Tag Archives: Chinese

Chinese New Year Tradition of New Clothes

Age: 19

Text:

“One tradition we have during Chinese New Year is that it is necessary to wear new clothes from top to bottom. So like inner clothes, pajama, and new bed sets, new slippers, new socks, and new everything. 
And then, we have to all clean our room and house by ourselves, since we can’t get housekeepers to do it for us, so it’s necessary to do it by ourselves. Then, at 12 o’clock midnight, you have to eat dumplings.

Context:

The Chinese New Year is celebrated in China for the first two weeks in the Chinese Calendar. Each day is filled with various cultural and familial traditions. The informant shared her family tradition for the first day of the Chinese New Year.

Analysis:

This tradition can be understood through both symbolic and social frameworks in Cultural Anthropology. Wearing new clothes during the Chinese New Year reflects ideas of renewal and transformation. This aligns with what Arnold van Gennep describes as rites of passage, marking a transition into a new cycle. Cleaning the house oneself reinforces responsibility and participation in maintaining social harmony, which reflects Confucian values of family duty. Finally, eating dumplings together at midnight could bring the family into a shared moment that feels special and unifying. This practice allows everyone to mark the transition into the new year collectively, which reinforces a sense of togetherness and connection.

Chinese Funeral Ritual

Text:

“When my family members pass away, we have a funeral ritual. When my grandmother passed away, the coffin was first placed on the ground floor of the apartment building. Before carrying her to the funeral parlor, my father had to break a porcelain bowl on the floor and say something he wanted to say to her — usually something short, like ‘may you go peacefully.’ Then the coffin was carried to the funeral parlor.”

Context:

This text was collected from a Chinese international student from Beijing. She recounted the ritual from personal memory, having witnessed it during her grandmother’s funeral. The practice involves two distinct symbolic acts performed before the deceased is transported to the funeral parlor: the placement of the coffin on the ground floor of the family’s apartment building, and the breaking of a porcelain bowl by the closest male family member — in this case, her father — accompanied by a brief farewell address to the deceased. The phrase her father used, “一路走好” (yī lù zǒu hǎo), translates roughly to “may you go peacefully” or “have a safe journey,” a common Chinese expression of farewell to the dead. The informant presented the ritual as standard family practice rather than something unique to her household, suggesting it reflects broader Beijing or northern Chinese funeral customs transmitted through family participation rather than any formal or institutional instruction.

Analysis:

This piece is a customary ritual operating at the intersection of material culture and folk belief, and it demonstrates Van Gennep’s rites of passage framework. The funeral ritual stages the deceased’s transition out of the living world through two carefully sequenced symbolic acts. The breaking of the porcelain bowl follows the logic of sympathetic magic, more specifically the contagious variety, where the destruction of a physical object in the shared space of the living enacts a spiritual severance, which could formally close the bond between the deceased and the household. The ground floor placement of the coffin before departure further emphasizes this threshold symbolism, positioning the body literally between the domestic space of the living and the outside world before the final transition to the funeral parlor. The father’s spoken farewell, “may you go peacefully,” functions as folk speech with ritual authority, a fixed phrase whose repetition across generations gives it vernacular power.




Travelling Tradition of Eating Noodles and Dumplings

Text:

“Whenever you’re going after travel, even if it’s just one day or something, you have to eat dumplings before you go. And when you come back, you eat noodles. Like for the first meal. The meal right before you leave has to be dumplings, and the meal right after you come back has to be noodles. We have a saying that goes “When you get in the car, you eat dumplings. When you get off it, you eat noodles.” It might be a Beijing tradition, but my grandmom is from Shandong, and they still follows this tradition. The dumplings look like small pieces of gold. You have to eat an even number of dumplings. Even numbers are considered luckier than odd numbers. When you come back, you eat noodles, which symbolize that you are attached to your home, because the noodles look like ropes. They held you to your home. Noodles are also not tangled, which simplifies a smooth future and a smooth return home.”

