The “S”

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: California
Performance Date: 4/9/22
Primary Language: English

Background: My informant is a 20 year old boy who grew up in California.

G: So the concept is to just draw a cool s with the six lines and the connectors so it kind of looks 3D. This one is pretty common, we all learned it in school from our friends at some point. I think I learned it when I was 8. You can just put it anywhere, it’s funny if you put it on a homework assignment or something to kind of mess with a teacher. You see it in graffiti a lot too.

My Thoughts: I learned this when I was about the same age and going to school in Colorado. I’m not sure how long its been around, but I think it’s something that every kid learns how to do and then doodles it all over their school notes. I think I learned it from older kids, so it felt almost like an initiation.

Lạc Long Quân and Âu Cơ in Vietnamese Folklore

Main Piece:

AL: The tale of Lạc Long and Âu Cơ:

Lạc Long Quân was born in 2800 BC. He is the sun of a mountain god… and his mother is uh the sea god. His body is a dragon of some sort even though his parents… Was a sea dragon and his father the son of mountain… [He] was like a human-ish figure. His name, Lạc Long Quân, translates to Dragon Lord of Lạc. Lạc is a place in Vietnam…

Âu Cơ is the daughter of the northern chief… And fairy from the mother… Lạc Long Quân, the dragon, decided to take the form of a handsome man because he has that power, and Âu Cơ is a fairy. And so they married, and um *laughs* interestingly enough, Lạc Long Quân married the daughter but killed the father. I know. It’s weird… You would think that you shouldn’t kill the daughter’s father…

Anyway, so they had sex, and uhm she gave birth to a sack of a hundred eggs, and they grew into a hundred boys… Or children, depending on lore, and reestablished Vietnam. Uhm they say that all ancestors descend form these 100 children… Âu Cơ loved the mountain, so she really liked the north side. Lạc Long Quân loved the water because his mother is a water dragon… And so they decided to split the kids in half, or not in half— *laughs* divide the kids in half, fifty-fifty, and take them to either location… Half of them in the mountain and half of them near the sea… It was agreed by both parents that they would help each other in need. Lạc Long taught his children to fish and tattoo. Âu Cơ taught her children to farm and breed animals.

In Saigon, there are two streets who intersect. One is named Lạc Long, and one is named Âu Cơ, and they intersect because they’re married to each other… It’s very cute… Probably intentional… And then Lạc Long is known as the first king of Vietnam…

Context:

Taken from a conversation with my roommate in the Cale & Irani Apartments at USC Village. Him and I are of Vietnamese descent.

Analysis:

Myths are like adult versions of fairy tales. Historically, they have helped societies try to understand elements of the natural world or the scientific phenomena around them. Here, this myth plays into patriotic ideals in the founding of a nation and a unification between the rivalry of North and South Vietnam. These cross-generational stories are kept alive by the communities performing them. These two figures are so deeply incorporated into Vietnamese culture that there’s many pieces of art dedicated to them. In fact, there is a temple dedicated to the Dragon Lord. Furthermore, the intersecting streets are just further proof of how stories like these unify people through their collective imagination, childhoods, and rich cultural histories and beliefs.

A Glitch in the Matrix – Sourceless Light

Nationality: Korean
Occupation: Dentist
Performance Date: 4/16/22
Primary Language: English
Language: Korean

Context: J is my friend’s father, who works as a dentist. He claims this story happened to him a few years ago when he was in his mid 40s. The topic of living in the Matrix spurred this conversation.

Me: What if we were all living in the Matrix? What if none of this is real and we just respawn when we die?

J: I think you’re actually closer to the truth than you think.

Me: ?? What do you mean? You think we’re living in a matrix?

J: Well, I haven’t experienced anything disappearing or people “glitching”, but I have encountered a light with no source.

Me: Uhhhh what?

J: Ok story time. So I was driving on this highway in the Valley with a friend, right, and it was really late one night. Along the middle were these street lamps that made a pretty noticeable cone of light. Like, they did a good job of lighting up the streets.

Me: Mmhm, I see what you’re saying.

J: Anyways, they were pretty regular, and we didn’t really pay much attention to them. Then we saw a cone of light with no lamp to cast it. Looked EXACTLY like the light from the other street lamps, just being produced by empty air.

Me: That is sooo bizarre. Were you able to investigate it?

J: I wish we had. We easily could have, since there wasn’t anyone else on the road, but we just drove on. We still talk about it sometimes, but we’re still scratching our heads to this day.

Me: Noo I can’t believe you didn’t investigate! The curiosity would’ve killed me. Did you believe in the Matrix before this?

J: No, I didn’t really know that people actually believed in it. I just thought it was a movie. After seeing that, though, I looked into it more and was kind of surprised to find more stories like mine.

Me: Do you actually believe those stories now? That we could actually be living in a matrix?

J: Well, they’re certainly more believable now hahaa. If it wasn’t a “glitch”, I don’t know what it would be. Maybe our eyes were just tired but that was really quite strange.

Me: Wow, thank you so much for this story!

