Tag Archives: proverbs

Dark Bright: Proverb

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Garden Grove, CA
Performance Date: 4/21/18
Primary Language: English
Language: Vietnamese

If close to ink, dark. If close to light, bright.

The Informant provided this Vietnamese proverb to me at around 2:30am on 4/22 while she did homework. She is an Economics and Mathematics student at UCLA. The Informant, my girlfriend, said this proverb was burned into her brain by her Vietnamese parents while she was growing up in Garden Grove, a city in Orange County.

Her interpretation of the meaning is that if you surround yourself with bad influences, bad people, or a bad environment, you’ll turn out bad as well. And if you surround yourself with the opposite, successful people, you will be the same. Essentially, you are a product of your environment.

This is similar to a proverb from the Bible. In Proverbs 13:20, “He who walks with wise men will be wise, But the companion of fools will suffer harm.” Although this proverb does not have a poetic aspect like the Vietnamese oicotype, I would assume most cultures have a similar proverb. A main function of proverbs is to impart wisdom and parents generally want the best for their children. I would be surprised if a society that uses proverbs did not have one to warn children about the type of company they keep.

I love the linguistics of this proverb. It has clear poetic aspects even though the entire proverb doesn’t rhyme. The actual words used confuse me a bit, because I see ink as a problem in an analogy puzzle. If I were given this analogy puzzle, “ink” would not be one of my guesses:

____ : Dark :: Light : Bright

Ink sticks out like a sore thumb, but that aside I enjoy the poetry of the proverb and the underlying meaning.

The Show Must Go On

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: California
Performance Date: March 20, 2017
Primary Language: English

Saying: “The show must go on”

Meaning: Regardless of what happens on or off stage, the show must continue.

Analysis: This saying in showbiz is a testament to the commitment it takes to put on a full performance. It also says a lot about the performer’s commitment to the audience. No matter what may befall the performers, within reason, the people who came to watch must be honored.

Devil in Angel’s Clothing

Nationality: Iranian-American
Age: 78
Occupation: Retired
Residence: La Canada, CA, USA
Performance Date: March 12, 2017
Primary Language: English
Language: Persian/Farsi

Informant Tahereh Behshid is 78 years old and recalled a proverb she was taught as a young child.

I wanted to know if you could possibly talk about some proverbs you might have used when you were a child in Iran, and the context that you would use those proverbs in. So… do you have an example for me?

“Yes, my name is Tahereh Behshid, and the thing we usually heard from parents, it was [speaking in Farsi] ‘shaytan delah baseh fereshte.’ The devil in angel’s clothing. That means you watch out for the people, they come to you, around you. When they act very nice to you, you have to see what their intention is. So… that’s what it was.”

Analysis: Like many proverbs passed from parent to child, this one deals with imparting a valuable life lesson in very few words. Tahereh grew up as a poor woman in a rapidly modernizing urban area of Iran’s capital, and so with the influx of strangers to her hometown, this advice was likely to be especially valuable. She taught the same lessons, albeit in English, to her own children in the United States, who then passed them on to their children.

Guatemalan Eclipse Ritual

Nationality: Guatemalan
Age: 60
Occupation: Cook
Residence: Calabasas
Performance Date: April 23, 2017
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Note: The form of this submission includes the dialogue between the informant and I before the cutoff (as you’ll see if you scroll down), as well as my own thoughts and other notes on the piece after the cutoff. The italics within the dialogue between the informant and I (before the cutoff) is where and what kind of direction I offered the informant whilst collecting. 

Informant’s Background:

The informant was born and raised in Guatemala, but immigrated here to America when he was about seventeen. He has not and will probably never go back to Guatemala as he fears he will be killed.

Piece: 

When I saw my first eclipse… lunar, you know a moon eclipse? I heard… well first we moved to the country because my grandma was dying. I grew up in the city and when I moved into the farm, everything was new to me. So I remember when the moon eclipsed, everybody was there banging things- they were banging the ceiling of the house, they were banging drums, making noise, you know? Because they thought that it would be the end of the world. *laughs* I got so scared! *laughs* That night I couldn’t sleep. It was, it was kind of disturbing for me.

