Category Archives: Rituals, festivals, holidays

Hide and Seek with a Teddy Bear

Nationality: Filipino
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Sioux Falls, SD
Performance Date: April 24th, 2017
Primary Language: English

Background: My informant was a young Filipino  girl who was born and raised in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. She currently is a student at the University of Minnesota studying Double B.A. Global Studies and Cultural Studies.

NOTICE: This is the “same” folklore I reported in my Hitori Kakurenbo, but told from a different completely unrelated informant and using a slightly different series of steps. It is most interesting because they learned about it through hearsay rather than through media like the first informant. I will list what is the same below and then follow with a list of discrepancies between the two stories.

Performance Context: According to my informant, the story was told to her by her two friends who are of Chinese and Vietnamese descent. They are not Japanese, but due to their Asian heritage they may have had contact with the original story to some degree. They described the story as of “probably Japanese or Korean” origin.

The Same  

Main Piece: My informant described a strange sequence of rituals that is played by presumably young people who enact a “Bloody Mary”-style ritual to play hide and seek with a demon. You must complete a series of ritualistic actions in order to play with the demon through the medium of a doll. Again, like the original/prior reported, you first take a doll, name it, and you must fill up a bathtub with water. You are also again supposed to play alone and with all the lights off (though the informant did not mention electronics like the prior reported).

The Different

After this, there is many discrepancies in the story. Firstly, the doll is supposed to be something like a Teddy Bear, because you should not (according to the informant) use a human doll. Anything with limbs will do. Then you cut it open with something sharp, not necessarily a knife. In fact, it’s not recommended to be a knife as the doll is said to stab you with it (similar to the prior reported story). Next you must fill it with rice. After this, you have to put something of your body within as well. It can be fingernails or a drop of blood, but either way it must be from you. Then you have to sew it back up with red thread. You then stab the doll. You find a hiding spot. You put the teddy bear in the tub (as prior) and then you go hide. Then, the ending is similar to the other. With your knife, you go back into the bathroom, the teddy bear shouldn’t be there. Then you have to find it and then you have to stab it to kill it.

The informant thinks this type of supernatural event could be real. She did not know whether it was real or not, but she wouldn’t want to try because she wouldn’t want to find out. She seemed afraid and avoided eye contact with me a lot during her description of the story. This is very different from the last informant who previously described it as “psychotic”.

My Thoughts: I think it is interesting because it shows how there are different modes through which stories can be passed. Sometimes they are passed through authored and derivative work, and other times, hearsay and the internet spread the stories to the point of becoming beyond recognition of origin. This new story even used a specific non-Asian doll as the main centerpiece rather than a more traditional doll. It is really interesting to witness the multiplicity and variation myself, as I asked these two informants to separately provide me some folklore, neither of them knowing one another nor knowing they would tell me this story.

Bongcheong-Dong Ghost

Nationality: Filipino
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Sioux Falls, SD
Performance Date: April 26th, 2017
Primary Language: English

Background: My informant was a young Filipino girl who was born and raised in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. She currently is a student at the University of Minnesota studying Double B.A. Global Studies and Cultural Studies.

Performance Context: According to my informant, the story was told to her by her two friends who are of Chinese and Vietnamese descent. However, she claims that it is a fairly common and famous online example of Korean comics on the internet, especially in horror circles.

Main Piece: The story is based on the 2002 suicide of a woman in South Korea. It is a comic that tells a ghost story supposedly based on true stories about the ghost of this woman who haunts an apartment complex in Bongcheong-Dong. According to the informant and the comic, the woman supposedly killed herself because she was being separated from her daughter due to divorce. In the story, a young girl is on her way home as she heads to the apartment complex. Along the way she encounters a strange otherworldly woman whose joints seem “twisted every way”. The woman demands that the girl tell her where her “baby” is, upon which the girl, too scared to know what else to do, points a random direction to send the woman. The woman then goes off in the direction that the girl points. The girl tries to run away at this point, but soonafter hears a scream from the direction of the woman, having discovered that nothing was in that direction. The woman quickly rushes the girl, and the girl awakens to find out that her neighbors found her passed out.

The comic is interwoven with two jump scares and sound in order to complete the experience.

To the informant, she wonders whether this story is really based on true stories. It seems to be derivative, but according to her, the story was made for a contest. This puts into question the authenticity of the stories origin and whether or not it had actually come from oral traditions. The suicide is supposedly real, and the rumors of the spirit seem to be true, but if they were not, it would not be hard for my informant to believe.

My informant is mainly interested in the story because of how it is meant to be spread to others as a sort of game. It is a viral comic that you want to show your friends because then you can watch as they are horrified as well. It is a sort of bonding that is made by spreading the story. In some ways, the story works in the same regard as many oral campfire traditions in uniting and making connection with others through the oral act of storytelling.

