Richardm. Nice touch . . again.
HG
these are all great posts. funny. interesting.
i believe in stitions, yes. super stitions, not at all. but they are fun to contemplate.
itās like UFos and gremlins and ghosts and reincarnation and heaven and heck. the human imagination is magnificent in its reach!!!
the pig toes one was FUNNY! LOL!
i think all agricultural societies were like this. my grandma from old Europe was full this hocus pocus too. so in few generations here, all this will be gone. thank GOD!
Bingo!
And thanks to you too, Toe!
Letās keep this to Taiwanese and Chinese superstitions, and perhaps also their Western parallels.
Neāer cast a cloot til May is oot.
Oh, hereās a Taiwanese one ā After we got married, I began having trouble sleeping (OK, OK, enough of the sniggering!) but it wasnāt until we changed the bedsheets that we discovered that ma had scattered tiny silver coins between the mattress and the sheet. Something to do with prosperity, I think. Doesnāt seem to have worked too well.
Or my ex-boss who used to drink a foul paste of black sesame seeds āto make her hair black.ā Sure enough, her hair was indeed black ā as was that of every other Chinese person in her office.
Iām not superstitious but . . .
Was having trouble finding a job I liked several years back when my ma in law decides she and I should pop down and burn some sticks at Long Shan temple. Threw those wooden things and got the right side up business in the first three attempts. Sure enough the next week I land a job Iām pretty happy about.
However, around a month later ma comes back and says it would be only reasonable if we went back and gave thanks. Now I donāt know if Kuan Yinās got something about people doing the bai bai thang when their ripped but I was fired the day after. The first time Iāve ever been fired in my life!
Iām too scared to go back.
After recovering from that, my wife convinced me that if I changed my Chinese name, all the blessed fruits of heaven would rain on our lucky lives. Went to change jobs sometime later and there was no end of hassle about having gotten one contract in one name and another in the new one. They came damned close to not giving me the job! And! One of the characters in my wifeās new name is absent from almost every computer you care to imagine requiring them to make two characters using the radicals. Never, never, never, again!
HG
Thatās ridiculous Huang Guang. Of course you losing your job had nothing to do with Kuang Yin. It was probably because the chickenās head was facing you at your company dinner.
They say couples getting married are lucky. We won around $40,000NT on the receipt lottery the month we got married.
For a long time I had trouble finding a suitable job in Taiwan; I never quite fitted into anything. Until, that is, my wife went to a temple to do her thing. This one:
If a man doesnāt finish his entire bowl of rice, his girlfriend / wife will get acne.
if a man does finish all of his bowl of rice, everything, not a kernel left, his pregant wife will lost her baby.
oich
Couples should put dates (the fruit, of course) on their bed if they want to have a baby.
Supposedly the Chinese word for date (zao ze) relates to the expression āZao sheng guei ziāā¦ a blessing to have children.
Interestingā¦ but I think youāre supposed remove the dates before you actually get down to biz-nass.
Apparently, chocolate, coffee and black tea will also affect the hue of your child.
Try going to a Taiwanese funeral. Some many superstitions that I was afraid to move!
A Reuters story (āChina probes bizarre death of falling birdsā) had the following: [quote]Chinese authorities have been quietly investigating the mysterious deaths of thousands of tiny birds said to have fallen from the sky over Communist Party chief Hu Jintaoās birthplace, sources say.
The Yangzi Evening News and the Nanjing Daily said more than 10,000 bramblings dropped like ābird rainā from the sky in Taizhou, in the eastern coastal province of Jiangsu, on Tuesday, considered a bad omen at the beginning of the new lunar yearā¦[/quote]
Now here comes the really good part: [quote]Chinaās atheist Communist Party virtually wiped out superstition in the years after sweeping to power in 1949, but such beliefs have grown in the wake of economic reforms, amid a spiritual vacuum.[/quote]
Superstition was, until recently, virtually eliminated from China?! What a fool this reporter is!
i generally consider that a bad omen.
ā If a cat jumps over a dead body, the body will become the living dead.
ā Donāt hang your washing out to dry at night; ghosts will inhabit the clothing.
In China & Taiwan, men are associated with the left hand and women with the right, also where palm readers look to determine when to marry, how many children, etc. Continuous palm lines mean tempers and little patience, while broken palm lines mean prosperity and fortune.
Grow the pinky fingernail past the first wrinkle of the ring finger, to ward off the ālittle spiritā.
Shut the bathroom door to prevent luck and fortune from flushing away.
Close the front door and open the rear, or open the front and close the rear, to prevent luck from passing through.
888 āba ba baā on the business card phonetically as āfa fa fa (chien)ā to reap wealth and fortune.
Fish tank at a businessā front door; fish never stop swimming, customers never stop coming.
Chopstick in rice = stick of incesnse at the temple + bad luck/death.
Donāt drink cold water - you will get sick!!!
Donāt get your hair wet when it is hot - you will get a cold.
Ghosts live in the sea and come out in Summer to get you! Donāt swim! (Has this got something to do with the coastal communities discouraging children from swimming in water that has human effluent in it at the height of summer?)
:loco:
A-Da-Ma-Sho-To