Red Envelopes and Lucky Money on Chinese New Year

Nationality: Taiwanese-American
Age: 22
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/5/2019
Primary Language: English
Language: Mandarin Chinese

Main Text

Subject: So…I think the idea is that…the rule that my family uses is, if you’re still in school…you receive. And once you have a job, like a full-time job, then you give. Um. And then so, when we were kids, like, each set of parents would usually give an envelope to each kid. And I think when we were younger it was like…just like, pocket money, like, maybe five bucks, 10 bucks. And like, as we got older, maybe 20, 40.

Um. And then I think for…for all of us I think when we graduated high school it was like, a bigger sum?

Background

The subject is a 22-year-old Taiwanese-American woman in her fourth year at USC. Her parents are immigrants from Taiwan, and celebrating Chinese festivals have been a family tradition since childhood.

The interviewer is a 21-year-old Taiwanese-American student in his third year at USC. As someone who is from the same folk group, he is familiar with most major Chinese festivals.

Context

The subject was describing a ritual associated with the festival of Chinese New Year, called red envelopes (紅包), which contained lucky money (壓歲錢).

The subject additionally describes two contexts where lucky money was given. The first is a situation involving a family friend named Annie, who had been working this year and stated she wouldn’t be accepting any red envelopes. However, the subject’s parents still brought Annie a red envelope, causing “a little bit of conflict.” Annie ended up taking the envelope anyway. The subject reflects on the absurdity of the incident, thinking about her own future as a grad school student. She wonders if, by that point, the decision rule would still continue to make sense, given that she will probably be in school until the age of 30.

After the interviewer mentioned that there were lawsuits going around for children suing parents who had taken their lucky money, the subject laughed, and brought up an instance when her dad took her lucky money. During the sophomore summer year of high school, her family went to visit Taiwan for the first time in a couple of years. Her grandma on her dad’s side had given her a really big sum, supposedly for college. When her grandma gave the money to her, her dad told her that she had to turn over the sum of money to him, and afterwards, she “never saw a dime” of it.

Interviewer Analysis

These two contexts illuminate the purpose of red envelopes with relation to Chinese New Year. Chinese New Year is one of many festivals that celebrate the passage of time. In the instance of Annie, the red envelope serves as a rite of passage. One demonstrates that they have grown up, by demonstrating they have earned enough money to handle the financial obligation of giving red envelopes to the children who haven’t. The conflict for Annie arose because even though Annie had believed she had earned the right to play the grown-up role in the red envelope ritual, the subject’s parents disagreed, and still put her in the position of being a child receiver. The fact that Annie still ended up taking the red envelope shows her lower status with regards to the more established adults in the ritual.

The second instance in Taiwan further shows the purpose of red envelopes as a coming-of-age ritual. Parents, like the subject’s father who took her red envelope money for college, have reasonable anxiety over whether children have the financial responsibility to handle large sums of money. They feel that as adults, they have the duty to safeguard that money. Safeguarding the money is not only a financial practicality—it is a social signal. It demonstrates to other adults that the parents are fulfilling their social duties as financially responsible adults, and it also teaches children about their cultural status: adults are higher than children, and the way to attain that height, is through practicing financial responsibility.

Purge the Legendary Pokemon

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/21/2019
Primary Language: English

1:

The Pokemon video game franchise has a long history of fan-circulated legends and hoaxes. One such hoax was created during the 4th Generation of Pokemon games, utilizing Pokemon Diamond for Nintendo DS. A false pokemon named Purge, whose graphics did not resemble anything close to any other Pokemon found in the game, was featured in a number of videos on Youtube. These videos purported the existence of Purge as well as building on the lore of how to obtain it.

2:

The Informant was an avid Pokemon player in primary school, as was her twin brother. The two would watch a large number of videos on Youtube about secret/fake Pokemon and try to use their instructions in order to unlock the secret Pokemon for their selves. The Informant said that she and her brother also talked to other children on the playground about these hoaxes (as though they were not hoaxes). One such way that they discussed how to obtain Purge was to “evolve a Bidoof in a specific way on some particular route, and you have to be holding a specific item”. She identified Purge as being the Fake Pokemon that she was the most invested in.

