Category Archives: Material

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.

Chinese New Year Superstition

Nationality: chinese
Age: 26
Occupation: environmentalist
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 a Chinese holiday called “Harvest Festival”. She detailed her experience of Chinese New Year and specific beliefs and practices her family had. She knows and loves these stories from personal experience. She knows and loves these stories from personal experience.

Informant:

“On Chinese new year, you are not supposed to wash your hair or your clothes because it is thought to be washing off the good luck. You are also only supposed to wear red, even your underwear. The elders also give the younger people money in red envelopes as a sign of good luck and prosperity. On the first day of the year you only eat dumplings, second day you eat fish and vegetables, and on the third day you eat ‘longevity noodles’ because it’s supposed to give you a long life.” 

Thoughts:

The superstitious aspect of “washing good luck off” was one thing that I found particularly interesting. It is believed that one possesses a high amount of good luck on Chinese new year and you will wash it off if you wash any of your things. The connection to red in Chinese culture is present in many stories that this informant told me and I am curious to know where red ties into their history and how it came to be such a symbolic color. I love the way that food ties into this holiday over the span of several days. It almost seems as though one is preparing the two days before in order to eat the “longevity noodles”, noodles that promote a long life. 

BUCHE DE NOEL

Nationality: German-American
Age: 22
Occupation: Graduate Student
Residence: Vail, CO
Performance Date: April 27, 2021
Primary Language: English

MAIN PIECE:

Informant: Well at Christmas we’ll always have Buche de Noel… Which is a French dessert. It’s like, “Christmas log…” And it’s like a cake, and it’s like a roll, you know? Where you roll it up? And you decorate it to like resemble a log, and a lot of times it’ll have like marzipan… Like little marzipan mushrooooms, or little like eeeeelves, or something, and there’ll be like powdered sugar to be like snoooooow. And they’re just like super pretty. And we always do that. 

INFORMANTS RELATIONSHIP TO THE PIECE:

Informant: We’re not French, but we always do it. My mom did a year abroad in France, so she’s big on France. We go there a lot. All I know is it’s just like a traditional French dessert to have at Christmas. 

Interviewer: Do you make it or buy it?

Informant: We always buy it. We always do catering for Christmas. Cooking or baking is too much pressure. We wanna be like enjoying ourselves. Like for me, I really love baking, but if there’s a lot of people around, I like hate baking. I’ll be like, “Get out of my space. Like stop it. Like leave.”

REFLECTION:

Buche de Noel began as a tradition because it represented the burning of the Yule log, which is rooted in Pagan rituals. The tradition then evolved from the burning of a log to making and consuming a cake, which has then become cross-culturally adopted, with a German-American family making this French dessert part of their family tradition. This demonstrates how traditions can change over time and become adopted by new people and groups. The informant is attracted to this Christmas cake even without fully understanding its ritual context and history. Instead, she appreciates it for its aesthetic appearance and sweet taste. This is perhaps why, as Elliott Oring writes in Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: an Introduction, “food traditions are likely to be tenacious and survive when other aspects of culture are transformed or disappear” (35). One does not always have to know a food’s ritual context to appreciate its taste or appearance. Thus, food can be adopted by “outsiders.” Buche de Noel is now a part of the informant’s family tradition, and has taken on its own meaning within the Christmas traditions and rituals of her family––a meaning that is separate from the context and meaning it might have to a French family.

ANNOTATION:

Source cited above: Oring, Elliott. Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: an Introduction. Utah State University Press, 1986.