• Genre and Sub Genre
  • Verbal Folklore: Superstition

• Language: English

• Country where Item is from: China

Informant Data:

• Informant is 19 years old and is currently a sophomore at Dartmouth College studying computer science. He was born in Beijing, China and lived there until coming to the United States to attend Dartmouth College.

Contextual Data:

• Social Context: This is a very widespread good luck/ bad luck superstition in China. The informant equates this superstition to be common knowledge observed from the Chinese language.

• Cultural Context: The negative context behind the number 4 is because it is a homonym for the word that means death in Chinese (死). The positive context behind the number 8 is because it rhymes with the Chinese word for wealth (发). Thus, the connotations of these two numbers is largely attributed to how they are pronounced in the Chinese language.

Item:

• In China, the number 8 is considered to be good luck
• In China, the number 4 is considered to be bad luck

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

Transcript of Associated File:

• Interview-Transcript_Jerry Wang

Informant’s Comments:

• Socially, when people select license plate numbers for their cars, they usually want the last number to be 8, so the sequence ends with like the number 8. So if you read the sequence, the last number rhymes with like getting rich. While people would avoid having the last number be 4 so when you read the license plate number it sounds like something death. The same applies for phone numbers as people want a lot of 8s in their phone number.

Collector’s Comments

• It is interesting to see that this good luck/ bad luck superstition take on a tangible form in that people are very particular about avoiding the number four in phone numbers and license plate numbers while trying to maximize the amount of 8s in phone numbers and license plate numbers.

Collector’s Name: Leo Lei

Tags/Keywords:

• good/luck/bad/chinese/license/phone/four/eight/china/death/wealth