Tag Archives: crickets

Crickets

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Portland, Oregon
Performance Date: April 2012
Primary Language: English

Crickets

Senior Prank/Practical Joke/Story

 

During a conversation about Senior pranks in high school, my informant recounted a Senior prank he heard happened at a neighboring school. The following is a transcript of our interview:

 

“Informant: There were two highschools, lakeridge was across the lake and we were rivals with them, but I had heard for Their Senior prank they got a thousand crickets and released them into the ventilation system and for the next month there were still cleaning up piles of crickets. Apparently it was horrible. Teachers were getting really pissed because they would chirp away in the back of the Class room, so during awkward lectures and speeches there would be crickets going in the back.”

 

My informant said that Senior pranks were often a topic of conversation in school.  Though he did not do any pranks, he said that he and his friends would often talk about them, trading stories they had heard from other schools.

 

This is an act of rebellion, using animals to desecrate the school.  This empowers the students, who are subjected to the authority of administrative bodies. Breaking down the seriousness of the school setting, the crickets chirp in the back of Classes. Often associated with awkward silence or the silence of an unentertained crowd, cricket chirping disrupts the Classroom and criticizes teachers by comparing them to boring things.  The act of a prank of a school illustrates the students’ empowerment through disobeying rules established by the administration and express students’ annoyance.

Folk Belief – China

Nationality: Chinese-American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Irvine, CA
Performance Date: April 24, 2007
Primary Language: English
Language: French, Spanish

Notes:

The house the subject lived in as a child was a new house on old farmland. So there were many bugs in the ground, particularly crickets. The crickets kept the family, especially the father, up at night for years.  And for many years the subject did not understand why there were so many crickets. The subject soon realized that every time a cricket hopped into the house while the mother was present the mother would not do anything to apprehend the cricket. So in actuality there were so many crickets in the house because no one killed them, or more specifically, because the mother would not and would not allow anyone else to kill the crickets. In the Chinese culture crickets are a symbol of good luck. The subject’s mother grew up in Taiwan so crickets didn’t really bother her, her mother was more worried about insects like cockroaches and ants. Furthermore, the subject’s mother was rooted in Chinese tradition and superstition. The subject figured that after a while her dad could not stand the sound of the crickets and sprayed bug killer.

In the advent of colliding cultures the more modern of the two usually prevails. In the mother’s traditional Chinese culture crickets, as plentiful as they probably were, were considered good luck. In American culture, however, they are considered a complete nuisance.