Entry 2: Yearly Lunar Episodes

Week 3: Speech Events

Following Mary Fong’s (2000) study of the ‘Luck Talk’ in celebrating the Chinese New Year, I was inspired to write a follow-up piece examining Singaporean Chinese people’s ways of speaking during the New Year event.

To conduct my study, I roped in my sister’s (Age: 19) and mother’s (Age: 49) help. I interviewed them separately on areas mentioned by Fong in her article. Though my study is not meant to be exhaustive, it suggests that some ‘Luck Talk’ does permeate conversations during the Lunar New Year, and it happens more so during the festive season than in everyday talk.

I focussed on the 2 research questions that Mary Fong highlighted:

1. What is the meaning of bad luck and good luck?
2. What are the speech acts of 'Luck Talk' related to the beliefs of good and bad luck of the Singaporean people during our Chinese New Year celebration?

Below are their responses (edited for succinctness):

Question 1:

Overall, both my sister and mother responded in a similar fashion saying bad luck is when things do not go your way all the time. Typical examples would include misfortunes in life, like loss of money, sudden lost of loved ones and inability to reach certain goals at work. Good luck is the opposite of bad luck. It happens when things seemingly go your way and you meet good fortunes in most of the things you set out to do.

However, my mother added that bad luck and good luck changes from year to year for a person and one can carry out certain acts to improve one’s luck.

Question 2:

Generally, both participants agreed with Fong’s findings that greeting and well wishes are exchanged to express good wishes and greetings for the purpose of creating a happy ambience and sharing hopes of good luck with one another to start off the Lunar New Year.

On the portion about positive conversation, my sister highlighted that a proto-typical positive conversation that follows after exchanging greetings would include questions like:

• Are you still studying?
• What are you majoring in?
• Which year of study are you in?
• Do you have any boyfriends?

What is interesting in that she mentioned that she is usually asked similar questions yearly by the same relatives.

This leads me to ponder if this constitutes to a positive conversation after all? Yes, you can view it as your relative being concerned about what’s going on in your life and he/she is trying to be positive by asking you seemingly forward-looking questions. However, if he/she has truly paid attention, would he/she still be asking you the same questions yearly?

No doubt, this situation usually takes place more often between distant relatives, it has become a speech event that never fails to occur take between my sister and some of my relatives during the festive season.

My stand is that I deem these speech events to be somewhat positive in nature, and it could also be a way to avoid saying words that signify death, sickness, poverty, or anything else unlucky so as not to invite bad luck for the coming year.

To my fellow GEK 1036 peer(s) who have encountered similar situations before, what is your take on it?