Tag Archives: birthday ritual

Birthday Noodles

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 77
Occupation: Grandma
Residence: China
Performance Date: 2020.3.19
Primary Language: Chinese

Main piece:

To celebrate one’s birthday in China, one should eat noodles instead of cakes. And one has to finish the noodles in his/her bowl.

Explain:

Birthday cake is a western custom. Originally in China, people celebrate their birthday by eating noodles. A real bowl of birthday noodles should formed by one single piece of noodle. But nowadays the standard is loose, any noodles can work.

Background information:

When I was in quarantined in my dorm in Los Angeles, I happened to celebrate my 20th birthday alone. My grandma called me and told me don’t forget to cook myself some noodles. I asked her to explain this custom again and she did. But she couldn’t remember how she heard it. It is just so widely performed that everyone seems to know it by nature.

Context:

My grandma called me and mentioned this custom, I asked her for more information for this collection.

Thhoughts:

I actually want to have a bowl of real Birthday noodles someday.

1st Birthday – Korean Tradition

Nationality: Korean
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 04/10/19
Primary Language: English

Piece:

“A Korean tradition celebrates a baby’s first birthday and it’s super traditional, like the baby wears the traditional Korean outfit and there’s rice cakes that are like rainbow, and there’s like fruit and always a lot of food but the main event is where uhm you set the baby in front of 5 or 6 different objects, and the baby has to choose one. Like a pen is going to be intellectual/writer, a stethoscope means you’ll probably be a doctor, there’s usually something for sports and there’s like other things that the parents want to throw in. Now there’s like cameras if their parents are photographers, or a paintbrush for an artist, but you put the baby in front and the baby chooses one of the things and that’s supposed to kinda predict what they are going to do in life and that’s a big part of the birthday celebration.”

Background Information: The informant is a current USC student with a Korean background. We were discussing childhood stories when she suddenly remembered a big tradition in Korean culture.  After telling me the story, the informant texted her mom inquiring about her first birthday celebration. She didn’t remember what item she chose as a baby, so she asked her mom. Her mom responded and said that the informant had chosen a pen, which as mentioned in the piece, represented intellectual/writer. I asked the informant if her decision of choosing the pen was consistent with her major and she agreed that it was.

Context: I was explaining the purpose of my assignment to the informant by providing different examples of folklore that I had collected from other students. After giving several examples, the informant stopped me in my tracks and began telling me this piece. This tradition is something that the informant’s family participate in. She remembers it because whenever a first birthday is celebrated, a family reunion is planned to witness the tradition. 

Personal analysis: I remember when I was younger, I was watching the movie Tinkerbell with my siblings and one of the scenes included a tradition similar to the Korean tradition that was described. Upon being born, Tinkerbell was placed in the middle of a circle surrounded by different objects. It was explicitly stated that whatever item she picked up first would determine her job in the fairy world kingdom. Now that I’ve been informed that this is a Korean tradition, I’m not surprised that Disney “borrowed” this folklore and incorporated in one of their movies.

 

 

 

 

 

A Happy Birthday song

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Pasadena, CA
Performance Date: April 30, 2013
Primary Language: English

A Happy Birthday song

My friend Kirsten is a fellow freshman at the University of Southern California, studying International Relations, as well as someone with whom I went to high school and preschool in Pasadena, CA. In the intervening time between our shared educational experiences, she attended a small, alternative K-8 school, also in Pasadena, called Sequoyah. The third child in a family of four children, she has an older brother, an older sister, and a younger sister who each, also, attended Sequoyah. She shared with me the birthday song (distinct from the copyrighted, ‘traditional’ “Happy Birthday to You”) that was sung throughout the school year upon the occasion of any classmate’s birthday.

(See hyperlink at top for tune.) The lyrics go:

“It makes me think of the good old days,

Happy birthday to you!

You’ve sure grown out of your baby ways,

Happy birthday to you!

It’s your [age – i.e. “15th”] birthday, wish you many more,

Health and wealth and friends by the score,

Let’s cut the cake and let’s eat some more,

Happy birthday to you!”

 

She describes that, “The way we did it at Sequoyah would be like every time someone had a birthday, they would bring dessert for the class, and then, after school, we’d all gather and eat whatever they had and then we’d sing the song. So whenever it was someone’s birthday we’d sing that,” and “you did it from first grade to eighth grade, it was the whole school,” the whole school career, and evidently sung multiple times per year. Though she doesn’t know when or from where the song originated, she knows that it was a school birthday tradition at least since before her brother started at the school, four or five years before she did so herself. But the interesting thing to note is that, for her at least, the song transcended school tradition and entered into her birthday ‘vernacular’ at home: “At home, we do both. We’ll sing the normal happy birthday song, and then me and my little sister will sing the song – ‘cus, like, we both do [it] every birthday even though my brother and my older sister have stopped singing it… So, like, me and [my younger sister] keep doing it.” Though she and another mutual friend with whom she attended Sequoyah never sang the song for any of our friends’ birthdays in high school, it was mentioned a few times, which I recalled and so asked her to sing it for me for this post. She went on to say that “part of actually why me and [my sister] keep singing it is that it [a birthday] doesn’t really feel complete if we don’t sing it, or like, I don’t know if I would necessarily teach it to my kids or something to that extent, but I guess, in my own family, or like if were to do it with [our mutual friend] or someone [i.e. another Sequoyah alum], then I would feel like I would have to sing it.” This statement seems to indicate that the song is meaningful for my friend, not just as a traditional piece of her childhood that she “Can’t remember a time, really, where [she] didn’t sing it,” but as symbol of unity and a marker of identity and belonging among students and alumni of her school.

Birthday ear pulling in Italy

Nationality: Italian American
Age: 25
Occupation: Actor
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/6/12
Primary Language: Italian
Language: English

My informant grew up in Italy, where there was a tradition that on someone’s birthday, his friends would pull on his ears once for each year he was old. He speculated that this could be because of a belief that the ears are associated with memory and so pulling them might make one better remember life as it passed them by. The other possible explanation he offered was that because earlobes grow as a person grows, this ritual of pulling them might be to wish a person a longer life.

It was never actually a tradition he particularly liked because he found it physically uncomfortable, but it reminds him of the time he spent in Italy growing up before coming to America. It also makes him remember the friends he had there as a kid and the birthday parties he used to have with them.

Personally, I would readily accept either of his suggestions for the meaning of this ritual. Otherwise, it could just be a thing children made up to annoy each other; it reminds me of the punch for each year birthday tradition in America. Maybe it’s used then as a painful/bothersome initiation into the next year of your life. Once you get past it, you come out better for having gone through the experience. I like his explanations better, though.