Tag Archives: children

MASH

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 16
Occupation: High School Student
Residence: Arcadia, CA
Performance Date: 4/28/2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

My sister told me that when she was young she played a game called MASH.  The game involves two people and requires a sheet of paper.  One person (who acts as a fortune-teller) sets up the sheet with the letters MASH on top.  M stands for Mansion, A stands for Apartment, S stands for Shack, and H stands for House.  The fortune-teller asks the other person, who is the main player, for the name of three boys or girls.  These are written on the left edge of the paper.  The fortune-teller then asks the player for three dream occupations and writes them down below the names of the boys and girls.  After that, the fortune teller asks for three dream vehicles and puts them under the list of occupations.  The fortune-teller asks the player for a number from 1 through 10.  They then write down the number in the center of the paper.  The fortune-teller takes this number and starts counting along the letters MASH, reversing direction every time they hit M or H on the end.  When the fortune-teller reaches the number, they cross out the letter they land on.  The process is repeated until one letter remains.  This letter indicates what sort of housing the player will have in the future.  The same counting method is used on the list of boys and girls to determine who the player is going to be married to.  Counting off on the list of occupations determines the future job, and counting off on the vehicles determines what the player is going to drive in the future.  When this information is obtained, the fortune-teller announces the results as such:
“So you’re going to live in a (x), and you’ll be married to (x), you’ll be working as a (x), driving a (x), and you’ll have (x) children!”

My sister learned this in primary school from other girls, and recalls obsessively playing it.  She thinks part of the appeal of MASH is that it seems to greatly simplify the future and put in the players’ hands.  She says that there are other variants she remembers as well.  In addition to the above information, sometimes the fortune-teller will also divine the marital status of the  player to the boy/girl selected through the counting process, by counting off a list involving such relationship statuses as “married, divorced, widowed, dating.”

I agree with my sister’s thoughts on the fortune-telling aspect of this game.  It’s a really simplified approach to telling the future.  It reminds me of fortune-tellers that children would make in order to answer all sorts of Yes/No questions through simple factors (like a number or color, depending on the format of the fortune-teller).  I find it interesting that this condenses the idea of futures and really gives the player agency (for example, you could pick 3 very expensive cars and 3 high-paying occupations and guarantee yourself a pretty positive future in this game).

“The wolves are coming!” 狼來了!

Nationality: Chinese
Age: 51
Occupation: Housewife
Residence: Arcadia, CA
Performance Date: 4/27/2013
Primary Language: Chinese
Language: English

“So a long long time ago, there was a kid… he has to release the sheep at home.  So everyday he would run up the top of a mountain, watching the sheep eat grass and the like.  So everyday is like this and he thinks it’s really boring.  When he was bored, he would look everywhere and when he looked down he would see a lot of farmers, they’re there tilling the soil.  So the boy thinks, “Eeeh?  I’m this bored, why don’t I fool them first!”  So, really loudly… then… so he thinks, “how do I fool them?” And he loudly yells “Save me!  Wolves are coming!” So… the farmers at the foot of the mountain go, “Eh?  The kid on the mountain is yelling for help… he says there’s a wolf,” so they immediately put down all their work, run up the mountain to save the boy.  So the boy is watching the farmers, so he sees the farmers running up the mountain and thinks it’s really funny, and very entertaining, like watching them do a show or something, so he… then the farmers run up and are exhausted, panting, and when they reach the boy, the boy happily claps his hands “Yay, yay, I fooled you guys!  I fooled you guys, there wasn’t a wolf in the first place, seeing you all run up, so cute!”  So the farmers say “Huh, this kid, playing with us like this,”  so they unhappily descend the mountain.  So okay, an amount of time passes, the boy still has to go up the mountain every day to tend to the sheep, and he sits and thinks “Ughh, so boring… last time was pretty fun though!  Again!”  So for a second time… then… he tries it again, yelling “Save me, save me!  Wolves are coming, the wolves are coming and carrying all my sheep away!  Save me, you better come quickly and save me!”  Then the farmers, at first, see him yelling like that and have… have… hesit-hesitate, have some hesitation, thinking “Hm?  Is this kid… is it true this time?”  But the kid, seeing the farmers… he calls the farmer and sees they are ignoring them and continues, acting really afraid and yelling “Save me, save me!”  The farmers don’t want to risk having wolves eating the sheep, so at the end the farmers decide to run up the mountain and save the kid, and they run, run, run, run up the mountain and the kid, again, goes, “Yay, yay, you’re all dense, you’re all silly, hahaha!  You’re all really silly!”  So this time the farmers are really angry… “This kid really is naughty, so ill-disciplined, right?”  “He’s like this, tricking us, wanting us to abandon our work to run up and save him, he… it turns out he’s joking with us.”  Then, an amount of time passes, and the kid goes up the mountain to tend to the flock again, and this time he’s really unlucky, there really is a wolf coming.  When the wolf is actually coming, it carries away his sheep, bites his goat…his sheep.  This time he’s actually terrified and screams “Save me! Save me!  Farmers below, hurry up and save, there’s really a wolf!  Faster, save me!”  Then the farmers hear it this time and think  “This kid is fooling us again?  He’s already fooled us twice… let’s not go save him.”  This time the farmers decide to ignore the kid.  Unfortunately, this time, a wolf really does come down.  So the wolf ate… carried away all the sheep and wounded the kid as well.  This kid, at this time, is really regretful.  He thinks, “why did I have to lie in the past to trick people?  Now that I’ve tricked people, they no longer have trust, they don’t trust me, so this time when I really have hardship, no one is willing to help me.”  So this story teaches children to be honest, don’t lie; if you lie, no one will trust you, and if there’s really danger, no one will save you.”

