Filial Piety

FILIAL PIETY. What a mouthful! By Western standards, Chinese children have neurotic relationships with their parents. How do you best deal with parental, generational, Confucian expections? Go ahead, spill your guts ;) Do you feel guilt-ridden, or are you truly able to fulfill your duties as a son or daughter?

Me? I am a born-again Confucian. More later.

And for you non-Chinese, tell us just how odd this concept seems to you. My friends ask me, "Is it really not negotiable about taking care of parents in their old age? We've got long-term care for ourselves so we won't have to bother our children."

My reply: Long-term care, my foot! How can you expect to get the same level of care by strangers?

Mmmm, I'm a filial piety junkie myself, or perhaps I should say, I'm a Confucianism fangurl.

On the other hand, very little guilt here, I adore my parents. I don't think filial piety is all about hair-shirts and suffering. One of the little bits of Confucianism I learned as a child from a school text book talks about filial piety. The definitions were pretty broad. It gave examples: the sickly boy should take better care of his health so his parents don't worry, the rude boy should be more polite so he doesn't hurt their feelings, etc. All those things apply to my thinking on the subject.

I'm all for quality long-term care. It's not that it's not my duty, rather it's my duty to intelligently distribute the work of taking care of my parents so they receive the best care available. That includes taking care of the important things - their emotional and intellectual well being.

The reason why I mentioned this is because my non-Chinese friend thinks all his needs can be solved by long-term care and his daughters would not have to trouble themselves about him and his wife.

Then my old friend (since 5th grade--also not Chinese) spokeup. He is a physician and admin at a VA hospital. He said that his mom, also a physician, would have died at the long-term care facility they had initially placed her. They brought her home and she has grown progressively stronger.

Mvrdrk, very funny: "Filial piety junkie." I'll have to borrow it.

So what I conclude from your friends comments is the important thing about long term care is that someone who really cares about the individual person needs to be there. Long term care isn't a warehouse. You can't just shove people in and not think about it. Isn't that act of keeping a careful eye on things filial piety, in a way?

Yah, my physician friend said, it's the "little things that matter to the elderly." He pointed out the room temperature could be just a tad too cold or too hot and his mom would not call anyone to adjust it. It's seems a minor point, but it's really the small details that a child would pay attention to.

My Auntie Guo is 74, an artist and a respected arts administrator. She lives with and takes care of her mother, 90 and father 100. They wait up for her if my auntie is out visiting friends, just as if she were still a teen. They take care of one another. Auntie Guo's father is a well-known Taiwanese artist. He stays mostly in bed, but gets up for a couple of hours to paint. Auntie Guo grades him to keep him happy, always giving him A++ ;) The relationship is so beautiful. Auntie Guo is a good role model for me.

Your Auntie Guo is a hero!

I plan to go live near my parents if they every get to that point. The spouse will have to forage on his own.

Filial piety--Interesting topic and conversation.

The very sound of those words spoken and administered in Chinese used to make me grind my teeth. As the embodiment of teenage daughter rebellion, and as that first gen kid, I threw filial piety back in the face of my poor mum. Things were bad. And then I decided that I could and would speak her language. I gave my first "real" pay cheque to my--grandmother. My mum suggested it. In fact it should have gone to her. My gesture was understood right away.

>7 betterthanchocolate: That's sweet!

It is an interesting topic.

I forget where I saw it, but I ran across an article once on the web talking about American college students horrified reaction to old Chinese stories about filial piety. I'll have to see if I can find it again.

I am an American (ancestry German, Scots-Irish, & Welsh) who grew up in a multi-generational home. My grandparents lived upstairs. I never suffered from separation anxiety if my parents left the house, because I had "Mamaw" and "Papaw".

My parents moved to another state when I was 10. That was a very wrenching separation for me. When my grandparents were in their 90's I moved back to care for them. I am very willing to care for my parents as well when the time comes. I am an only child.

I respect filial piety and think modern American culture could benefit from closer family connections. However, I also think that it is much better for caregiving to be voluntary, not out of guilt. I don't know much about how much pressure is put on children raised with traditional Chinese values to care for their parents. It probably depends on the family. Care to enlighten us about what it involves for you?

Varies by family. In my house, no pressure, it was just assumed that that's how things were. In idle childrens chatter, we used to compete in how filial we were, even in our teens, though we weren't thinking of it in terms of filial behavior. ("Oh yeah?! Well, *I'm* going to live at home ForEver!")

That having been said, I believe that Chinese filial piety has a strong component of obedience, something hard for American-ized teens to cope with.

From the time they are babies, the common term for a good child is 乖 (guai). You ask babies if they are 乖. They tell people they are 乖. 乖 has strong connotations of modestly-behaved and obedient, rather than smart or competent or any of the other ways of thinking of 'good'.

>8 mvrdrk: Yes! I'd be very interested to read up on that perspective. Let me know if you do find it...

>9 waterlily:: Waterlily,
Neat household! I really like the idea of multi-generational households. It's one of many more viable alternatives, I think, to the cloistered nuclear family thing. I too was raised by both mother and grandmother. Where I could not get along with my mother, my grandma would understand, and vice versa.

