Tag Archives: Chinese

Nationality: Singaporean Chinese
Occupation: Teacher
Residence: Singapore
Performance Date: March 2007
Primary Language: Chinese
Language: Hinghwa, English, Hokkien

守株待兔, 不劳而获

Shou zhu dai tu, bu lao er huo

Protect tree wait rabbit, no work and gain

Don’t wait for the rabbit to dash its head against a tree, to gain without work

This was first learnt by my informant when he was a young boy in Putian, a small village in the province of Fujian. He assumes that this is to teach children that there are no rewards without hard work as the likely hood of a rabbit dashing its head against a tree is very small. This discourages laziness in the hopes that the child would work hard and accomplish great things in the future.

In fact, according to my informant, there was a back story involved with this proverb as well. While he did not tell me the whole story, the gist of it was that a farmer was out one day looking for food, when suddenly, a rabbit ran into the tree in front of him and died. The farmer was so happy to have food that night that he kept venturing out to the same tree in the hope that another rabbit would perform the same feat. Day after day, the farmer kept going out and the rabbit never came. Eventually, this happy tale ends with the farmer starving to death.

In the past, much of the Chinese economy was agricultural based, and even now, most of China is very dependent on farming and fishing. To many of them, to follow a blind hope such as this, instead of cultivating the crops that they had at home is just foolishness. The Chinese also prize hard work and just rewards a lot more than luck. For example, from the Tang dynasty onward, hardworking scholars could become court officials if they did well at the examinations in the capital. Therefore, it can be inferred that this proverb was to encourage young children that there are no rewards in slacking and the results of laziness can often be dire.

Annotation: Huaxia.com.  http://www.huaxia.com/wh/jdgs/cydg/00096705.html 24 April 2007

Nationality: Singaporean Chinese
Occupation: Teacher
Residence: Singapore
Performance Date: April 2007
Primary Language: Chinese
Language: Hinghwa, Hokkien, Mandarin, Cantonese, English

照

Zhao

Shine

一个日本人，

yi ge ri ben ren

One Japanese Man

站在门口，

zhan zai men kou

Standing at the doorway

拿着一把刀，

na zhe yi ba dao

Holding a knife

杀了四个人。

sha le si ge ren

He kills four people

 

This was learned by my informant when she was growing up in Singapore in school, when she was about ten or eleven years of age. While she can’t quite recall who she learnt it from, she said it was rather useful for learning characters in Chinese.  It is in essence a word riddle, in which the bottom four lines would be told to the other person and the other person would try to guess what the word was.

Even though there is supposedly nothing meant by the content (morbid as it is), it is just there because it fits the word. However, when my informant was growing up during the 1950s and 60s in Singapore there was a great deal of resentment against the Japanese for WWII. The words of this riddle could originate as a subtle form of anti-Japanese rebellion or statement for the brutal acts that they performed in Singapore and most of South East and East Asia.

During World War II, it was very common for Japanese soldiers to enter houses indiscriminately and slaughter whole families for numerous trumped up charges, like being Chinese, or having a wife that the soldier found mildly attractive or even looking at them wrong. Therefore this might be a reflection of not only this anti-Japanese sentiment but also oppositional culture.

Chinese Naming Superstitions

Nationality: Singaporean Chinese
Occupation: Retiree
Residence: Singapore
Performance Date: March 2007
Primary Language: Chinese
Language: Hokkien, Hinghwa, English

The older Chinese tended to nickname their children after animals and give their boys, a girl’s name or a girl a boy’s name.

My informant knew about this custom because his older sister was given a boy’s name to ensure that the next child would be a son. His sister was born in the 1940s, and he learned about it in the 1950s when he was very young.

There are many reasons for this. In the past, people used to name their children after animals to avoid the demons from taking their children away because they would get confused when the parents would call them animals in hopes that the spirits would take the animals instead. Another reason is that the spirits would think that there was something wrong with the children if they’re called names for the other gender. Often though, Chinese families would call their older girls (especially families with no boys) by boy names in the hopes the next child would be a boy.

This is because, boys are very important for more traditional Chinese families. In the past, the daughters would become part of the family they marry, but the son would remain, carry on the family name and take charge of the farm and parents.

A Chinese Chopstick Custom and Folk Belief

Nationality: Taiwanese/American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Room 4305B, 920 W. 37th PL. Los Angelos, California 90007
Performance Date: 2/4/2011
Primary Language: Chinese
Language: English

My informant says this about her background:

“I was born in Connecticut, left when I was two months old, went to Taiwan. For elementary school, went to Hong Kong and went to Shanghai when I was starting middle school, and finished high school there. My parents are typical Taiwanese or Asian parents who only came to America for school and they don’t know that much about American culture and aren’t that great at English. So I was raised in a very “Asian” atmosphere/family.”

