Outsiders will never understand the horrible influence of Confucian thought on the parent-child relationship unless they actually dig into the source material. In traditional Confucian culture, the idea that the child can be superior to the parent is legitimately incomprehensible. Even proposing it as an idea will get you looked at in the same way we'd look at someone trying with all sincerity to argue that 2 + 2 = 5. Suggesting that things should be otherwise is as socially taboo as casually asking a father if you can rape his daughter to death in front of him. Thousands of years worth of Asian cultural traditions, literature, philosophy and artwork has been spent reinforcing the absolute and unbreakable obligation of the child to be submissive to their parents in all things, regardless of how irrational, stupid and petty they are. The fact that one is the parent and the other the child is automatic justification; the parent is right because they are the parent, there are no exceptions.
Traditional Filialism and the Filial Son In traditional Chinese culture (I refer here most specifically to the period of the Ch'ing Dynasty), one was expected to be filial if nothing else. For the son or daughter of a gentry-literati family, the principle of hsiao or filial piety was at the very center of personal, family, and social existence. Its mystique was so powerful and so pervasive that Fung Yu-lan, a leading contemporary Chinese philosopher, has called it "the ideological basis of traditional [Chinese] society." Whether he was seven or seventy, a son's attitude toward his parents was expected to be one of reverence, obedience, and loyalty. Nor was this to be a token response, since if it did not stem naturally from his inner being, he was not being truly filial. He learned how to be a filial son from his parents and his older brothers and sisters, through the unconscious transmission of cultural forms as well as through their conscious elaboration. And the indoctrination began early: when only three or four, a child might be told stones (in a culture very fond of storytelling) of the famous 'Twenty-four Examples of Filial Piety." These included such tales as that of the eight-year-old boy who allowed mosquitoes to "feed without restraint upon his blood until they were satisfied" in order to prevent them from biting his parents; of the seventy-year-old man who dressed himself in gaily-colored garments and played like a child "in order to amuse his parents"; and the most impressive story of all, entitled "On Account Of His Mother He Buried His Child," which is worth quoting in full:
"During the Han dynasty, Ko Keu, whose family was very poor, had a child three years old. Keu's mother usually took some of her food and gave to the child. One day he spoke to his wife about it, saying, "We are so poor that we cannot even support mother. Moreover, the little one shares mother's food, Why not bury this child? We may have another; but if mother should die, we cannot obtain her again." His wife did not dare to oppose. Keu, when he had dug a hole more than two feet deep, suddenly saw a vase of gold. On the top of the vase was an inscription, saying, "Heaven bestows this gold on Ko Keu the dutiful son. The officers shall not seize it, nor shall the people take it." - Source: Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism - A Study of Brainwashing in China, page 361.
"During the Han dynasty, Ko Keu, whose family was very poor, had a child three years old. Keu's mother usually took some of her food and gave to the child. One day he spoke to his wife about it, saying, "We are so poor that we cannot even support mother. Moreover, the little one shares mother's food, Why not bury this child? We may have another; but if mother should die, we cannot obtain her again." His wife did not dare to oppose. Keu, when he had dug a hole more than two feet deep, suddenly saw a vase of gold. On the top of the vase was an inscription, saying, "Heaven bestows this gold on Ko Keu the dutiful son. The officers shall not seize it, nor shall the people take it." - Source: Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism - A Study of Brainwashing in China, page 361.
