How did everyone's pulls go~~??!!?

Let's see how long it took me to paint it now 🥀

“The Jin Guangyao in my eyes and the Jin Guangyao in your eyes – as well as the Jin Guangyao in the eyes of the world – are all completely different people.”

Lan Xichen says these fateful words in episode 43 of CQL. And honestly, I think it’s really interesting to see the varied “Jin Guangyaos” in the eyes of different people in fandom! 

Everyone weighs differently — how much Jin Guangyao’s varied motivations (from ambition to the search for dignity) contributes to the choices he ultimately makes; and even the choices available to him in the first place! 

But in the English-speaking part of the fandom, I think what’s less explored is how much of a hold the traditional Chinese virtue of filial piety (孝 xiào) (deference to one’s elders, usually parents) had over Jin Guangyao’s motivations and choices available to him. 

I suspect that an appreciation for how deeply entrenched the virtue of filial piety is in Chinese culture might make one more likely to be sympathetic to Jin Guangyao as a character. After all, the many self-defeating decisions that we see Jin Guangyao make regarding his father and mother — so much of it feels startlingly similar to stories of filial piety celebrated in Chinese culture. In countless other parables and proverbs about filial piety, Jin Guangyao would be valorised. But in MDZS, what we have is a tragedy.

In this post, I’m going to try to get at this, through exploring how filial piety might have influenced Jin Guangyao, namely through two of his fateful decisions — to continue serving his father even as he was being abused and going back for Meng Shi’s remains. I’d like to suggest that both can be read as a deconstruction of filial piety, as part of MXTX’s broader deconstruction of traditional family values as a modern author. But caveat as always that this is heavily coloured by my own experiences with the value of filial piety :P And this post is going to be long….

While both Chinese and Indian cultures prize filial piety to an extent that’s difficult for Westerners to understand, there are a lot of differences between them, both in practice and in underlying philosophy. I don’t have the language or academic chops to lay them all out, but two differences came to my mind reading this post was the communal nature of filial piety as I understand it.

Putting under a cut, since filial piety is so often easily misunderstood when it comes to eastern vs western social paradigms: