like that, so they (the rituals) never had specific names. It was just kind of known things they would do and then they were passed on. And I actually was just talking to one of my friends, who’s Korean American, and she was talking about how they have similar things that they would do. But they would pull out an eyelash for styes as well.They would pull out the eyelash that’s near it (the stye) and then they put the eyelash on the ground. So it’s always having to do with something outside, I feel like which is interesting. Because, especially in Ecuador, for my grandparents growing up, they were very connected to the land and farming and things like that. I feel like, for them, it (spoons and coins) was just like things that were accessible to them. Maybe just like single household objects, because they didn’t necessarily…I know my grandparents growing up didn’t necessarily have the means to have the most medical things, if that makes sense”.

Context: T.M. is a student at USC. She is part Ecuadorian and part Native Alaskan. She explains that her grandparents are originally from Ecuador, and this was a medical tradition their parents taught them. Her grandpa then taught it to her mom, and her mom would tell her about it, even though has never personally done it. Even though she has never personally done it, she does believe that it works because her mom told her that it worked for her. She remembers it from early childhood because she always had a problem with styes. Her parents would take her to a doctor and she would get medicine. But when she would tell her grandparents about it, she got to hear their history and what they would do. Since then, it has always stayed with her. 
My interpretation: I thought the use of a metal object was important because metal can become cold easily, especially if it’s placed outside when the weather is cold. The fact that it has to be cold is also important because the cold (like ice packs that get placed in freezers and are used when a child gets injured) is known to lower swelling, which can sometimes happen with styes. The overlap with the informant’s friend over aspects of the outside world is also very telling about how medical treatments are connected to the resources people have in the geographical environment they are in. In this case, the informant’s grandparents being from Ecuador, a developing country with a rich ecosystem, reveals why they used affordable items and made sure to physically place them on the land.

The Cleansing of the egg- Religious/ Spiritual ritual

Description (From Transcript): “Okay so for this one it’s the curing of the egg! I don’t know how the other person you got it from told you this, but my mom, she gets an egg, and she rubs it with either alcohol or agua bendita (holy water). We get our agua bendita from church, or sometimes in a tiny bottle. We have like a little bottle here at home, and what she does is she puts agua bendita or alcohol, or both sometimes, and she does a cross on our body. But that cross is a small cross on our forehead, which is 1, 2, 3, 4, (*does a cross motion*) and then a small cross on our heart, in the small crossing our legs and then a cross behind our head. She rubs that egg all around our body,  starting with the back of our head, which is the most important part. My mom says that’s the most important part because that’s where it’s in the middle. Medically, if you hit your head right there, you’re probably going to die. That’s the most important part that you have to protect, and that’s where she rubs us and especially when I had problems with stress, she does this to me, and as well. She does it through the head, first in the back of the head and then on top of the head, and then she moves towards the shoulders and hands, the front of the heart, and then she moves to the back, and then at the end towards the bottom, and then she brings all that energy into the top, and she rubs the head again. Then she goes to the restroom. She opens the egg, and she throws it in the toilet, not in the back. I know a lot of people throw it in the backyard or they throw it in the trash.But she does it in the toilet. She’s like “don’t come with me because you’re going to get that bad energy, and I have to do it by myself”. 

She goes to the toilet, she closes the door, and she flushed it. Then, she throws the shell in the trash can outside. 

Context: The informant, VA, is a first generation student at USC. She has one sibling and her family is from Puebla, Mexico. She got this tradition from her mother, who learned it from her own mother. As for how to do it, her mother saw it on an online video on facebook. However, she first learned of it from her mother. The informant explained that this practice shows how, even if you don’t believe in it, seeing how much her parents care for her, or the extent to which they care that they would do it, makes her feel important. She emphasized how seeing her mom do this small ritual for her when she feels bad or because of schoolwork, she feels a lot better. 

My interpretation: Unlike the other informant who explained this ritual, VA utilizes many religious aspects, including holy water and the crosses made on her body. To me, this reveals how the act is not only a demonstration of religion, but also a way for her to connect to her family and her culture. Additionally, her explanation of the head being the most important body part demonstrates how physical well being and spiritual well being are directly connected, and more specifically, how negative energies can be physically removed from a person’s body even if they are not visible or tangible. Flushing the bad energy down the toilet demonstrates how it’s seen as a particularly putrid agent that must be disposed of the way waste or toxic chemicals might be disposed of. I found it interesting how her mother relearned the ritual through social media videos. 

Rosca de Reyes

M is 44. She was born in Los Angeles, her parents are from Guadalajara, Mexico. She told me about how her family practices the tradition of Rosca de Reyes in person.

“So, um… on January 6th, it’s the tres reyes magos they came to Jesus to bring him gifts and um… in order to celebrate that, someone bakes a cake and everyone takes a slice of it, and inside the cake there’s a baby Jesus, like a toy of the baby Jesus and whoever gets the slice with baby Jesus has to throw a party. The cake is called rosca de reyes… it looks like a round pretzel and on top it has like nasty pieces of jelly. In my family we always buy it, we don’t bake it ourselves…but so, the party is I think… in April. You throw a party in celebration of the coming of Jesus.”

The Rosca de Reyes is a variation on King Cake which dates to medieval times. The tradition is linked to Western Christianity and many countries have versions of it. In the United States, it is particularly popular as part of Louisiana’s Mardi Gras. The version M told me about is typical of Spanish speaking countries, especially Mexico. The hiding of the baby in the cake is said to represent the biblical story of Herod’s massacre of the innocents and the party thrown afterwards is supposed to be on Candlemas which is in February. For more information about the King Cake in Louisiana see,https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/02/17/147039138/is-that-a-plastic-baby-jesus-in-my-cake. For more about Rosca de Reyes see https://entrenosotros.consum.es/en/history-roscon-de-reyes. For more about the Candlemas party see https://wearemitu.com/wearemitu/culture/ok-so-you-got-the-baby-jesus-figurine-in-the-rosca-de-reyes-now-what-heres-what-dia-de-la-candelaria-is-all-about/