Tag Archives: bedtime story

Pretend to Play the Yu

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 22
Occupation: Grad student
Residence: Los Angeles, California
Performance Date: 3/26/23
Primary Language: Chinese
Language: English

Text:

Title: 滥竽充数

Literal translation: Pretend to Play the Yu

Dynamic translation: Pretending to be something that you are not

XX: This story is about a musician. The musician- he couldn’t really play any instruments. Anyway, one day, he heard that there is an audition going on, and he went for it anyway. When he got to the place, he found that he’s going to be playing among a group, a group of instruments, in an orchestra in front of the emperor. So anyway, he got into the audition, and he passed it as a group, and the whole orchestra got employed by the emperor, and he got famous after that. So, he got famous, and after decades and decades, he played in the group for the emperor, to entertain him. So after the emperor passed away, his son succeeded his crown, and his son is someone who prefers to hear solo music, so one day, he gathered this whole orchestra and had every musician play to him one by one. And when it was the musician’s turn–the emperor finally found out that the man couldn’t play any instrument, so then the emperor executed him. That’s the story–that’s how we tell people that you cannot lie about your skill if you don’t know how.

Me: Oh wow–I was expecting this to be some sort of wholesome children’s story–so your grandpa would tell you this before you slept?

XX: Yup, but I’m not really bothered by the execution part, because I feel like he deserved it, right? Because he’s a liar.

Context:

XX mentioned that they heard this story almost every day as a young child. Their grandfather would tell this to them during the “little time we had before we all went to bed.” It was “just a little educational lesson my grandpa wanted to give me.” Their grandfather was never one to “say something really obvious–” he liked to “inspire you to know something.” While XX said that the story was mainly just a typical part of their daily nighttime routine, they also learned something from it: don’t lie about having a skillset you lack. It has been a while since XX last told this story, and this was the first time they told it in English.

Analysis:

When people first started to think of folklore, the bedtime stories told by nannies and babysitters came to mind. Bedtime stories and lullabies are meant to put children to sleep, but the text and lyrics themselves can be ambiguous. Perhaps introducing kids to these valuable lessons–don’t pretend to be something you’re not–in a relaxed, tranquil setting will resonate with them more vividly as they grow up and become acclimated to the world around them. This idea of “double vision” that parents/grandparents hold rings true: while they want to comfort their children, they also want to warn them and give them lessons and pieces of advice that they will carry on with them through adulthood. These stories balance the weight of consequences with lighthearted fun. However, it is questionable whether we associate these stories with their actual lessons or more with the fonder memories of childhood and bedtime.

Nonetheless, being set in a distant past and intertwining fictive elements with real world morals, these tales open up children to important pieces of knowledge to function in society, rather than shielding them in a romanticized image of the world. While execution is an exaggerated consequence of lying, the tale’s ending provides a vivid warning on what happens if you’re caught for fabricating your identity. These stories are effective because they are memorable–they spread messages creatively and even with a negative, violent ending, children want to hear them over and over because it is ingrained into their night routine. They’re comforting because they’re consistent–they’re told by the same, reliable person at the same time. The last words children hear before falling asleep often get at the heart of the bedtime story, so it lingers in their memory. These tales can contain universal values: its message is clear across language barriers, which reveals the foundational similarities amongst different variations.

Working Mother Ballad

Context:

N is a college student at the University of Southern California, she told me about a bedtime story her mother used to tell her when she was little. She tells me this story is sung as a ballad, but she no longer remembers how the ballad was recited, so she narrated the story instead. According to N, the melody of the ballad is very sad, therefore the story is better when preformed accurately. N and her mother are Korean but moved to America when N was a baby.

Text:

“The story is about a mom and her baby, who live on an island at sea. The mom had to leave her baby son home alone to go to work, where she collects limpets every day. The baby son would stay at home and miss his mom but couldn’t do anything other than sit by the sea and listen to the waves crashing, which would put him to sleep. The mom was working but would become worried over her son, so she would rush home with her basket half full and find her little son sleeping.

Analysis:

Some time ago, many mothers had to leave their children alone so they could go work because no one else could take care of them. It is believed that that is how this song originated. This ballad might be related to the war times, explaining the absence of a father in this story. It is evident that the quality and replication of folklore are better when performed by an active bearer; perhaps hearing the story from the informant’s mother might have been more insightful. It is often hard to collect folklore from a generation that does not actively bear their culture’s traditional folklore.

Mother and son frogs

Context:

N is a college student at the University of Southern California, she told me about a bedtime story her mother used to tell her when she was little. N and her mother are Korean but moved to America when N was a baby.