>10 mvrdrk:: Mvrdrk,
Yes, I know that term well! I've always disliked it, because of its connotations that you clearly identify: that one is obedient, modest & restrained, filial. I think the value placed on obedience is hard to swallow, because there is always the risk that such obedience may lead to unhappy outcomes for the individual.

Do you know of a term (and a corresponding value), used to describe or refer to children (the next/younger generation), that suggests a more open consideration and respect in the language?

>12 betterthanchocolate:

I'm not a good one to come up with an alternate to guai, since I use the term, like the concepts and connotations, and expect it of myself and my kids.

I think you could use good, as in 好, but even that has connotations ...

Hey, what program do you use for the chinese characters? (At the moment I'm just copying and pasting the ones you typed.)

Hm, 好 as in "good" is.. good, as it's pretty straightforward. Here's one I thought of earlier today: "hao sun." As far as I understand, and maybe you could confirm this, the term suggests both obedience (the second character) and an attitude of listening or observation or consideration (the first character)--so that the former is based on the latter.

I guess it's the suggestion that one be unquestioning in one's obedience to authority that bothers me about the term 乖. *But*, no kids, so maybe I may change my tune yet!

>14 betterthanchocolate: betterthanchocolate, I use NJ Star Chinese wordprocesser. You can try it for a month for free. It's quite good and I also use it as a Chinese dictionary. Has the simplified Chinese and the fan-ti characters. I don't know what mvrdrk uses.

>9 waterlily: Waterlily, my non-Chinese friend says, "Americans have abandoned their old people." I am also an only child. I think old people are cute. I like the way my father toddles when he walks;d my parents vulnerablility inspires protectiveness. All the money in the world won't insure that you can give aging parents quality care at a long-term care facility--by quality, I mean mental stimulation, and most of all, their need to be a active, participating member of a family. My parents are young in spirit because they know they are absolutely necessary in my life as guides and mentors.

Oh, I've been a very bad daughter in my youth ;) so I am finally testing out the Chinese way in middle age.

I was a panelist on Chinese immigration in San Francisco on Wednesday. I took my parents, as did a professor of Asian American studies, as did the moderator. Now, THAT'S Chinese. Can you imagine a non-Chinese panel of 4, plus moderator, bringing their parents?? I thought it was so sweet that almost everyone did bring family. The elders were able to talk to one another.

I love meeting Asian-Americans. There is just so much commonality in our backgrounds that we often don't have to say too much to establish a level of comfort. I grew up far away from a Chinese community. I had to meet Chinese-Americans in China.

>14 betterthanchocolate: If you have MS Windows XP or later, it's built in to your operating system, all you have to do is turn it on.

I haven't figured out how to do it in Linux with gvim yet, I know it's possible, it just isn't very high on my priority list.

Years ago, I almost broke down and got NJ Star, but didn't really have a need for it. Now I can get similar capability for free and still don't have a need for something as advanced as that.

For dictionary, I use paper. I think I'll treat myself to an electronic one this year. It'll be a 'golden piggy' year gift or something.

If you stop and think about it, Confucianism and filial piety are all very authoritarian social models. Old Chinese social customs are very authoritarian and most societies derived from them, modern Chinese communism, Singaporean government, most of the modern Chinese immigrant societies, tend to reflect that. I don't have problems with authoritarianism in general so I'm not a good critic of it. Specific instances of authoritarianism, those I have problems with.

>16 belleyang: Me, too!

I think growing up without a Chinese immigrant community makes the whole Chinese-American experience very different from the stereotypical experience people think of when they see Asian-Americans.

What a lovely thread!

I only recently discovered, and have been beginning, to explore the Hua/Fa Mulan legend, in which "filial piety" is a central theme. I didn't know what it meant, beyond a vague sense that it had something to do with some kind of fidelity to the others in one's relationships, especially those with one's parents. And that the "piety" gave it some sense of "reverence" for the relationships.

I'm US-born, and non-Asian, but have lived in a Chinatown for 28 years. Through all those years I didn't want to learn Chinese -- the written language is beautiful, and I didn't want understanding it to interfere with the pure aesthetic pleasure of it. The beauty of it. Then I began, early last year, watching Chinese film with English subtitles (Mei Ah could do better in that regard) and now seriously regret, and am constantly kicking myself, for not realizing that I could all along have been learning how to speak and understand Chinese without also learning to read (and write) it.

As for "filial piety": in my older age I can see some merit in it; but had I known and conformed to that norm when a child and teen, I would never have got out of an unhealthy culture let alone gone beyond K-12. On the other hand, there is much to be said for the reduction in conflict -- and therefore of stress -- that "filial piety," when healthy, can induce.

Now I can return to Chinese film with a better understanding of the at-times apparent "overly obedient" nature of relationships. There is certainly a personal dignity, and respect for other individuals, especially the older, and their dignity -- and for generational continuity -- to be preferred over the fractious exaggeration of individualism resulting from the isolated nuclear family amnesia about their having been a past which actually continues in the present and into the future.