My Thoughts: I think it is interesting because of the reasons that the informant explicitly stated. Storytelling is generally regarded as a form of communication and there is no reason that the discourse of that story cannot also be a way to communicate with others. The horror of the comic serves as a sort of initiation to a inner circle of those that have experienced it versus those that have not and whom can be spread to. There is a special bond formed through the esoteric knowledge of the experience.

Spook Road

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Sioux Falls, SD
Performance Date: April 23rd, 2017
Primary Language: English

Background: My informant was young Caucasian man who was born and raised in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He currently attends the University of Sioux Falls for Biology and History.

Main Piece: My informant made me aware of a historical location known as Spook Road, that exists just outside of the small town of Brandon, SD. Brandon is a suburb of the Sioux Falls Metropolitan area. In this area, there is a county road that is known as Spook Road to local residents. This is because there are many accounts of supernatural events occuring within this location. The most famous has to do with a ritual that many young people take, especially during Halloween. The idea is that there once was a girl there who hung herself on a bridge. What one is supposed to do is, during the middle of the night, you and your friends get in a car and drive down spook road between the main road and the highway. On the way through, you should pass over a series of bridges. You should count the bridges as you cross them going on way, turn around, and then do the same on the way back.  You should count 5 bridges on your way, one-way. However, it is said that if on your way back, you count 4 bridges, you should be very scared. There are various reports of strange happenings on this very long, very narrow road. However, this story has created strong cultural ties for the people. The road is long and narrow, so there have been many attempts to fix it and improve the road, to reduce traffic accidents. However, many in the community have slowed down this progress even to a halt, petitioning to protect the “historical landmark”. The informant also says that there are also old reports of witchcraft happening in the area, though they do not know how accurate or likely this is.

Performance Context: According to the informant, this road is particularly famous in Sioux Falls, especially since many Brandon youth visit the main city. The relative closeness to the main city means Brandon folklore is often spread through hearsay and most people know about Spook Road as a result.

My Thoughts: I think it is interesting because it has gone from being a spooky story to a sort of rite of passage of many of the youth. There is a ritualistic action that many take upon themselves due to the relative ease of access to the story and also the challenge it seems to prod at. It is also something that is very easy to drag your friends into on a cold Halloween night, where everyone is out trying to have a good time.

Dragon Boat Festival

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/22/17
Primary Language: English

Background Information: I have been on the Dragon Boat team at USC for one year, and I have been to multiple dragonboat festivals. I interviewed one of my friends on the team, who is of Taiwanese descent, and grew up in Hong Kong. At her school in Hong Kong, she heard many folk stories about the origins of the dragon boat festival, which is an important part of the culture in both Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Sabrina: “So, legend has it that a long time ago, there was a really famed scholar, who was like, really important in the king’s court, and um, he was like, one of the king’s top advisors. And like, one day a lot of other people were out for his position, and they didn’t like the way that he was controlling the king. But like the way he was controlling the king was like, he was like, making him really benevolent and like, generous. But then, um, like so the other advisors wanted to control the king to give themselves more power, right, so they like, murdered him? Like they told the king that he lied about something, and then the king like, ordered his execution. And then they dumped his body in the river. So um, but like, since he was beloved to all the people, like since he made the king really nice to his subjects, um everyone like took a boat, and like paddled out to the middle of the river and threw like, these like rice… like… they’re called like glutinous rice wraps? We call them like zòng zi (粽子). They threw them into the river so that the fish would eat that instead of his body, and his body would rest in peace. Yeah. And so like, that’s like the origin story of the dragon boat festival, way back in China. And like, to this day people still have like, festivals every year, during the summer, to like, remember that tradition.”

Thoughts: I enjoyed hearing this story, especially because when I asked Sabrina where she had heard it, she told me that it was a story that many people simply knew about, or just came to learn as they grew up. As we have learned about folklore, it is knowledge that is widely known within a folk group, but that is not institutionalized or ‘official’.

Chinese New Year

Nationality: Singaporean
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/26/17
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

Background Information: Amanda is a Chinese Singaporean in her 2nd year of college, and she and her family grew up in Singapore. Her family celebrates Chinese New Year every year, which is a country-wide festival in Singapore, where Chinese people make up the majority of the population. Usually, it is a four-day holiday, and there are specific ways in which Chinese families celebrate it. I interviewed Amanda about how her family spends it.

