Title: Crab

General Information About Item:

• Customary Lore, Children Hand Games
• Language: Vietnamese
• Country of Origin: Vietnam
• Informant: Thuyen Tran
• Date Collected: May 13, 2019

Informant Data:

Thuyen Tran was born in Vietnam and lived there till she was eight years old. She then relocated to the California, United States with her mother, father, and younger brother. She joined Dartmouth College in 2015 to pursue her major in Mathematics. She hopes to be an educator and a school principal in future.

Rules:

Please refer to “Contextual Data” section for this example to learn more about the rules.

Text:

This is a non-verbal game.

Contextual Data:

The Crab game has non-verbal and involves only hand movements. This game would be played between two children for the purposes of keeping themselves occupied. To play this game, one has to twist one’s fingers to fold on top of each other. Each player’s hands would end up looking crab-like. Since children’s fingers are more flexible due to their youthfulness, this game is more suited for them. Their hands can be able to easily assume the folding that would look complex and impossible to an outsider. Once the players’ hands are in positions, they use their crab-like hands to undo the folded fingers of the other player, until they manage to unfold all their opponent’s fingers. The player to do this first wins the game. Since this game was primarily played between children, children would learn the rules of these games and how to play this game by playing with other children.

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

Transcript: 

(Crab Game)

Okay, so here’s how you assemble the hand… There you go. Then I have my fingers hitting each other, and then…yeah, this one loses…

Collector’s Name:

Wendy Kangethe ’19

Tags/Keywords:

• Customary Folklore
• Children Hand Games
• Crab