Finish Your Food, Children Are Starving

Text: My father, JW, was told by his parents in Ohio in the 1970s, whenever he refused to finish his dinner: “Finish your food, there are children starving in China.”

My mother, IW, who grew up in suburb of Beijing in the same decade, was told something similar: “把饭吃完，美国还有小孩没饭吃” (bǎ fàn chī wán, Měiguó hái yǒu xiǎohái méi fàn chī), literally: “finish your food, in America there are still children with no food to eat.”

Both invocations were performed at the dinner table. Both intended to produce guilt in a child sufficient to clear the plate. 

Context: In Ohio, JW’s parents and grandparents drew on a long American tradition of using China as the reference point for starving children. In Beijing, IW’s parents drew on Cultural Revolution rhetoric, in which capitalist America was officially characterized as a place of mass inequality and hunger. My parents realized this surprising symmetry in their respective childhoods after they had married. 

Analysis: The mealtime “starving children” phrase is a textbook example of folk speech functioning as parental disciplinary technique. What is notable here is the mirror: in the same decade, parents in Ohio and parents in a Beijing suburb were deploying the identical rhetorical structure with the other country supplying the sympathetic reference point. In the United States, China is the pitiable other nation filled with hungry children, in China, it’s America. The form is highly stable across speakers, the only thing that varies is which country gets named, which is itself dictated by where you are sitting at dinner. It’s very interesting to me this convergent evolution from two sides of the world of deploying guilt and sympathy against stubborn children. 

Exploding Sodium

Text: During his Peace Corps years teaching chemistry in Fiji, JW would take his students down to the bay every now and then with a chunk of sodium. His school lab had real sodium, kept in oil. He would fish out a small piece and throw it as far as possible into the water. It would skim across the surface and then catch fire and sometimes explode. The students loved it. He had seen it done by another teacher before trying it himself.

Context: JW is my father. He served in the U.S. Peace Corps in Fiji for two years following his undergraduate studies, teaching high school chemistry at a local school. The demonstration is not part of any sanctioned curriculum, but rather an informal reward to a well-behaved class. It is generally considered dangerous, and therefore impossible in a well supervised urban school setting. JW has not seen the practice done outside of his peace corps years in Fiji. He has retold this story to me on several occasions.

Analysis: This is a good example of occupational lore. The sodium demonstration is a chemistry teacher’s vernacular practice: it is not taught in the credentialing program, and the manuals tell you not to do it; you learn it from your own teacher and transmit it to your students. Its status as both pedagogically vivid and institutionally suspect is what gives it folkloric stability: every chemistry teacher who has ever done it remembers their own teacher’s version, and JW’s repeated retelling of the story, with the same opening and the same skimming and the same explosion, is itself an iteration of the form that keeps the practice circulating. The Peace Corps placement adds a second layer. An American chemistry-teacher folkway moved with JW to Fiji and entered a different pedagogical ecology, where his students may now be carrying it forward as their own, possibly without ever knowing whose Ohio classroom it had been picked up from in the first place.

Sleep Paralysis and The Hat Man

Text: The Hat Man is a recurring figure in LS’s sleep paralysis episodes. He is tall, faceless, dressed in a trenchcoat, and wears a wide-brimmed hat, like a big fedora. He stands in the corner of the room, watching, while the sleeper is awake but unable to move. He does not speak or approach. After a few minutes he is gone. 

Context: Told to me by my friend LS, who experiences recurrent sleep paralysis. LS had encountered testimonies of the Hat Man online both before and after her first sleep paralysis episode featuring him, notably on Reddit’s r/sleepparalysis and YouTube. He has appeared in several of LS’s subsequent episodes, almost always the same way. 

Analysis: Sleep paralysis itself is well-documented neurology: during REM the body is paralyzed to keep us from acting out dreams, and on waking the paralysis sometimes outlasts consciousness, producing hallucinations of intruders, pressure on the chest, and shadowy figures. What is folkloric is the figure. Different cultures have produced their own intruder for the same neurological event: the Old Hag in Newfoundland, the Pisadeira in Brazil, Kanashibari in Japan, the night-mare of medieval Europe. The Hat Man is the contemporary English-language version, relatively common on internet forums and YouTube in the 2000s. It’s interesting how in lockstep different accounts of the Hat Man align with each other, and I wonder if it is a natural phenomenon that causes this similarity of accounts or if it is the sharing of the accounts that causes the Hat Man to appear in such a consistent form. 

“Just a Little Something I Learned in the War”

Text: My good friend KH, who has never been in any war, has installed the line “Just a little something I learned in the war” as a personal signature, dropped after she performs an act of trivial competence. Two recent examples: following up a successful U-turn in her car, “Just a little something I learned in the war.” Another, she twisted off a stuck cap from a soda bottle with some difficulty and said, “Just a little something I learned in the war.” She uses the line straight-faced, without further commentary, which usually makes it even funnier.

Context: KH does not appear to have inherited the phrase from a parent or grandparent; she has identified social media (primarily TikTok) as the point of contact, where the formula has circulated as a stock comic move. 

Analysis: The catchphrase is a piece of folk speech that works through deliberate, comedic over-attribution: KH credits a tiny bit of everyday competence to a vast, unverifiable, fictitious, catastrophic past. The joke depends on both speaker and audience knowing there was obviously no war. The gap between the trigger (a U-turn, a bottle cap) and the dramatic framing is the entire setup. It’s like wider American comic phrases such as “Vietnam flashbacks,” “Back in ‘Nam,” “in the trenches,” and “old Army trick.” All these dresses something small in the language of something terrible and huge, for comedic effect. 

Asking Mom If It’s a Good Day for a Haircut

Text: My friend AH, who has on multiple occasions described himself as “not religious” and does not actively observe Hindu practice, casually mentioned that he needed a haircut and added that he had to text his mom first to find out whether the day was a good day to get one. When I pressed him on what made a day good or bad for haircuts, he was vague and unsure: something his mom kept track of, something about certain days being unlucky. He did not subscribe to the system or the belief but thought it worth it to ask. 

Context: AH’s family is Tamil (South India), and he has been raised in California. He identifies as essentially secular but retains a small handful of inherited practices that he observes operationally even if he doesn’t subscribe to the backing religion. Checking on haircut days is one of them. His mother keeps the schedule, and he checks by texting her. 

Analysis: I became curious of the schedule AH is alluding to, I pulled most of the following from online resources. The Tamil Hindu framework rests on the panchangam, the almanac that maps each weekday to a planetary deity. Tuesday (Sevvāy/Mars) and Saturday (Sani/Saturn) are the days most strictly avoided: Tuesday because Mars is held to govern blood and vitality, and Saturday because of an old rule that a Saturn-day haircut shortens one’s life by seven months. The folkloric move here is AH’s deferral to his mother: a Hindu astrological ritual surviving in California as a text message to mom, with the operational practice shifted from the individual consulting an almanac or priest to a son texting his mom, who functions as a keeper of the schedule. This is a common pattern in diaspora households: the ritual knowledge stays with the older generation of the family, but those born into the new setting struggle to internalize the framework as well. In AH’s case he explains that he is not doing it necessarily because he believes in it, but more out of respect for his mother and her beliefs.