Were they trying to scare you?

I don’t know, maybe they were kind of, kind of ignorant you know? They thought that the moon was fighting with the sun. You know what I mean? And the sun was… it was like that. This is something that they’d think for years. They thought that the moon was fighting with the sun. So they were rooting for the moon and that is why they were making so much noise.

So they were cheering on the moon?

Yeah… it was weird. I don’t know if they still do that. They probably still do, or maybe not because you know… traditions sometimes die. It was in the 60s you know? The beginning of the 60s. I was very young.

Did they tell you to bang on things too?

They want me to. They want me to but I was like… scared. I was surprised you know cause I never saw one of those things. I mean I didn’t know that there was so much superstition in that… in that people’s heads. You know, I don’t know… there was dancing, they were looking at the moon. I was like… I don’t know. The only thing I remember I told my dad, “what happened?” And my dad just laughed. You know because my dad didn’t believe in all this stuff.

Piece Background Information:

Informant already expanded that he thinks that the people he witnessed partaking in this tradition were ignorant, and that he did not quite understand what was happening at the time.

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Context of Performance:

In person, during the day at informant’s house in Calabasas, California.

Thoughts on Piece: 

I could tell while collecting that the informant (who is my boyfriend’s father) was and still is very disturbed by this experience, which reflects in the fact that he is disconnected from Guatemala. He was very young when he witnessed this and it adds to why to this day, when we go out to lunch, he is always saying that Guatemalans are very superstitious- it scared him to death because he literally thought the world was going to end. Upon further research, I found further expansions on this belief that one must cheer on the moon during an eclipse so that it does not die. Apparently, without the moon, it is thought that there will be lots of deaths within the community and the age range of the persons involved in these deaths (children to elders) depends on the size of the moon being eclipsed.

“Locks don’t keep robbers from stealing. Locks keep honest men from making mistakes”

Nationality: Mexican-American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: March 21 2016
Primary Language: Spanish
Language: English

Title: “Locks don’t keep robbers from stealing. Locks keep honest men from making mistakes.”

Interviewee: Armando Vildosola

Ethnicity: Mexican-American

Age: 21

Situation (Location, ambience, gathering of people?): Just me and my older brother Armando, as I asked him to share his most important pieces of wisdom that our family has shared throughout the generations. We do this every so often as some way to strengthen the bonds that we have as brothers, something of a brother meeting or a brotherly bonding session. We are sitting in our home in San Diego around our dinner table, having just finished dinner. Out house is full of family walking about visiting from Mexico. We are both on spring break from school at USC.

Piece of Folklore:

Interviewee- “Our Grandpa used to say, “Locks don’t keep robbers from stealing. Locks keep honest men from making mistakes.””

Interviewer- “Do you really like that proverb?”

Interviewee- “Of course! That is why I told you it! That’s why I always tell you that. I think it’s really important to us and to our family. Plus, it wouldn’t hurt for other people to hear this too.”

Interviewer- “Do you remember when you first heard that proverb?”

Interviewee- “Not exactly the first time no. I kind-of just learned it cause grandpa said it so much.”

Analyzation: Everything about this made sense to me personally because I had heard this being said in our family many times. This proverb that was perhaps started by my Grandfather embodies my family’s views on people in the world. There are people that do evil things, and there is little that one can do to stop them from being evil. What one can do however, is make sure that an honest man stays honest. This saying is extremely important to my family, and that is mostly due to the hardships that my family has faced. That can be said for a lot of proverbs floating around. They are usually born from experience, and usually a painful one. They are born in the hopes that future generations will not have to feel the pain that past generations felt. In this case, do what you can to make sure people stay honest, but don’t expect a simple lock to keep robbers away. You need more, you need to expect them to be clever. One must always see ahead and ensure that bad things don’t happen to their family. My older brother obviously values this, and wants to make sure that I take it to heart and use it throughout my life. Because at the end of the day, the Vildosola family is the only real family we have.

Tags: Locks, Proverbs, Wisdom, Honesty