Chinese New Year

Nationality: Chinese-American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Oakland, CA
Performance Date: April 22, 2018
Primary Language: English
Language: Cantonese and Mandarin

Main Piece:

The following is transcribed from a conversation between the performer (HH) and I (ZM).

ZM: What do you do for Chinese New Year?

HH: Umm… In terms of when I’m here in college or when I’m back home?

ZM: When you’re at home.

HH: When I’m home um my parents would clean the house, like um frantically because we need to be clean for the new year and we also can’t wash our hair on the first day of New Year’s too because if you wash your hair, you’re washing your luck. Yeah. Very interesting. Um, it’s nothing really special, it’s just being with your family, um… The whole day you um… Do you know what Yum ta is?

ZM: No.

HH: Like going out for morning tea, like with dim sum…

ZM: I’ve never heard of that. I don’t, I don’t know.

HH: Okay um so uh we do yum ta, which is like going to um a local, um a nearby restaurant around our house and inviting all of our relatives and…

ZM: Is that New Year’s day?

HH: New Year’s day yeah. Um, and all of our relatives will come and we exchange um red envelopes with money inside and um its umm… If you’re married you give, you give a red envelope to the kids so…As long as I’m not married I can still receive them.

ZM: But you don’t give any?

HH: I don’t give any until I’m married. Yeah it’s a perk. (laughs) Uhhh yeah and then um on the day, or like… Chinese New Year goes for like a few days like up to fifteen days. It depends on how long you want to celebrate it. Umm, like the first few days um either relatives and friends come to your house or you can go to their house and you bring gifts like oranges or like crackers or whatever to uh to bring to their house and you get to exchange gifts, and you guys talk and drink tea and all of that.

ZM: Do the oranges have any significance? Like why oranges or…?

HH: Umm… I feel like they do, but I don’t know (laughs) Uh that’s pretty much what we do. And um we eat chicken. It’s for a reason, but I don’t know why also. But, chicken is like a good kind of meat like… Um you always want um, like for dinner you always, for like the first few days, my brother’s in-laws and us we all eat together as a big family. Like a sign of um, a union. Um, so we have like up to ten dishes for like not even ten people. Like, um it’s very lavish dinner with like chicken, umm duck, fish, all kind of veggies, noodles, noodles really important as a sign of longetivity in life. So, yeah.

 

Context: This is from a conversation I started with HH about her Chinese culture.

Background: HH was born in China and raised in Oakland, CA. Both of her parents are Chinese, and they speak limited English. She is a sophomore studying at the University of Southern California.

 

Analysis: I thought it was interesting that you only begin giving red envelopes when you are married. Even if you are an adult and you are not married, you do not have to give the envelopes, you only receive them. But, if they’re married and they don’t have kids to give envelopes to they exchange red envelopes between husband and wife. While marriage and adulthood would’ve previously been equivalent, in today’s society they can be very separate, and this changes the tradition a little bit.

 

Goulash

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Sacramento, CA
Performance Date: April 23, 2018
Primary Language: English

Main Piece:

The following is transcribed from a conversation between the performer (EC) and I (ZM).

EC: Stuff that we would do is we would eat goulash on holidays. Which is like a German stew.

ZM: What’s in it?

EC: Umm… It’s just basically a stew I guess. Like vegetables and some form of meat. I feel like…it was probably just like beef or something normal like that, but like it has a German name so…

ZM: Who makes the goulash?

EC: My aunt does. So… yeah.

ZM: She’s the one that was in the military?

EC: Umm my uncle by marriage was in the military and then she is my like blood aunt. My dad’s sister.

 

Context: This is from a conversation I started with EC about her German traditions.

 

Background: EC is a sophomore studying at the University of Southern California. She is of German descent. She was born and raised in Sacramento. Most of her German traditions were not passed down, rather influenced by aunt’s family who lived on a military base in Germany.

 

Analysis:I thought it was interesting that even though EC is “significantly German heritage-wise,” the only German traditions practiced by her family are not due to their lineage rather a modern-day influence.

 

 

 

Hella, Grody, Jank

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Sacramento, CA
Performance Date: April 23, 2018
Primary Language: English

Main Piece:

The following is transcribed from a conversation between the performer (EC) and I (ZM).

ZM: Is there any like, NorCal slang?

EC: Ooo slang. Like, “grody,” and umm “hella.” I know a lot of these have like spread because of the Internet, but they’re like OG NorCal I would say. Yeah, “grody” and “hella” or like… “jank” or “janky.” That’s one. Those are my best three I would say.

ZM: Okay. And how would you use…all three?

