Bad luck inside the house

Nationality: Ukrainian
Age: 52
Occupation: Journalist
Residence: California
Performance Date: 5/5/20
Primary Language: Russian
Language: German, English

Context: My informant is a Ukrainian immigrant who grew up in the Soviet Union, lived in East Germany, and currently resides in California. This piece of folklore comes from personal experience. She will be referred to as “L”.

Main piece: Whistling inside the house is extremely bad luck. We will lose money. Also if birds get into the house, that is an omen that someone will soon die.

Background: My informant grew up extremely superstitious. She is also an immigrant, and finds that continuing these superstitions is a way of preserving culture in her new home.

Notes: I think this fear comes from this idea of bad things invading the sanctity of the home. It’s no secret that birds can carry disease, I’m sure there are some connections to birds and death (ravens as a symbol of death?). Whistling could perhaps be a sign that one isn’t paying attention to their wealth, meaning it could be stolen away.

Curbs and Fertility

Nationality: Ukraine
Age: 52
Occupation: Journalist
Residence: Santa Monica
Performance Date: 5/5/20
Primary Language: Russian
Language: German, English

Context: My informant is a Ukrainian immigrant who grew up in the Soviet Union, lived in East Germany, and currently resides in California. Her folklore is an old wives’ tale.

Main piece: Young women should never sit on a cold sidewalk or curb. If they do, they will be infertile and never have babies! The coldness of the curb “freezes” your eggs and you won’t be able to have babies!

Background: My informant was told this from older women in her community. She grew up in a military village and then in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. She also frequently visited relatives who lived on farms deep in the countryside.

Notes: I would personally be interested to see when this old wives’ tale came about. It is possible that this originated from rural people who created myths about urbanized communities to scare young people into leaving the countryside. This tale feels like it also has its roots in trying to get young women to act more “ladylike”, therefore discouraging them from sitting on curbsides. Fear of infertility seems like an effective method to get young women to fall in line, so to speak.

Bottle Flipping – Find out if girls like you

Nationality: United States
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: El cerrito, CA
Performance Date: 4/29/20
Primary Language: English

Main text:

BR: At my old high school, we’d do this thing called bottle flipping…

MW: Oh yeah! We did that too. Was that just like a NorCal thing or…?

BR: I mean I don’t know, but we’d do it and kids would be flipping these dumb bottles everywhere and the goal was to flick a plastic bottle upwards and have it land on its bottom again. And they boys would be like, oh, if I flip it and it lands right it means she likes me…

MW: Oh, that’s interesting. I’ve never heard that version before…in my school we just did it to do it, you know? There’d be bottles, like, stuck in weird places because of it…

BR: haha. Yeah, all the band kids did it. It’s actually kinda funny because it’s actually kinda hard to get the bottle to land right, so it means, or like was implying, that girls weren’t liking guys back. Especially the band kids.

Background:

The informant, BR, was born and raised in the Bay Area, specifically El Cerrito (the East Bay). He remembers this tradition specifically because it was a fun bonding activity, and also a meme at the time. He looks back on this memory fondly. 

Context

This story was brought up in a FaceTime call. I asked the informant what traditions he remembered in high school, to see if we could cross compare since I went to high school not too far from where he did (San mateo).

Thoughts:

Upon further research, I believe that bottle flipping was done across America, maybe even more globally. It was perpetuated by the internet and made into one of the most popular memes of 2016. I think that BR’s school’s addition of having a girl like you back is really funny because it is so reminiscent of other children’s superstitious games. As we talked about in class, a lot of childrens’ superstition (especially girls’) revolves around who you will marry or relationships, etc. I think it’s just so fascinating that something as seemingly dumb as bottle flipping was able to work its way into that same pattern, probably just because it’s something the youth was doing. It’s also interesting to note that this phenomenon applied mostly to boys getting girls to like them back, as usually it’s a “girl’s game” that involves relationship fortune telling, as we talked about in class. 

(For an example of bottle flipping, please see this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp5QMSbf-a0) 

Eating 12 Grapes at Midnight – New Year’s Tradition

Nationality: United States
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Orange County, CA
Performance Date: 4/29/20
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Main piece:

IS: At midnight on new years, we eat 12 grapes. And each grape is like, a month of the year and it represents an aspiration or wish. So the first grape is january, and it’s what you want to happen in january, and then etcetera. And you have to eat the twelve grapes in under a minute. I always really loved this tradition because it always made me really hopeful. And it was a fun thing to do with family, too.

Context:

IS was born in the US, but his parents are from Mexico. This story was collected over a group phone call, talking about family traditions.

Thoughts:

I think this tradition is really interesting because it is one of the few that I have found pertaining to holidays that becomes something of a game. Because there’s a time limit and you have to be able to meet it, I feel like the added challenge makes this even more of a family activity. 

Flipping the Fish – An Asian Seafarer Taboo

Nationality: United States
Age: 48
Occupation: Healer and Meditation Teacher
Residence: Burlingame, CA
Performance Date: 4/30/20
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

The informant, AW, was in a position where he couldn’t call because of WiFi restrictions and of course, in quarantine we couldn’t communicate in real life. However, he had a story he wanted to tell, so he texted me the following:

As a child, we had all kinds of superstitions about things you shouldn’t do because they were bad luck

Our family is Chinese, but specifically Shanghainese, and the family business was shipping, so a lot of the superstitions were around avoiding bad luck in business kind of realms

For instance, if you had a whole steamed fish for dinner, you absolutely had to work through the fish by filleting the meat aside and then removing the bones as is, without flipping over the backbone, let alone the fish overall

This was because if you actually, heaven forbid, flipped the fish over, for shipping/fishing family, it was symbolic of a boat capsizing on the water, which was about the worst kind of catastrophe a culture like that can imagine

Were you would lose the bounty of your harvest, your business venture would not come back to port and attain fruition, and there would be loss of life along the way

And so, we were taught very early on, but you must absolutely never “flip over the fish”, and anyone who actually did that would not be invited to dinner again, and no one who was aware of that superstition, whatever continue reading or otherwise touch a fish on the dinner table that had been unwittingly flipped over by some unfortunate ignorant guest

So as to avoid the bad luck created by the flipped over fish

It’s funny, I realized in later years it’s not even a Chinese thing, since I do remember seeing other Chinese, inland, non-seafaring Chinese flip fish with no problem. So I realized over time it was a seafaring thing, and a subset of Chinese culture not something universally Chinese or even Asian

And the funny thing is, to this day I still continue to observe that tradition and superstition, and if you ask my kids whether it’s okay to “flip a fish” they’d answer unthinkingly, reflexively, “obviously not, why the hell would anyone do that??” 

 And while it may seem funny, to all of us it’s simply obvious, and not even worth a 2nd thought 🙂

Context:

This story is a family tradition. The informant, AW, is my father, and we come from a family of fishermen. We always thought it was a Chinese tradition, but it actually might not be. This story was collected over text, due to technology restrictions.

Thoughts:

Before AW wrote this story down specifically for me, I never realized it wasn’t a Chinese tradition, but rather a seafarer tradition. I think that his decision to include the sarcastic part about “you would lose income by flipping the boat, and loss of life along the way” speaks to a seafaring tradition that is not romanticized/kindly views Chinese seafaring tradition. Rather, it says rather plainly that the wealthy did not care/were exploitative of the fishermen who worked for them. Many people in the west view fishing as a gentle, kind, simple life; whereas in 20th century China in an industrial setting, it was anything but.