“If you peel an apple at 12 midnight in front of a mirror with a candle in one continuous shave without breaking the skin, the face of your future spouse will appear in the mirror.”

My mother tells me that she had heard this from several of her friends when she attended middle school in Hong Kong.  Many of her friends had tried this to see their future spouses, but my mother never believed that it would work.  She does not recall if her friends had seen their spouses and was unable to validate the belief.  The age that my mother had first heard this folklore is significant because it was during budding adolescence—a time when young tweens begin to think about the opposite sex, fantasize about their future soul mates, and grow increasingly curious about their sexuality.  Additionally, this phenomenon can only occur, supposedly, at 12 midnight, the moment of not quite being yesterday and still not really today.  The ambiguity of spatial time shrouds the belief in mystery—anything can happen at midnight.  However, I am not quite certain as to why the peeling of the apple is relevant to the revelation of a person’s spouse.  The only connection I can infer is that an apple is often symbolic of the Adam and Eve myth; and since Adam and Eve were the first couple, it then follows reason to explain why the apple is used to reveal the identity of a person’s soul mate.

Overall, this belief hardly seems like something that could only be confined to a particular culture or place.  Since most school children around the age of adolescence wonder about their destined soul mates or future loved ones, it seems like this folklore could be spread and shared over a large area of nations, cultures and beliefs.