A mother showed me her daughter’s folded paper version of an age-old game and asked whether I had seen it before. She had made them herself, while growing up as a girl in Shanghai. A Fortune Teller, Whirlybird, or Cootie Catcher in the United States (for catching cooties) and a Chatterbox in Australia, the game has a long history. I hadn’t seen one for a while, but according to the book, Studying Girl Culture: A Reader’s Guide, girls in Japan were first observed playing this simple playground pastime as early as the 1600s. Social trends come and go, amazingly though, this simple one remains. It moved from the East to the West from generation to generation of young girls and in Melbourne 2013, the game is still alive and well.
bakersmith 