EC: Umm. Okay “hella” is like basically what it sounds like. And it started in Davis. Which is like fifteen minutes from my house. Umm…and… they’re really obsessed with it. They tried to get a like formal unit of measurement. Like a prefix as like the hella. So it was like ten to the like 36 or something. So it would be like, “I have a hellagram of” like something. But, like that didn’t pan out I don’t think. Um, “grody” is like gross I suppose. Um… just kind of like… nasty. “Janky” is like… not necessarily like suspicious, but like… something like about…like if you had like a really old car that like looked like it was about to fall apart, like that would be a janky ass car. (laughs)

 

Context: This is from a conversation I started with EC originally about her German traditions.

 

Background: EC is a sophomore studying at the University of Southern California. She is of German descent. She was born and raised in Sacramento.

 

Analysis: I am from Florida and I had heard of all of these slang terms before coming to California. I did not know that they supposedly came from NorCal nor that there was an attempt to create an official unit of the “hella.” EC seems to firmly believe that these words all originated in Northern California. It’s plausible, but also very difficult to tell.

 

 

Aerosols, C4, and High-Powered Rifles

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Sacramento, CA
Performance Date: April 23, 2018
Primary Language: English

Main Piece:

The following is transcribed from a conversation between the performer (EC) and I (ZM).

ZM: Do you do anything, like special, around Christmas? Other than like the goulash?

EC: Not really. We have a lot of like very family specific traditions, um, because my grandparents owned like a huge ranch in Napa and had like a winery and everything. And so like, that has been like in the family for generations and so like a lot of our holiday tradition’s centered around like going up to the house and like being rednecks in general.

ZM: What do you do?

EC: Um like, on Easter, we would like blow things up. So like, for Easter I might get some aerosol paint cans and then some like C4 explosive and put them together and then shoot it with a high powered rifle just to see how big of a fireball I can make.

ZM: (laughs) And that’s just… because they live on a ranch?

EC: That’s just our family. Yeah.

ZM: Do you go every year and like blow stuff up? Is that like a…

EC: Yeah. It actually burned down, so like not in the last year with this recent fires, but yeah um before that we would go for like every holiday, like Fourth of July, Easter, Christmas, Thanksgiving, other random stuff.

ZM: And do you blow stuff up every holiday?

EC: Basically. Every holiday involves shooting guns in our family.

 

Context: This is from a conversation I started with EC originally about her German traditions.

 

Background: EC is a sophomore studying at the University of Southern California. She is of German descent.

 

Analysis: I thought it was ironic that EC and her family always try to create the biggest fireballs that they can on the ranch and it ended up burning down, but the two events were completely unrelated. The actual act seemed unrelated to the variety of holidays it is performed on. The explosions seem more like something they do when they’re together and they just happen to be together on those holidays.

 

Halcyon House Underground Railroad

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Washington D.C
Performance Date: 10 April 2019
Primary Language: English

Transcription: “In the 1950s, a family owned the house. A bunch of rats and critters were crawling up from the basement so they hired a carpenter to close up the space. When he was down there, he heard wailing, but he decided to ignore it. When he was putting the last brick in, he heard a blood curdling scream and felt a strong gust of wind. They say that the explanation is that the house was a stop in the Underground Railroad. The house is next to the Potomac, which is right across from Virginia. They say that the wailing and moaning come from the spirits of slaves who were upset that their last glimpse of freedom was being sealed up.”

The same informant who works for a Washington D.C. tour company told me another more recent story involving the Halcyon House. Despite its origins in the 1950s, the story relates back to a renowned moment in American history, the Underground Railroad.  

My informant began the story in the 1950s by describing the rodent infestation in the Halcyon House. A seemingly typical household repair was converted into a ghost story when a carpenter was hired to seal off the basement from the rest of the house. When the carpenter was laying the final brick that would seal of the basement, he felt a strong gust of wind and heard a scream. With no logical earthy explanation, those involved turned to history.

The Halcyon House is rumored to have been a stop on the Underground Railroad. Due to its location near the Potomac River and proximity to Virginia, the Halcyon House could have been the final stop for runaway slaves on their way to freedom. Slaves who did not make it to freedom across the Potomac would have been trapped in the Halcyon House. Some reason that the scream from the basement came from the spirits of slaves who were upset that their path to freedom was being permanently sealed off.

My impression of this story is that it signifies a reanimation of history. In other words, American history is made new through this ghost stories of the Underground Railroad. The story acts as a reminder of a period in American history that should not be forgotten. To dramatize its memory, the Underground Railroad was translated into a ghost story.