Amanda: Chinese New Year is a holiday, I think it’s 12 days, where Chinese people celebrate the Lunar New Year. It’s in February every year, because the Chinese follow a different calendar than the Gregorian one, and I’m speaking from experience as a Chinese in Singapore, because Chinese people in China and in other places celebrate it very differently. We have a Chinatown that’s usually decorated in red lanterns, with these large banners we call couplets because they always come in a pair and they have some kind of prosperous saying on it that we read from right to left and it’s usually 8 words broken up into 2 phrases wishing people good fortune, luck, things like that. But because Singapore is predominantly Chinese, Chinese New Year almost always ends up being a national celebration, and we get a number of days off school and work.

Ankita: What does your family usually do to celebrate?

Amanda: Usually what my family does is visit friends and extended family, so on the first day my grandma always invites her family over, so that would be my grand-aunts and uncles, my parents’ cousins, things like that, and this is all on the paternal side of my family. She would cook a nice, big lunch for everyone with some traditional things like sharks’ fin soup, which I object to but my grandfather buys sharks’ fin every year anyway, or sometimes she substitutes it for fish maw, and also fried chicken wings which everyone likes, some broccoli mushroom with gravy type thing, and bamboo shoots because my dad likes those. And in the mornings, she’ll always cook these, they’re not noodles but they’re weird shapes made of flour, I can’t really describe them because she molds them by hand, but yeah so she’ll cook those in a thick white soup with a lot of cabbage and carrots, and it’s delicious. Then after that we go over to my aunt’s house on the maternal side of family, and then the next couple of days, usually it’s over the weekend, we go to my parents’ friends’ houses. Oh, also the biggest thing about Chinese New Year, and I think the most recognizable and widely celebrated thing is angpao, or hongbao (红包), which literally translated means red packet. Basically, the elders, typically those who are married and those who are working, give the younger ones, those in school, children, etc, red packets with money inside, and the money is always an even number. And in return, the young ones give the elders a pair of oranges, which is supposed to symbolize some kind of fortune, I think because of the Chinese name of oranges and how it sounds like gold – a lot of things that are considered prosperous by the Chinese is because they sound like prosperous things in the language, since there are so many words in the language that sound exactly like each other but are just written differently. I would still be considered a young person, so I do still get angpao every year and my parents keep it for me, just because I’m not out of college yet. I think it’s quite a formal thing too because my parents and grandparents will give me angpaos, and the people who are closest to you tend to give you more money, like I get $100 from each of them every year, which adds up to a lot of money. But I’ve seen my parents budget for angpaos before and it seems like a really stressful thing… like, people can give $100 or even hundreds of dollars…

Ankita: Are there like, typical decorations and stuff involved?

Amanda: When we were younger, the house would always be decorated for Chinese New Year, we’d have a lot more sweets out, I know friends who’ve gone to Chinatown to buy flowers and lanterns and things like that. And we used to also follow the pre-Chinese New Year rituals a lot more like spring cleaning, which was supposed to help usher in good fortune by purging all the things we don’t want. So it’d be a big family thing where we cleaned the house together and donated all the things we wanted to give away, and we’d always go shopping for new clothes, kind of keeping in line with the ushering in the new sort of mentality. During Chinese New Year, we’d always wear new clothes to these sorts of house parties, and we even used to buy new jewelry, like my grandma would give us these gold fish necklaces and my parents got us gold bracelets with our names engraved on them. But I think it was after the first recession in 2009 or something like that where my parents’ income decreased, because it was around that time that both my parents changed jobs that had substantially lower incomes, we started saving a lot more money, and that cut back our spending on Chinese New Year substantially. We’ve since kind of bounced back financially, but Chinese New Year has never been celebrated the same way, and I don’t think it’s just for us, but also it does feel like less and less people are committed to making it to the house parties even, because I don’t see the same people as often. I don’t know if these elaborate sort of social gatherings and rituals are things my generation and I would bother to keep up with, because I feel like it’d be too much of a hassle for me to, and it’s also difficult now because we’re all overseas so it’s not like we can really meet up with each other.

Thoughts: While Amanda’s experiences and memories of celebrating the festival are specific and individual to her, she describes the commonalities in how the general population does things. For example, the exchanging of hongbaos and oranges, and the family visits, seem to be common. I have encountered friends exchanging stories on these family gatherings, which generally happen once or twice a year on such a large scale. Some basic customs, stories, and rituals, therefore, seem to be in the collective consciousness of the community, and everyone knows to do it. It is also interesting to note her description of the slow shift in traditions, and in how many people (in her family at least) do not celebrate the festival as extravagantly anymore, or how she does not show up as often to gatherings. Perhaps because of the fluid nature of folk practices, it is often subject to change, and what is commonly practiced or accepted shifts with social or economic context, as Amanda has described.