My mother heard this story from her mother as a child.  Her mother would tell her this story, usually like a bedtime story, and teach her the lesson of not lying.  My mother and her sisters would often rely on their mother to tell stories like this to pass the time.

At first, I didn’t recognize the story because the title was “Wolf is coming!”  in Cantonese (狼來了!)  But when I heard the story I recognized it as a version of the folk story, “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.”  I think the difference in the titles comes down to the fact that “狼來了!” is catchier (long loi liu!) and that “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” does not have a particularly smooth Cantonese translation.

In this telling in particular, the “kid” is referred to in Cantonese as siu peng you (xiao peng you, 小朋友), which refers to kids in general but is also understood to refer to boys more often than girls.  Perhaps this is because most other versions of the story feature a boy.  I also found it interesting that the kid sees farmers, instead of being part of a village and yelling to the villagers for help.  The comments of the boy towards the farmers are likely different with each performance.  The “hahahas” were added as a sort of flavor by my mother in this particular performance of the piece.

In other versions I’ve heard, the resolution is adverse but not particularly violent; for example, the sheep would run away at the sight of the wolf.  I was surprised that this version, which my mother learned as a child, has the kid injured and the sheep eaten.  There is also no seen with the farmers teaching the kid a lesson – the lesson comes from the kid reflecting on his mistake.

A variation of this tale in literature can be found in B.G. Hennessy’s children’s book, The Boy Who Cried Wolf.  It seems that there’s yet another variation in this authored text;  at some point the boy’s friend gets involved.  The information of this book is below:

Hennessy, B. G., and Boris Kulikov. The Boy Who Cried Wolf. New York: Simon & Schuster for Young Readers, 2006. Print.

La Llorona

Nationality: American
Age: 18
Occupation: College student
Residence: San Francisco, CA
Performance Date: 4/30/2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

My friend spent part of her childhood growing up in Mexico, and she would hear this story of La Llorona from other kids.

“La Llorona was a beautiful young woman, as every young woman is in stories, uh… who, like, married this man, and uh… had like beautiful children and… I don’t know, there were like six or something, and…then… he cheated on her, and she got super angry, and killed the kids by drowning them in a river.  And, uh, the legend goes that if you’re a bad child, or if you, like, don’t do something that you’re supposed to do, uh, when you’re a kid, like… the threat of La Llorona is that… um, she’ll come and like, steal you away or something, and there’s like, this legend that she’s still wandering around in riverbeds going like ‘mi secos, mi secos!’”

