Chinese Superstition

Superstition runs deep in Chinese culture, especially in southern China, like Fuzhou and Taiwan where my family is from. My sister Marie has been subject to a lot of these superstitions lately, having just given birth to Michaela. There are superstitions and beliefs about what types of food you should eat while you're nursing, about how to take care of the baby, etc. So she's been told to not eat foods in the "cold" family, only "warm" foods. This doesn't mean temperature of the food, but rather the category of food. For instance, watermelon is a cold food, even if you serve it piping hot. In addition she's been told to drink lots of liquids, especially warm hot soups, and in fact there are special fish and pork soups that are supposed to help her produce better milk for nursing Michaela.

My mother has long believed in Chinese superstitions. A year and a half after my parents were married, my sister Su fen was born. At that time my parents moved into their own home, a residence that was provided to them by my maternal grandparents. The house that my grandparents provided was a Japanese style house, filled with shoji screens and tatami beds.

At the time my dad worked late hours as a newspaper man. My mother spent the evenings alone while my father worked getting the newspaper out for the next day. Filled with her Chinese superstition, my mother imagined all sorts of ghosts and spirits as the wind blew through the Japanese house, rattling against the rice paper shoji screens.

More often than not she would get scared enough to take my sister and myself to my grandparents house, my mother's parents, to wait until my father returned.

This superstition continued to prevail even after we arrived in the United States. In our first rented home in Uniondale, my mother imagined the same ghosts and spirits in the evenings and refused to stay in the house until my father returned home late in the evenings from his second job or studies at New York University (his first primary job being his teaching position at Hofstra University). He kept long hours because we needed the money back then to pay back the debts incurred coming to the United States.

My mother would take my sister and myself to a local arcade and amusement center, where we had the chance to ride the Merry-Go-Round. She'd do this every evening my father would work or study late. And keep us there until it closed, just to avoid the ghosts and spirits.

This finally led my parents to the purchase of an all new home. That's really the reason my parents purchased a house on the eastern end of Long Island. It was one of the few places you could buy a home in a new development. In a brand new home you had no fear of ghosts or spirits.

Recently, my mother has had to spend evenings alone in her house while my dad stayed in the hospital (during the time his duodenum perforated). She confided in me she would stay awake hearing noises in the evening, and she could only get to sleep by leaving all the lights on in the house. Eventually my sister Marie, went to stay with her during that time to keep her company and so she could get some rest.

I guess some things you can't change about people. I just hope the spirits come to rest for my mother, and she can learn to live with them.