My Chinese mother always wears a jade bracelet around her wrist. She believes it will keep her safe. She once heard of a woman who tumbled down the stairs. Her bracelet cracked in half, but she was uninjured. The bangle took the fall for her.

When we were children, my mother made us move a pole. The City of Oakland had installed a street-cleaning sign in the dirt patch in front of our house, and my mother was not happy about it. She understood why the sign was necessary -- the street had to be cleared of cars and cleaned at night – but she objected to its placement so close to our front door.

So she handed my siblings and me shovels and spades, instructing us to dig out the steel post and move it three feet. There, it would face the alley between our house and our neighbor’s house.

The deeper we dug, the hotter we got, the more worried we became. We kept a lookout for cops and meter maids. Surely we were violating some city ordinance.

We didn’t know then why she was so adamant about moving the pole; we simply did what we were told. Years later, we learned that she thought the post, in its first location, would have diverted creative energy away from our house, preventing luck and wealth from entering. She had tried to explain feng shui to the workmen who installed the pole that morning, but they wouldn’t listen. She wanted to ensure happiness in our home; she wouldn’t let a steel post get in the way of that. Her Chinese beliefs would take precedence over decisions by the public works department.

Over time, my siblings and I were introduced to other laws of luck, especially when we prepared for Chinese New Year, an occasion steeped in symbolism and tradition, a celebration rooted in superstitions that dictated everything from the foods we ate to the ways we cleaned house.

On New Year’s Eve, like other Chinese, we enjoyed numerous pork, poultry, seafood and vegetable dishes, much more than we could ever finish in one sitting. If we had plenty left over, we said, we would not go hungry in the new year.
Our menu included foods we believed were particularly blessed. We had chicken because of the popular Chinese phrase "Eat chicken, good world." We had fish because the word for fish sounded like the word for abundance. We ate ho see, or oysters, because these words sounded like the ones for good news. We ate lettuce because the words for lettuce, sang choy, sounded like the ones for birth and fortune.

We behaved. Like other Chinese, we wore new outfits and settled debts. We visited friends and relatives. We gave and got tangerines and oranges with their leaves intact. We gave and got candies and cookies and crisp dollar bills in bright red envelopes. We did all this for luck.

One New Year’s Eve, my mother asked me to sweep the front stoop before dinner. The task would be easy, I thought, until I forgot what she had told me about motion and spirits. What were her instructions again? Should I sweep inward or outward? If I swept toward the house, would I sweep in bad luck? If I swept away from the house, would I sweep out good luck?

If something wonderful happened to my family in the new year, would it be a result of my cleaning skills? If something horrible happened, would it be entirely my fault? Did our collective fate depend on me and my broom? It seemed too great a responsibility to put in the hands of a 12-year-old. More than two decades later, I still do not know the proper way to sweep.

Folklorists and academics often try to define superstition. They conduct surveys on habit and personality. They devise pie charts, sketch bar graphs and calculate percentages. They want to know if superstitious people are illogical or practical, illiterate or educated. They toss around phrases like "emotional bias," "denial and delusion." They want to quantify luck, explain faith, separate fact from fiction. They ask questions to which we do not have answers.