Lucky Number 168 – Chinese

Title: Lucky Number 168 – Chinese

General Information about Item:

  • Sign Superstition
  • Language: English, Chinese
  • Country of Origin: China
  • Informant: Meifang Buchsteiner
  • Date Collected: 02-26-2018 (via Skype)

Informant Data:

  • Meifang Buchsteiner was born in Taipei, Taiwan in June 27th, 1964. She moved to the US halfway through her college career to pursue a degree in Information Technology at Bradley University. After living in St. Louis, Missouri for about seven years, she met her husband Juergen Buchsteiner through work. Six months after they met, they got married and immediately moved to Germany, giving birth to her first son Juergen “Wei Wei” soon after. Six years later, she gave birth to her second son McCoy. In 2011, she and her family moved to San Jose, California, where they remain to this day.

Contextual Data:

  • While raising Wei Wei in Germany, she was disappointed in the lack of Chinese schools because she felt it was important to keep Wei Wei connected to his ethnic roots. As a consequence, his first language was actually Mandarin Chinese, as she read children’s stories and fables to him all the time. His father was at work most of the day so Wei Wei did not learn German or English until he attended school. Furthermore, she always taught him about other facets Chinese culture, such as lucky numbers.

Item:

  • The number 168 is lucky because of the sentence that it phonetically sounds similar to in Cantonese. It sounds similar to “one path to prosperity”: 1 is “one”, 6 is “path”, and 8 sounds like “prosperity/luck”. Therefore, you tend to see the number 168 at Casinos, on license plates, and other novelty items in China. People want to keep these numbers close to themselves as they believe it will bring them luck and prosperity.

Collector’s Name: Juergen Wei Buchsteiner

Tags/Keywords:

  • Superstition
  • Lucky Number
  • 168
  • China

 

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