Category Archives: Rituals, festivals, holidays

Handgame: Miss Suzy

Nationality: European American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Chicago
Performance Date: 03/27/2016
Primary Language: English
Language: French

Main Piece: (sung) “Miss Suzy had a baby/ she named him Tiny Tim/ she put him in the bathtub/ to see if he could swim/ he drank up all the water/ he ate up all the soap/ he tried to eat the bathtub/ but it wouldn’t go down his throat (giggles)/ miss Suzy called the doctor/ miss Suzy called the nurse/ miss Suzy called the lady/ with the alligator purse….uhhhh…..oh yeah ok….measles said the doctor/ mumps said the nurse… haha that’s terrible… pizza said the lady/ with the alligator purse.”

Background: The informant initially learned this handgame on the playground in elementary school from her friends. The piece would be performed on the playground during recess or occasionally in the hallway. The informant finds the piece entertaining and humorous. She remembers learning the song and finding it all so random, making little sense. This piece is sung while playing a handgame, a repetitive motion between partners clapping their hands together. The informant says this is usually performed between two young girls. She says it was a popular song among the group of girls she atteneded elementary school with. The game would become more advanced as it would speed up and test who could keep up.

Performance Context: I sat across the informant in my living room as she told me the piece.

My Thoughts: This handgame seems to be utilized as a way of defining in-group versus out-group members (i.e. as the game advances, less and less participants are included). The rhyme itself, as the informant contends, does not completely make sense. Its lyrics are a bit morbid, but is sung in a child-like tune, and is best known in the context of an elementary school playground. The informant alludes to the ways in which childhood folklore can be somewhat explicit, exploring themes of adulthood (i.e. morbidity, illness, death). Although the lyrics of the handgame are somehwat grave, the informant was an innocent receiver and teller and enjoyed participating in the folklore.

Soul Pole

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/22/16
Primary Language: English

Piece:

It was this wooden stick–kind of like a paddle, kind of like a stick–whenever someone was out of line the prefect (a senior who had authority) would threaten to get the “Soul Pole” and beat them with it. This is no longer a tradition.

Informant & Context:

My informant for this piece is a student at the University of Southern California who graduated from the boarding school (Cate) from which this folk object originates. His knowledge of this phrase dates back between 3 and 11 years ago, though it is reasonable that it has existed for longer. He said that the use of the folk object had been discontinued after it was discovered by the schools faculty.

The object references social periods in which a room was occupied by seniors and underclassmen, in which the seniors had direct authority over their younger peers.

 Thoughts:

This is a folk tradition in which older students beat up younger students for disobedience. This was a sacred object used to conduct an act of hazing that could only occur at the school given the confinement into the school’s campus of the students and lack of adult supervision. The result of these circumstances was apparently the rise of a new hierarchy with a strict judicial system in the fashion of Lord of the Flies.

Freshman-Senior Brawl

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angelas
Performance Date: 4/22/16
Primary Language: English

Piece:

Freshman-Senior brawl: at the end of each year, the senior boys and freshman boys gather in the schools old gym (this tradition is unknown by the school’s faculty) to have an unofficial freshman-senior brawl to celebrate the moving up of freshman to sophomores and the graduation of seniors moving on from the school. “I do this to you so you can do this to freshman some day.” The idea is that freshmen are hated for being new, young, and naïve and this is the last chance for them to be bullied before they are no longer freshmen. The seniors sort of intentionally go easy on the freshman because they’re 18, whereas the freshmen are 14.

Information & Context:

My informant for this piece is a student at the University of Southern California who graduated from the boarding school (Cate) from which this tradition originates. His knowledge of the tradition dates back between 3 and 11 years ago, though it is reasonable that it has existed for longer.

Thoughts:

It is curious to me that a ceremony of physical violence can be viewed as a positive thing. My informant explained to me that it was seen as a right of passage—after which, both parties move up in the world. I would point out that both parties would move up, regardless of the ceremony, but it is important to note that this is how the community reacts to such a passage. It becomes a “you get bullied now so you get the right to bully later” type of scenario.

Urban Legends and Trading Card Games

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Orange County, California
Performance Date: April 22nd 2016
Primary Language: English

Context

Trading card games are often too associated with child’s play to be taken seriously; by many it is considered to be entirely driven by luck and inherently unfair. Despite this widespread opinion, trading card games – such as Magic: The Gathering have found a competitive audience where skillful players attempt to best others through a combination of strategy and deck building.