The concept of living in a simulation, or simulation hypothesis, is not new, with roots dating back to the ancient Greeks or Indian philosophers. However, the popularity of movies such as The Matrix and Inception brought the idea into the mainstream. Personally, I do not believe that we live in the Matrix, although stories like these are very intriguing, since they remind us that there are still so many things that we don’t understand about our universe. Though I have read stories about such “glitches” online, with the most popular ones being about surviving a supposedly fatal accident unscathed, this was my first time hearing about a glitch through someone that I know. It was definitely very confusing and left me with many questions about the world and what I have been taught. Although I have not experienced any glitches myself, hearing this story led me to become more open to other ways of interpreting the world.

Why Chinese People Have Short Names

Nationality: Chinese
Occupation: Barber
Performance Date: 4/28/22
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

This is a story that I heard from a barber when discussing folklore origins. S is a middle aged Chinese woman who used to live in China before immigrating to the United States.

S: There was one about a boy with a super long name who fell down a well and almost died because his name was too long. I think his name was “Tiki-tiki-tembo-no-sar-embo-charri-barri-boochi-pip-perry-pembo” or something like that. It was Chinese.. custom to say the full name of a firstborn child. So the boy with the long name had a brother with a short name, and they were playing next to a well by their house. The younger brother fell into the well, so the older brother ran to their mom and said Chang fell into the well! Oh, and Chang was the name of the younger brother.

Me: Oh nooo! Were they able to save him?

S: Yes! They got a ladder to help Chang climb out of the well right away and he was just fine. Then another day, the two brothers were playing next to the well again when this time it was the older brother who fell!

Me: (groans) come on guys, do better. Silly little kids!

S: So this time, Chang runs to his mom and tries to tell her that Tiki-tiki-tembo-no-sar-embo-charri-barri-boochi-pip-perry-pembo fell into the well. But since he ran there, he was so out of breath that he could only say tiki-tiki-tembo… before running out of breath. His mom was so intent on respecting her first-born son’s name that she would not listen until he was able to say (inhales largely) Tiki-tiki-tembo-no-sar-embo-charri-barri-boochi-pip-perry-pembo. Whew! That was hard hahha.

Me: (trying to say it with her) Tiki-tiki-tembo-no-sar-embo-charri-barii-boochi alala blehhh. I couldn’t imagine having a name that long. That must suck!

S: Yeah anyways, they finally got the ladder after Chang was able to pronounce his brother’s name, but he was basically almost drowned by this point. They were able to save him, but it took him a long time to recover. And that’s why Chinese people have short names!

Me: Wow, what a cool tale! I hope that the mom learned her lesson, that could’ve ended really badly.

Buried Alive

This story um… is from our Paine side of the family and it goes back to I believe around 1727, the year 1727. And we had a relative named William Winston and. . . he wasn’t a wealthy man, but he worked hard, but he was relatively poor. And he lived up in Northern Virginia and he met a woman who he fell deeply in love with. She was. . .she became his paramour. She was all he had hoped for in a mate and he decided this is going to be the woman that. . . I. . . I am going to marry, and her name was Sarah Dabney. And, so he started courting her as they did back in that day, and the courting process went on for quite a while. Um. . . long enough for him to save up a lot of the money that he had and he had made from work in order to buy her what was going to be one of the most beautiful rings that anyone in Northern Virginia had ever seen as an engagement ring. And. . .they were going to get married in mid spring, and it had been a terrible winter, and William Winston lived in a small, small house. You know back then it was probably a shack. But, the poor weather continued and it snowed and then the snow to rain and sleet for quite a while but he and Sarah went ahead and got married. I think it was. . . late. . . late April of 1727 if I am correct on the date, and word got out that she had this incredible engagement ring that he had gotten for her that was (you know) a sign of their betrothal. And, the word got out. . . and she fell sick with pneumonia and he thought um she became really really sick and. . . to the point to where the doctors pronounced her dead. And this was like a month. . . this was not long after they had been married. And he was devastated, he was totally traumatized. And he buried her . . . I guess he buried her in a somewhat shallow grave and the word had gotten out that his wife who had this beautiful ring. . . that this–this laborer who had married a woman and given her this just almost priceless wedding ring–that she had died.

And  three–I guess they would have been equivalent to highway men,robbers, grave robbers–after she had been buried, they dug her up, and because the ring fit so tightly on her finger that they couldn’t slide it off of her finger, and they cut her finger off! Well he was back in his home, and they dug her up in this dark and stormy night, and he’s (you know) probably sitting at his little table in his little shack with the candle flickering and the wind howling and the rain beating and the roof leaking and you know just crying into his hands. . . and there was a scratching at the door! And he’s– and he (you know) he’s just just sobbing and the scratching continued and it got louder and louder and louder and he finally realized somebody or something is scratching at my door! And he got up and he went to the door and he opened the door and there was Sarah and she hadn’t died, she had been buried alive! When they dug her up and cut the ring off of her finger it. . . it. . . it resuscitated her enough, along with the oxygen that she was able to breathe again. . . and that’s the story. And they lived happily ever after after that.