3:

This tradition in particular is founded in Internet Culture because of the nature of sharing screen recordings of the supposed gameplay. Doctored screenshots and gameplay footage being shared across epistemic groups have the ability to spread like wildfire, and the members of those groups are supposedly people who deeply enjoy the popularity they receive from the group that they belong to (in this case, the fanbase of the Pokemon video game franchise). When the informant was voraciously consuming this sort of content, she was still in primary school and had enough free time to spend hours on investigating digital legends.

紅衣小女孩 | Red-Shirted Girl in the Mountain

Nationality: Taiwanese
Age: 26
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/23/2019
Primary Language: Chinese
Language: English

1:

When people travel through the mountains (台中風動石, a mountain whose name the Informant tells me loosely translates to “Wind Moving Rock”), they will sometimes see a little girl dressed in red. If she begins to follow you, “bad things happen”. The Informant goes on to suggest “maybe the girl will possess you”, and explains that “you have to say other people’s names or you will be possessed until you die”.

2:

The little girl is believed to be a “Mountain Spirit” which has transferred their self into a little girl, wearing red. One family, between 1999 and 2000, went up to this mountain and recorded videos of their family walking through the trail in a line. When they reviewed the footage, they saw that there was a girl in the line of family members who was not a part of their family. She stands out because of the red she is wearing. One of the family members ended up dying afterwards, and the video was given to a TV Station in order to broadcast it. The Informant stated that “some people say that it’s maybe because the resolution of the video is too low” and implied that the presence of the girl was just a visual aberration due to the VHS-era technology it had been recorded on.

The story was made into a movie in 2015 called “The Tag-Along”.

3:

The elements of Nature Spirits being mixed with technology (VHS cameras, potentially capturing the existence of such a spirit) is interesting in that it creates a mystical story related to the cultural heritage and geographic identity of Taiwan that can still be recorded and distributed via the then-40-year-old infrastructure of television stations.

Religious Proverb

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/9/2019
Primary Language: English

1:

“A person without religion is like a dog without a bone.”

2:

The informant was told this proverb by his great-grandmother, who also believed that dogs did not go to Heaven because they did not have souls.

3:

This seems to be a highly-religious proverb in that it extolls the human need for religion. Dogs are known to deeply enjoy bones, and be far happier when chewing on one. As such, this proverb is implying that people are happier when they have religion than when they do not have religion.

Gravity Hill Near Echo Mountain

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/21/2019
Primary Language: English

1:

A “Gravity Hill” is a popular occurrence across California: a hill with a downward slope that, due to its surroundings, appears to be an upward slope. Because of this, cars are able to slowly roll down the hill and appear as though they are being pulled uphill. It has been said that at one such hill near Echo Mountain, if you cover the back of your car in powder and leave it for some amount of time and come back, you will find small childrens’ handprints left behind in the powder on your car.

2:

The informant began by talking about Echo Mountain and the lore surrounding it, of which much is distressing and and some is true. The Jet Propulsion Lab nearby had, she insisted she had confirmed, employed “some bigwig” who was also the leader of a satanic cult. Anything that follows, she acted as though was pure speculation.

In some of the camping trails in Altadena, the satanic cult which the bigwig led would meet and perform animal sacrifices. Somewhere nearby there was a mansion at the base of one of the Altadena Camping Trails which was supposedly the hose to local KKK meetings. It is near this mansion, “on the same street”, that the gravity hill is.

3:

A gravity hill on its own doesn’t require much explanation, as it is simply an optical illusion. The added element of “invisible children are pushing your car” is what interested me the most about this urban legend. I think the intention is to imply that the children are ghosts, which would line up with the number of uncomfortable stories floating around about the area in which the gravity hill can be found. This would be very easy to disprove, so I think it probably exists more as a joke which stemmed from the reputation of the area.