In Magic, the most important game mechanic and key consideration in building decks is the resource: Mana. It comes in five different colors that explore different themes: Green for example focuses on playing stronger creatures and generating extra mana to play them earlier, while blue focuses on negating the opponent’s plays and drawing extra cards. The vast majority of mana is accessed through land cards of usually one or two colors that can be played to generate 1 mana of a color per turn (although exceptions exist). This causes situations where one only draws creatures (mana-screwed: unable to cast anything due to lack of mana) or only draws lands (land-screwed: unable to play creatures as the hand is full of lands), causing losses often attributed to statistical variance.

Informant Information

The informant is an avid player of Magic. I first met him in a card shop in Yatap, South Korea, and we kept in touch ever since. One time while he was playing a draft game – a game mode where decks are built from cards chosen from packs opened on the day of the event – he told me an urban legend supposedly pertaining to the very location we were playing in:

Collector: “What did you end up drafting?”

Informant: “I drafted a 4 color control deck.”

Collector: “That sounds like too many colors and card requirements to consistently play anything, that sounds so bad…”

Informant: “Yeah but if you draft your cards at this shop you get all the cards you need for the deck to run well.”

While he did end up losing most of the games, they were close losses, largely because my friend was able to get the right balance of cards to make reasonable plays each turn. Intrigued, I asked around the shop if the urban legend was true, and soon realized that most players in the shop not only knew about it but also agreed – somewhat sarcastically or otherwise.

Analysis

As the context of the location changes, not only including the exchange of goods, but also social gathering, a folk group forms and produces folklore. This urban legend is particularly significant because in a competitive setting, non-skillful (i.e. luck-driven) elements are undesirable; this makes the discussion of luck in an outcome of a game very contentious: A taboo topic. By giving members of the folk group ways to joke about the taboo (such as sarcastically agreeing to the urban legend, as seen above), the taboo topic becomes less serious, and therefore less frustrating to the losers. Another factor to consider is the urban legend becoming a subject of superstition; by believing and hoping that he/she will receive good luck, the passion for the game and the folk group of card game players can remain intact. This in particular shows that a work of folklore can be contextualized to fit into multiple genres.

Celebration of the First Birthday in Korea

Nationality: South Korean
Age: 42
Occupation: Engineer
Residence: Seoul, South Korea
Performance Date: March 16th 2016
Primary Language: Korean
Language: English

Context

The celebration of a baby’s first birthday in particular is widely practiced across the world, as infant and child mortality rates were much higher in previous eras. In the eastern Asian regions, this traditional celebration includes a ceremony where the objects are placed in front of the baby and good things are said about the baby’s future based on the grabbed object. In my native South Korea, the objects typically associated with the occasion are books, writing tools and money. Other objects – even microphones and calculators – can also be used in the celebration, though that depends on how traditional the practitioner wants the celebration to be.

Informant Information

The informant is my uncle, who recently celebrated the first birthday of his twin sons. He first learned of the tradition in childhood, then through from his mother and grandmother. As a celebration for his sons, the performance of this tradition was of a personal importance to him. I was unable to attend the celebration in person, but I was able to ask the informant about it during spring break.

According to the informant, he placed a pencil, a book, money and a ball of strings – traditionally included symbols/items – on the table, but he also placed modern picks: a computer mouse and a basketball. The traditional symbols refer to a future in education, academics, riches and healthy life, respectively. The informant said that his contemporary additions represented “technological savvy” and “athleticism”. In the end, both his children picked up the pencil and the informant wishfully said that he was “happy he shouldn’t have to worry about their [the twins’] grades”.

Analysis

It can be observed that the practice of traditional celebrations sees variation based on the practitioner, as do works of folklore in general. Though it is entirely up to choice to follow tradition or not, the informant’s use of contemporary objects to update the objects to be grabbed by the baby show that celebrations can be altered to be contemporary yet not taking away from the traditional meaning of celebration.

To see the traditional Chinese version of this tradition, see “To Catch the First Year” in the Folklore Archives
(http://uscfolklorearc.wpenginepowered.com/?p=30617)