In the Uzbek language, spoken in the central Asian republic of Uzbekistan itself as well as parts of its neighbouring countries Afghanistan and Tajikistan, the word suyunchi (also spelled sevinchi) connotes a very particular type of gift or present. The word whose root meaning in Uzbek is joy describes the gift a person offers or receives on the occasion of good news.
Its most common usage is related to the birth of a child, where the bearer of good news rushes to the relatives and solicits suyunchi in return. In most cases, any present will be symbolic, but the more ostentatious or merely grateful recipients will give cash or other expensive items. In a male-dominated society like Uzbekistan, the value of suyunchi may increase with the arrival in the family of a baby boy.
The essence of the suyunchi is that the messenger has to deliver the news in person. In cases involving births, anxious grandparents would often wait anxiously, their gifts ready.
My family used to live close to a maternity hospital, so we were often the first to deliver the news from the delivery ward to our many aunts and cousins. My own mother was a frequent messenger, and suyunchi-getter.
Around eight years ago, I was living in a university dormitory. Because personal letters were given to a concierge who would distribute them at her whim, individual students were often entrusted with letters to hand to others. One day, a fellow-student brandished a letter I had been expecting from a scholarship programme I had applied to. She did not know what the letter was about, but the fact that someone in America bothered sending an Uzbek student a letter was already good news.
After seeing the letter and understanding that my application had been successful, I could not contain my happiness. I took whatever money I had in my pocket and rewarded my good messenger. At that moment it felt like I was exchanging the little money I had for a big change in my life, so it was totally worth it and it seemed a natural thing to do.
This is suyunchi.
The resilience of the custom may partly be due to the fact that good news is often scarce in modern Uzbekistan. For example, although Uzbekistan has a national health-care system, in practice patients have to pay the doctors who deliver their babies on the spot. In pre-1991 days, when Uzbekistan was part of the Soviet Union, this resembled more of a tip like the cigars fathers traditionally offer in some western countries.
Nowadays, the doctor or midwife who delivers the baby demands a much more substantial reward, and the payment is often called suyunchi rather than a professional doctors fee. Needless to say, the value of suyunchi is higher where a caesarian section is performed not everyones idea of good news!
Every tradition is capable of subversion. Many Uzbeks of my generation or older recall a late 1970s film called Suyunchi: that rare thing, a feelgood Soviet classic. The main character is a goofy unemployed man who lives with his mother, his wife, and ten children all boys. The comic storyline highlights and gently satirises traditional Uzbek values and contemporary social issues. At the end of the movie, the wife gives birth at last, to a girl. Her youngest son runs around their village, screaming at the top of his lungs: Suyunchi! Suyunchi!