One time during dinner at a shopping mall, she brought this folk belief up, reprimanding one of her Caucasian friends for sticking his chopsticks vertically into his rice:

“If you stick chopsticks in the rice straight down into the rice bowl, it’s a bad, a very bad omen. It’s disrespectful because it’s like you’re putting incense on a grave and yeah, okay.”

Before I elaborate on this custom, I just wanted to talk about my own background first. I’m a third generation Chinese Taiwanese male student who was born in Taipei, Taiwan. I speak English and Chinese. I lived in Taipei for two years before moving to New Jersey, where I lived for seven years. After that, I returned to Taipei where I finished high school.

Returning to the topic at hand, in Chinese culture, it is customary to use incense as a way of communicating with spirits or as a way of indicating something is an offering to the spirits of our ancestors. My informant reprimanded her friend for sticking his chopsticks vertically into his rice because it is similar to putting incense on foodstuffs Chinese people offer in front of graves.

I grew up in a Chinese family too so I’ve heard this “rule” before. But, varied as folklore should be, the version my parents told me was that sticking chopsticks (or anything similar in shape to incense) in my rice would invite spirits to feast on the rice, which is at once disrespectful and uncanny–you wouldn’t want spirits eating your rice at the same time you are eating it.

She mentioned another folk belief right after talking about the chopstick “rule”:

“Ok, I heard this from my mom. So another thing is, depending on how far you hold the chopsticks [she picks up her chopsticks], so depending on how far you grip the chopsticks, it depends– they say that…this is for girls, like if you hold it like here [she notions to the bottom of the chopsticks], you’re going to be married off to some guy who lives really close to you and like vice versa, like if you hold it like super far they it’s like ‘oh, you’re going to be married to like, you know, to a distant country or something like that’. Like it depends on how far you hold the chopsticks [she notions to the top of the chopsticks] , like around the tip.”

While I never heard of this belief before, maybe because I am male, this website (a sort of online journal) has a writer who brings up the same belief: thestar. This belief reveals a heavy emphasis on marriage in Chinese culture, which seems to be targeted at young women, that is passed from parent to children or in this case, mother to daughter. My informant elaborated that she heard this from her mother when she, herself, was caught holding the chopsticks near the tip. Her mother lamented that my informant was going to be married far away from home. From that background, we can see that marrying and residing far away from home carries a certain stigma-like quality to the extent where parents will warn their children that they will marry away from home (home as in the sense of city, town or country).

Preventative Chinese Childhood Folkbelief “Genitals on Head”

Nationality: Asian American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Room 3303C, 920 W. 37th PL. Los Angelos, California 90007
Performance Date: 4/23/2011
Primary Language: English
Language: Chinese

My informant is second generation Chinese American female student. She grew up in Chongqing, China but moved to America when she was six and a half. After coming to America, she has moved around from Texas to California to Iowa and finally to Missouri. She mentioned the following childhood belief during a group study session when we were discussing our childhoods:

“Informant: Ok, so, this was in kindergarten. Like…we had bathrooms where the boys and the girls went to the same bathroom and so like the thing was if you like looked at the other person’s genital area, you’re supposed to grow the thing on your forehead [laughter] and so if girls looked at a guy’s penis [giggles] they’ll have a penis grow on their head [laughter].

Collector (me): So did you believe in this? Where did you learn this?

Informant: No, I was in the bathroom when someone was talking about it and I overheard.

Collector: Why do you think this belief spread?

Informant: Um…I guess…probably parents told their kids not to do it and that’s how they were going to scare them.”

I consider this folklore homeopathic childhood magic in the sense that it carries the quality where “like attracts like”. In this case, looking at genitals of the other sex, causes one to grow said genitals on one’s head. And children, especially little girls (in my informant’s case), believing in this magic and unwilling to grow genitals on their heads, will try not to look at the genitals of the other sex. As my informant believes that Chinese parents told their children this folklore to scare them, this folklore is obvious in its preventive nature–stopping childhood sexual curiosity. In that nature, this folklore reaffirms the perhaps university and global belief that children are meant to be kept innocent, naive and sexless. Moreover, this folklore implies the gender/sex division of children as early as kindergarten, which seems to be an aspect of preventing sexual curiosity.

However, considering how the “scare effect” is achieved, the belief “don’t look or you’ll grow one on your forehead” doesn’t scare one unless that person is relatively familiar with what genitalia looks like. That is to say, the only reason a little girl wouldn’t want the male genitalia growing on her head would be because she knows what it looks like. So, this folklore also implicitly shows us that children might be familiar with or already exposed to the other sex’s characteristics in an period as early as kindergarten (or at least in China where this folklore originated from).

It also begs one to consider, if there was such a focus on sex/gender division and naivety, why were boys and girls made to go to the same bathroom at my informant’s school.