Category Archives: Rituals, festivals, holidays

The Class Rock

Text: The informant told me that there was a tradition their theatre teacher did. There was a specific rock that the teacher had that was like the class rock and on the closing show you’d have to find a place to put it on stage without people noticing it. Then it would be painted to match every show. Then after the closing show they’d go backstage, they think that it was something that people did but on that teacher’s last show the teacher did it, where’d they’d hold it up and everyone would chant “rock”.

Context: My Informant, 21, white, is currently a college student who is from Southern California, though this story is from before college. They have done theatre for a long time and are still immersed in it. They said this tradition had gone on for a while because the drama teacher had been there a while. Informant also experienced the teachers last year there.

Analysis: There are a lot of closing night rituals in theatre. I think it shows the limited nature of theatre, and how people deal with it. This is a ritual that marks the end of a show but the object, the symbol, also lives on beyond the show, gets used over and over, and is even called the class rock. It’s permanent among something that is impermanent thus used to say goodbye. I think that ritual of the chant is also a bit of performance used to up the energy, bond, and release some of the emotions that come with an ending. It very much showcases the community aspect and energy of theatre, and the permanent but impermanent nature of it.

牛郎织女: The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd

Text: There was once a poor cowherd, Niulang (牛郎), who lived alone with an old ox. One day the ox spoke, telling him that seven heavenly maidens were coming down to bathe in the river, and that if he hid the youngest one’s robes, the Weaver Girl Zhinü (织女) would not be able to return to the sky and would become his wife. He did, and she did. They had two children and lived happily.

The Queen Mother of the West discovered that her granddaughter had married a mortal. She came down and pulled Zhinü back into the heavens. Niulang followed, with his two children carried in baskets on a shoulder pole. The old ox had told him before dying to wear its hide so he could fly. He came close. But the Queen Mother pulled out her hairpin and drew a line across the sky, and the line became a river of stars: the Milky Way.

Niulang and Zhinü are now two stars on opposite banks of the river, unable to cross. Once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, all the magpies in the world fly up to form a bridge across the heavenly river, and the two of them meet for one night. This has become China’s equivalent to Valentine’s Day.

Context: Told to me by my mother, IW. She has told it to me in some form since I was small, sometimes as a bedtime story. The story even became a tool to teach me Chinese as I vividly remember reading it from a book of fairytales. For most of her life and for most of mine, the Milky Way that the story turns on has been invisible: we have always lived in areas too light-polluted for it. On a family vacation to Fiji several years ago, on a beach far from any artificial light, we saw the Milky Way clearly for the first time. It did look like a river.

Analysis: ‘The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd’ is one of the four great Chinese folk tales, with attestations reaching back to the Han dynasty. It explains a visible celestial phenomenon (the Milky Way as a river, with Niulang as Altair and Zhinü as Vega on either side), supplies the etiology for the Qixi festival on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, and exists in clear regional variation across Han Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese traditions. IW’s telling is a standard northern Chinese version. What stays with me about hearing it for years and only later seeing the Milky Way clearly, on a Fijian beach, is that the myth was composed by people who could see the river every clear night. To stand under a sky where the river is visible was to recover the perceptual ground that produced the story. It was a powerful moment for us both.

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.

Hanako-San

Text:

Interviewee: Hanako-San’s story is an urban legend in Japan, widely spread among children. While I believe it began spreading among people in the mid-20th century, it has been passed down to this day.

Hanako-San is a young girl who wears a red skirt or dress. According to this tale, when you go to a lavatory at night, Hanako-San will haunt you when you are using it.

If you knock a closed toilet stall door three times, Hanako-San will appear. In some versions, it has been told that after Hanako-San’s appearing, if you look up, there will be a ghost looking at you. In other versions of the story, a hand—Hanako-San’s hand, will appear, and Hanako-San will kill you.

There are some versions of the story that have a good ending. For instance, in one version of the tale, when Hanako-San appears, she will play game with you. And this is typically a good ending.

Interviewer: Why is Hanako-San there (in the lavatory)? Any suspicions?

Interviewee: There are sayings about how Hanako-San became a ghost. Some people say she was threatened, frightened, and bullied, and so she hid in a school’s lavatory and died there. Some others say that Hanako-San’s death was caused by air raids in World War II, which makes sense given when the story was first told.

Context:

My interviewee learned Hanako-San’s story when listening to a Chinese podcast. The host of that podcast specializes in Japanese horror stories. My interviewee thinks of this story as a “typical childhood ghost story.” She also uses this legend as a way to learn about Japanese culture and society—their history (such as WWII being alluded to in this legend) and ideologies, etc.

Analysis:

Psychoanalytic interpretation: This urban legend can be interpreted using psychoanalytic theory. At its core, this legend functions as an externalization of repressed anxieties in Japanese society: fears that the Japanese society couldn’t openly confront, such as child mortality, wartime trauma, and school bullying.
Spatial symbolism: Toilet rooms are typically very small and confined. Their confinement targets people’s fear and mirrors their repressed anxiety.
Social issues / Wartime origin: Though this is only one variation of the story, the wartime origin (Hanako-San dying of WWII air raids) connects to Japan’s generational, collective trauma and guilt (this legend was first spread around 1950, not long after WWII). This embodies people’s way of processing this war, as well as the historical violence.

Ghost Pressing on the Bed

Text:

Interviewee: When I was young, my mom and dad would say it’s “Ghost pressing on the bed” that made me unable to move my body, despite being mentally awake.

I was 7 years old. One day, I woke up early in the morning —I think it’s around 4 or 5 o’clock—I was mentally awake, but I just couldn’t move my body. I thought I was stuck by something, but it was invisible, so I could not really see what happened on my body. This kind of like situation stayed with me for around 10 minutes. And then I fell asleep again, and then the next time I woke up, I could move properly.

When I told my parents about this, they said, “Oh, it’s a ghost. He or she was pressing down on your body so you could not move.”

It’s kind of like a common belief or way to explain this in China. Scientifically speaking, it’s about your mind—maybe you are being too mentally stressed or, like, too tired, and that will happen to you.

But the tricky thing is that after that happened, I kept dreaming about weird things. I would dream of being in a playground, like a theme park, and riding a rollercoaster without any security belts on. And then, I saw someone sitting next to me, but I couldn’t really see her face, though I somehow knew it was a woman. It was just so scary that I almost peed (and I was young, only seven years old.)

I never told my parents that I had this dream after the “Ghost pressing down on my bed” experience because I didn’t know how to tell them, or maybe I was too ashamed to tell them. Now, when I think back on this experience, I think it’s funny—it’s something that not everyone will experience, and it’s something that is both very tricky and very unique.