Pondering the history of 100 Good Wishes quilts

I love old-fashioned research. I practically leapt for joy in school the day we were assigned to examine old magazines and I found an early 20th century ad for Jell-o. (It was pitched as an upscale item, can you imagine?) I could probably pitch a small tent in the library stacks of any major university and live happily the rest of my days if I only could smuggle in a few necessities (a coffee maker, my sewing paraphernalia, perhaps a cat...).

When I was planning my wedding, I indulged my love of research by tracking down the origins of the traditions we included in our ceremony. Armed with this information, I set out to edify our soon-to-be-dumbfounded guests by explaining in our program what the heck we were actually doing up there slurping that sake and why there were origami cranes everywhere. Our guests seemed to find the presence of the blurbs tolerable enough – or maybe they just turned the page – and it brought me deep satisfaction to put disparate pieces together to form a meaningful whole.

In the case of 100 Good Wishes quilts, however, we may be facing a puzzle that we may not easily be able to solve: just where did the idea originate?

Using the keywords 100 Good Wishes and Bai Jia Bei, I performed a few online searches and skimmed through the results. Google returned a ream of blogs where people like ourselves cataloged their experiences creating these quilts. Many users seemed to have copied and pasted the following explanatory paragraph into their blogs verbatim without attribution:

To welcome and celebrate a new life, there is a tradition in the northern part of China to make a Bai Jia Bei, or 100 Good Wishes Quilt. It is a custom to invite 100 people to contribute a single square patch of cloth. The 100 patches are sewn together into a quilt that contains the luck, energy, and good wishes from all the families and friends who contributed a piece of fabric. The quilt is then passed down from generation to generation. (100 Good Wishes Project 2000, "Introduction")

A few sites referred back to a Yahoo mailing list for adoptive parents (a possible source for the quote) where the concept was apparently broached in the spring of the year 2000. The web site for this mailing list remains vague on the details, stating only that "adoptive parents and prospective adoptive parents on the APC listserv learned of this tradition," not where they learned it, or from whom. Even the webmaster of this Ur-site admits, "We have not been able to find very much information about this tradition...," although she notes that one of the site members found a passage in a book by Pearl S. Buck that seems to capture its gist:

She must offer the child as an adopted son, by symbol, to other powerful families in her clan. Yet what friends had she? She thought and she pondered and she devised this plan. From the head of each of the highest one hundred families in the Empire, she required a bolt of the finest silk. From the silks she commanded the palace tailors to cut one hundred small pieces and from these make a robe for her child. Thus he belonged, by symbol, to one hundred strong and noble families, and under their shelter the gods would fear to harm him. (Pearl S. Buck, "Imperial Woman," p. 60)

This may be the closest we can come to a historical reference without access to a university library.

But, as another blogger points out, how much does the history matter? Although "we've got no real documentation," does the origin actually "matte[r] at this point since the tradition has established itself within the China-adoptive community"? Whether the custom of creating a 100 Good Wishes quilt has been practiced for hundreds of years in China or whether it was a more recent invention built on Chinese ideas, the idea of wanting to share the love and luck of 100 families with a baby is just as valid and just as meaningful. Even if it weren't a tradition before, it certainly is one now.

I cherish the hope that more evidence will come to light. In the meantime, I leave you with this quotation, as independent verification that the tradition did not spring fully formed from the head of an imaginative list member but probably is actually practiced in some parts of China today: "For those of you who have asked about the '100 Good Wishes' quilt, it is Chinese tradition in Northern China. I have a volunteer right now who is from that part of China. She explained that not only do they create quilts but they also make food and deliver it to the new family with their special wishes."

100 Good Dishes, anyone?