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The Best Kids Chinese Parents Could Ask For
They made you. They are you. And yet you won’t friend them on Facebook. Breaching that Great Wall between you and your parents, if you’re lucky enough to still have them, is the final step to actualized adulthood. If we may, Dr. Phil? “See, to get love, ya gots ta give love, first. And if y’all wanna give love, ya gots ta love yurself first. Now ya cain’t love yurself without lovin’ your parents.” That being said, parent-worship was Confucius’ version of a 401K. Chances are your kids won’t leave you to state charity if they fear a few eons on the fourth level of Chinese hell. There are 24 levels of hell, incidentally, just as there are 24 Chinese pillars of filial piety. Coincidence? Perhaps, but see the lengths some of these pillars went to to keep their folks happy – milking deer, scrubbing chamber pots, and the like. Whatever the case, in China, love is a verb. Ding Lan: Idolizing His Parents (Literally) You’d figure if your parents die and leave you an orphan, then the filial contract is null and void, right? Not in China; not in China. Ding Lan proved right savvy about making his way in the world, and had scrabbled together a healthy living as a merchant while still a young man. Nothing would do on building his new house, though, than to have a sculptor carve two wooden statues of his parents, looking as benign as he remembered them. Ding Lan went the whole nine, bowing to his parents first thing in the morning and last thing at night, burning money and incense at their feet on all the important holidays. You gotta serve somebody, as Bob Dylan tells us, and Ding worshipped the graven idols of his long-departed parents. But there is that in a woman which wants the soul of a man (again, Bob Dylan), and Ding Lan’s wife, although well provided for, resented that the best part of her husband would forever belong to memories and not to her. One day, bored and spiteful, Mrs. Ding went and carved a naughty character on the back of her wooden mother-in-law’s hand, figuring hubby would never see it. He did, of course. She cracked quickly under questioning, and Ding unceremoniously dumped her as soon as she confessed, putting her out on the street and divorcing her with all expediency. Oprah and her audience would have flayed him alive, but a man who will leave his wife for disrespecting mom is a real man, in the Old China book. Tan Tzu – The Deer Milker It’s like De Niro said in The Deer Hunter: “One shot. That’s what it’s all about. One shot.” Tan Tzu lived in the Spring and Autumn Period, which resembled the Vietnam War for sheer civil war pandemonium, but lasted three hundred years. It wasn’t a good time to have old, feeble parents without Blue Cross, eyesight nearly gone. They needed deer milk, before they started getting lost on the way to the outhouse and stumbling into the ravine that edged their rough hut. Such milk was dear (See what we did there?) at the apothecary’s, even when in supply. Tan Tzu barely had that with which to afford his folks’ coffins (Peasants bought them as soon as they could, death the one certainty.) So he made like Buffalo Bill and lured three of the loveliest, dumbest blond does he could into his pitfall trap. Clad in a reasonable semblance of a harmless deer, he learned to approach herds without frightening them, some at last suffering him to squeeze his due from their furry teats. Not without more than a few cloven-hoof kicks, of course, but Tan Tzu could suffer any pain for his parents’ good. Indeed, even a near-mortal arrow wound could not put him out of mind for his parents’ well-being. A hunter, spying a plump yet low-slung doe skulking about its mates, drilled it in the hind end from a good hundred paces. Imagine his surprise on hearing his prey speak, “The deer. It’s getting away….the milk.” After hearing Tan Tzu’s story, the hunter was moved enough to trap lactating deer and tether them at the hut of the filial pillar, until Tan’s parents had their sight restored. The reason Tan Tzu himself could not have taken such measures and saved a pierced rump is lost to the ages. Scholars speculate that blind devotion clouds the faculties. Huang Tinjian – Sweetening the Pot Not a lot of story here, but a pillar of piety is a pillar of piety, third act or no. Huang Tianjian was certainly rich enough to have hired help attend to the daily necessaries, and did. He was a celebrated poet and calligrapher, and more financially important, a high-ranking official. Yet amidst all the obligations of an ancient official- KTV visiting, providing for nubile young women, flouting traffic laws in his Audi chariot – Huang claimed one piece of household drudgery exclusively as his own: cleaning out his aged mother’s chamber pot and placing it back in her quarters each evening. He would entrust no one else with the duty (See what we … never mind.) We’re China culture mavens, not psychoanalysts, so we’ll leave the Freudian ramifications to the experts. We can’t even speculate that it was recompense for changed diapers. From time immemorial, Chinese parents have dispensed with the Pampers and invested in ass-less pants. Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com This story was written for China Expat, a blog for expats living in China. China Expat was established by Chris Devonshire-Ellis, who is also the founder of the China business site, China-Briefing.com. |
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