Context:

The informant describes a travel-related food tradition practiced in her family. This tradition is possibly rooted in northern Chinese regions like Beijing and Shandong. Before leaving for a trip, even a short one, the family must eat dumplings, and upon returning, the first meal must be noodles. She learned this practice from her grandmother, who continues to follow it, showing how the tradition is passed down across generations. The informant also explains specific rules, such as eating an even number of dumplings because even numbers are considered lucky. This ritual remains important even when travelling becomes routine. For the informant, it functions as a meaningful way to frame movement away from and back to home.

Analysis:

This tradition shows that everyday practices create a symbolic order. The pairing of dumplings and noodles structures the uncertainty of travel into a predictable and meaningful sequence. Dumplings, shaped like gold, symbolize wealth and a good beginning, while noodles represent connection and continuity, emphasizing a safe return home. The rule of eating even numbers further reflects how ideas of luck and order are embedded in routine actions. These practices turn travel, a potentially uncertain experience, into something culturally organized and emotionally reassuring. Thus, this tradition reinforces values of safety, prosperity, and attachment to home.

Chinese Proverb

Text:

“Man proposes, God disposes.”

Context:

This text was collected from a Chinese international student who shared this proverb in our interview. The original Chinese, “谋事在人，成事在天” (móu shì zài rén, chéng shì zài tiān), translates literally as “the planning of affairs lies with man, but the completion of affairs lies with heaven.” It is one of the most widely known classical Chinese proverbs, originating from the Ming dynasty novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms and attributed to the strategist Zhuge Liang. Despite its literary origin, the proverb has long since detached from its source and circulates entirely through informal, oral transmission — functioning as everyday folk wisdom rather than literary quotation. It is typically deployed as a consolation in moments of uncertainty or disappointment, as it acknowledges the limits of human control while still affirming the value of effort.

Analysis:

This proverb is an example of a fixed phrase carrying metaphorical wisdom. It is transmitted orally across generations in an unchanged form, lending it the vernacular authority that distinguishes folk speech from ordinary language. Its staying power lies in the philosophical tension it holds together: human agency and cosmic limitation are acknowledged at the same time, offering the speaker neither full determinism nor full helplessness. This balance makes it useful as a coping tool across an enormous range of situations, from personal failure to collective misfortune. The proverb’s original literary attribution to Zhuge Liang is a compelling illustration of the idea that folklore and literature exist in a continuous feedback loop. More specifically, the text begins as authored writing, detaches from its source through centuries of informal transmission, and eventually circulates as anonymous folk wisdom. It has effectively become folklore through the process of diffusion. The proverb also demonstrates a distinctly Chinese cosmological worldview — the concept of “天” (tiān, heaven or fate) as a force beyond human control — reflecting how folk speech preserves and expresses deep cultural values across generations without naming them explicitly.




Chinese Proverb

Text:

“Dogs can’t change their habit of eating shit.”

Context:

This text was collected from a Chinese international student. The phrase is a well-known Chinese proverb, used across generations and regions, and the informant learned it through everyday family and peer interaction rather than any formal context. The proverb is often used spontaneously in casual conversation to describe someone whose behavior has repeatedly disappointed them. It functions as a sharp, often humorous way of complaining about someone’s character, as the phrase implies that no matter how many chances a person is given, their fundamental nature will still reveal itself. The proverb is vulgar in its imagery, which likely contributes to its rhetorical force and memorability. Moreover, it was shared in English translation, meaning some of the original linguistic texture of the Mandarin phrasing may not fully carry over.

Analysis:

This proverb exemplifies core folkloric features as it is a fixed phrase carrying metaphorical wisdom, transmitted informally across generations without a traceable single author. Its vulgarity is rhetorically strong — the shock of the imagery makes it memorable and forceful, which is also how oral traditions like this one are sustained across time. The proverb reflects folklore’s capacity to encode community beliefs and values: embedded in this saying is a culturally shared assumption that human nature is fundamentally fixed, offering a folk framework for making sense of repeated disappointment. This connects to the course’s discussion of folk speech as vernacular authority. More specifically, deploying a traditional proverb rather than plain speech transforms the speaker’s frustration from an individualized emotion state to a sense of collective, time-tested wisdom, making the claim feel less like personal opinion and more like cultural truth.