My friend didn’t believe in La Llorona as she grew up.  Her friends often did, however, and would cite the danger of being caught by La Llorona as reasons to not cause mischief.  I think there’s a different effect when kids tell the stories their parents tell.  I often think of stories such as this as cautionary tales created by parents to warn children to be on good behavior.  For my friend, hearing that other children believed in it made her think the stories were rather silly.  My friend points out that “La Llorona was a beautiful woman, as every young woman is in stories”… I think that she notices there’s a motif in which someone/something beautiful becomes spoiled.  And this ruination of somebody causes them to somehow haunt this world.  I do agree with her; I think La Llorona is not the only ghost story that involves ghosts somehow beginning beautiful and ending as abominations after their actions.  The ghost of La Llorona also hangs around riverbeds, which makes me believe that her existence as a ghost comes as a form of punishment for drowning her children.  It’s interesting that the story that my friend knows of does not really emphasize on the husband.  Instead of a tale of infidelity, La Llorona ends up as a ghost story about a homicidal mother that intends to scare children into compliance.  On the other hand, there might be something more about the husband in other versions – other than the elements my friend finds kind of silly or fascinating, she doesn’t remember too much of a specific narrative.

Folktale: The Golem

Nationality: White, Jewish, Spanish, Greek, French
Age: 28
Occupation: GraduateStudent, Instructor
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 18 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Hebrew, Ladino, Spanish, Fench

 

The Golem

She heard this story from friends at the Jewish school. She went to school in Los Angeles. She explains that her family is Spanish and the story of the Golem is an Eastern European story so she didn’t grow up with it like her classmates did. She states that she heard from her friends who were Ashkenazi. The basic story goes like this:

The story takes in a town in Prague. A rabbi created a Frankenstein-like monster called a Golem to protect the Jewish village. The Golem was a giant creature with the word Emet, which is Hebrew for truth, written on its head. This word brings the creature to life. He was created to ward of attackers but it eventually runs amuck and starts attacking people. It couldn’t be stopped until the rabbi who created it erases the first letter of Emet from its head. Emet without the first letter, spells met which means death. This doesn’t kill the golem it just shuts it off like a robot. To revive the Golem all one has to do is fill in the first letter.

The informant mentions that she heard slightly different versions of the story. In some versions the person who brings the golem to life is a rabbi, sometimes it’s a mad scientist, other times it is just some guy. The nature of the golem itself varies in some versions it is aggressive in others its docile like a baby.

The informant doesn’t think the story itself is very important but the ideas related to it are important. She says that the story is related the history of antisemitism and it stems from the idea of having a magical protector.

I’ve heard of the story of the Golem of Prague before but in the version I read the Golem only goes berserk because the Golem had the ability to turn invisible and there were more explicit mentions of magic. In the version I heard the Golem was made from the clay of the banks of the river and the ceremony that brought it life mentioned the use of Kabbalah mysticism. In the version the informant told me she makes numerous references to Frankenstein and mad scientists. It seems like the scientific bent of contemporary society got fused with this older primarily magical society. The story is the same but the motifs are slightly different.

Game: Afikomen Game

Nationality: White, Jewish, Spanish, Greek, French
Age: 28
Occupation: GraduateStudent, Instructor
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: April 18 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Hebrew, Ladino, Spanish, Fench

The Afikomen Game

The informant couldn’t remember what Afikomen means or whether the word is in Yiddish or Hebrew.

This is a children’s game that’s played during Passover. The informant explains that during Passover there is a service called a Seder. The ceremony comes with a book that spells out all the rituals and what order their supposed to go. The informant says that the service generally lasts about two hours. However there are people who try to finish it in one hour. The informant has lead Seder’s before and they tend to three hours long. At some point during the Seder the person leading the prayer breaks off a piece of matzo (explain) and usually hides it somewhere in the house. All the children get up and race through the house to find the Afikomen. However finds it first gets a prize usually money. It’s usually money because children are not allowed to eat sweets during Passover.

The informant in Passover most of the events and rituals are directly related to the history of the holiday or the Commandments. The Afikomen game is not related to holiday at all. According to the informant the game was created to help the children get through the Seder without disrupting it. She explained that the Seder lasts for hours and Passover has certain dietary restrictions, bread and candy are off limits. Basically the holiday isn’t very kid friendly. The informant says that some Rabbis try to justify its existence by saying that it symbolizes the search for freedom but it only exists to keep the children from getting bored

My informant says the game is not that important in itself but it is important it is related to Passover.

The informant mentioned that Passover is a ritualized holiday; every aspect has some historical or religious significance. I think it is interesting that a holiday as old and sacred as Passover has this completely unrelated game attached to it. Even though it was not originally part of the traditions it is still important enough that people try to justify its existence. Maybe being a useful way to keep children quiet during the ceremony outweighs the fact that has no symbolic significance.