Text:

“She [her mother] told me multiple stories but there is one I remember the most because I would cry every time I heard it. So, there was a son and a mom, and they were both frogs. The frog son would never listen to his mom and always did the opposite of what she asked him to do. She would tell him to do his homework, but he would play instead; she would ask him to gather wood from the forest, but he would get sand from the beach. Everything she said, he would do the exact opposite. One day, she was very sick and knew she was going to die, so she told her son ‘When I die, bury me in the shallow banks of the swamp’, thinking her son wouldn’t listen to her. She actually wanted to be buried high up the mountains but expected him to do the opposite of what she asked. When she died her son was very regretful for what he did to his mom, so he decides to listen to her last wish. He buries her in the shallow banks of the swamp as she asked him to; the problem was that every time it rained, all the mud and sand were washed away, and the grave was unearthed. Every time it rained, he would sit and cry in fear of his mother’s body floating away because of the rain.”

Analysis:

Apparently, frog stories are a common reoccurring theme in Korean folklore, as well as mother-son stories. This story seems both like a tale and a fable, as it is used as an aesthetic narration, but at the same time, it is meant to teach the children listening to the story the importance of obeying their parents. This story is in some way very sad and graphic, as it depicts a child watching their mother’s corpse constantly resurface, traumatizing and punishing him for his actions in the past. It clearly is also a story about the importance of maintaining one’s reputation in a good way. When searching online, I found a similar tale by the name of “The Green Frogs”.

Close Your Eyes

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: student
Residence: USC
Performance Date: 4/3/23
Primary Language: English

Text: “There once was a little boy named H. He stayed up late every night and made his mother very angry by not going to bed on time. But one night, he wanted to try and keep his eyes open until morning, without getting a lick of sleep. But on that very morning, his eyes were shriveled up like raisins and he could no longer see. When his mother came in, she screamed. She told him, “Close your eyes forever.” After that, the boy never saw anything out of his eyes again. And you want to know why? Because your eyes need to be closed for a few hours while you sleep, in order for them to reset. Keeping them open for a long period of time and blinking to comfort them only goes so far. They need to be closed for hours in order to keep your eyes healthy.” – Informant’s mother

Context: This scary little tale was told to the informant when his mom would get mad at him for staying up too late. She used a tale in order to get him to go to sleep and used the scare tactic to make him want to sleep. As a 7 year old, this story scared him enough to stop staying up so late. The informant laughed when telling this tale because it is so stupid and probably made up by his mom. However, it worked.

Analysis: When I was little, my parents would tell me that if I don’t go to sleep, my nightmares will happen in real life in order to get me to go to sleep. Similar to this tale, they were both tactics used to improve our lives. Sleep is one of the most important things for a human and yet, a growing child. It teaches us a lesson that will help in the long run and actually made us both go to sleep. Although my version was more of a myth type and the informant’s was more of a tale, they both made us follow the rules set by our parents.

Persian Sleeping Beauty

Nationality: Iranian
Age: 54
Occupation: Compounding Pharmacist
Residence: Albuquerque
Performance Date: 3/17/19
Primary Language: Persian
Language: English, Spanish

Main Piece (direct transcription):

Dad: Iranians believe that if something is predicted, it will happen.  There was a king, and he had a son.  Somebody came, and told him that that boy… It’s the same thing as Disney, the same concept, do you remember…

Me: Sleeping Beauty?

Dad: Yes, with the spinning wheels.  In our story, the king had a son, his only son, and a magician told him that his son would be bitten by a scorpion and would die.  The king told all his people to kill all the scorpions and took his son to an island where there were no scorpions.  He was guarded by many servants, and when the son was older, he was sitting by the beach with one of his servants, and he asked the servant,

“Why did my dad do all of this for me?”

The servant told him what happened.  And the son said,

“But I’ve never even seen a scorpion.  What does it look like?”

The servant drew the picture of a scorpion in the sand, and it came to life.  The scorpion then stung the son and killed him.

 

Context: The informant, my father, is a pharmacist who was born in Shiraz, Iran.  He moved to the United States after growing up in Iran, and now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  His first language is Farsi, his second is Spanish, and his third is English.  He lived in Spain for several years before moving to the United States, and therefore has collected folklore from his time in these different countries throughout his lifetime.  My dad was telling me about different Iranian folktales, since my dad was originally born and raised in Iran.  We were originally talking about superstitions, and he decided to tell me this story.  The moral of the story, he said, was that “if it has to be, it will be”, and that we could not escape our fate.

 

 

My Thoughts:

I thought this story was particularly interesting, because it had the same basic plot as Sleeping Beauty.  Since I grew up with Disney, and know the story of Sleeping Beauty well, my dad did not even need to get very far into the story before I made the immediate connection between the two.  I thought it was funny how my dad, before even really starting the story, asked me if I could already see the connection between his story and Sleeping Beauty.  Being from Iran, he is not as familiar with the Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and he knows many of his European fairy tales through Disney movies that he watched with me and my brother as we were growing up.  My dad had never told me this Persian tale before this moment, and so I was unaware that there was an Iranian equivalent to the Sleeping beauty story in their culture.

 

For another version of this tale, please see Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Little Briar-Rose (1857), which can be found here