#parental devotion

Antiochus Yearning for Stratonice

Artist: Stefano Pozzi (Italian, 1699–1768)

Date: c. 1740

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, United States

Description

New Post has been published on http://www.therakyatpost.com/world/2015/03/30/china-museum-showcases-examples-of-filial-piety-to-encourage-parental-devotion/

China museum showcases examples of filial piety to encourage parental devotion

Guyi (China), March 30, 2015:

What makes a good son or daughter? At China’s first museum dedicated to the topic of “filial piety”, the answer seems to be: almost superhuman levels of devotion and sacrifice.

Respect for family elders has been a cornerstone of Chinese culture for millennia, but many believe it is being eroded by the country’s rapid economic growth.

The Modern Filial Piety Culture Museum, which cost more than US$1 million (RM3.71 million), is part of government-backed efforts to “pass on the value” — as a banner over the entrance exhorts.

In a grey brick courtyard building inspired by traditional Chinese architecture, slick panels and exhibits in gleaming glass cases tell of more than a dozen modern-day filial role models.

One is policeman Wang Chunlai, who provided his bedridden parents with years of medical care, giving them injections and blood transfusions.

“This man is a classic example of filial piety,” said museum volunteer Zeng Yan, in front of the Wangs’ tattered beds and discoloured bedpans, donated after their demise.

Others include an 8-year-old girl who provided constant care for her paralysed mother, and a schoolteacher who took his Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother everywhere he went.

Among the artefacts are a blue and yellow cart — something between a fairytale carriage and a wheelbarrow — in which two sons pulled their mother to more than 600 towns and cities across China to fulfil her dying wish to travel.

They wore out 12 pairs of shoes in the process, several of them on display beside the carriage in the museum in the southwestern province of Sichuan.

“I think that people often don’t consider their parents’ dreams. That’s the meaning of the exhibit,” Zeng added.

 Paragons of piety

Filial piety was the core value of China’s ancient sage Confucius, and outlandish tales have been used for centuries to spur readers to greater heights of parental devotion.

One of the country’s most renowned literary works is the Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety, written during the Yuan dynasty 600 years ago.

It includes a woman who breastfeeds her toothless step-mother, a son who tastes his father’s excrement to test for illness, and another man who sits naked at his parents’ bedside to prevent them being bitten by mosquitoes.

But China’s three decades of rapid economic growth have put families under unprecedented strains, with hundreds of millions leaving their parents behind as they migrate to find work.

Suicide rates among elderly people in some rural areas have increased five-fold over the last two decades, state-run media have reported, with family neglect seen as a major cause.

Projections show that 350 million Chinese —- one in four of the population -— will be aged 60 or older by 2030, almost twice as many as now.

At the same time “one-child policy” family planning rules mean the burden of care will usually fall on a single offspring.

A 2012 law requiring adult children to visit their aged parents “often”, or risk repercussions, has been seen as unenforceable.

Instead, Beijing has fallen back on celebrating examples of the virtue, with local bureaucrats holding competitions to find “filial children”.

State-run media have run pictures of hundreds of schoolchildren kow-towing before their parents to show their obedience — although social media commentators said such ceremonies discouraged independent thinking among children.

The museum, on a riverbank in the Sichuan backwater of Guyi, opened four months ago and local authorities provided at least a quarter of its eight million yuan (US$1.3 million) construction costs, its businessman founder Liao Lin told AFP.

An introductory panel features equal-sized portraits of Confucius and President Xi Jinping, with a quote from the current Communist chief urging officials to read the Standards for Being a Good Pupil and Child, a collection of Confucian sayings which emphasise filial piety.

 ‘They may feel guilty’

But the official drive has been criticised as a way for the state to shirk its duty to provide elderly care.

China’s civil affairs minister said last year that there were just 25 care beds for every 1,000 senior citizens, while health insurance rarely covers the costs of major procedures.

“Many Chinese families, facing smaller family size and family separation, are anxiously searching for new ways of fulfilling filial piety,” said Hong Zhang, a researcher at Colby College in the US.

“If the government is promoting the filial tradition, people can be cynical and see it as the government’s effort to find an excuse of not doing its job.”

Museum founder Liao, a tea and liquor magnate, admitted that heroic acts of filial piety alone were not enough.

“China’s social security system is still lacking,” he said.

Liao — whose own daughter is at boarding school and hopes to study abroad — said he “thought a lot” about his parents, and “did my best to serve them”, but would not give details.

“People will see these perfect examples, and be inspired to do even better,” he said of his exhibits.

By Andrew Jacobs and Adam Century, NY Times, September 5, 2012 BEIJING--Reading it now, six centuries after Guo Jujing wrote this paean to parental devotion, "The 24 Paragons of Filial Piety" comes off as a collection of scary bedtime stories. There is the woman who cut out her own liver to feed her sick mother, the boy who sat awake shirtless all night to draw mosquitoes away from his slumbering parents and the man who sold himself into servitude to pay for a father's funeral.

While the parables are even more familiar to most Chinese than Grimms' Fairy Tales are to Americans--the text remains a mainstay of educational curriculum here--they have understandably lost much of their motivational punch.

But when the government, in an effort to address the book's glaring obsolescence, issued an updated version last month in the hope that the book would encourage more Chinese to turn away from their increasingly self-centered ways and perhaps phone home once in a while, it wasn't quite prepared for the backlash.

Compared with its predecessor, the new book brims with down-to-earth suggestions for keeping parents happy in their golden years. Readers are urged to teach them how to surf the Internet, take Mom to a classic film and buy health insurance for retired parents.

Those good intentions have unintentionally kicked up a debate on whether the government, not overextended children, should be looking after China's ballooning population of retirees.

In a fast-aging nation where hundreds of millions of people have left their former homes in the countryside in search of jobs, "The New 24 Paragons of Filial Piety" strikes many as nearly as out of touch with the problems of modern China as the old parables.

Take, for example, the responsibility to "take one's parents traveling frequently." While feasible for successful professionals, the obligation is all but impossible for working people, especially the nation's roughly 252 million migrant workers, few of whom have ever experienced the joys of leisure travel.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics, their numbers are rising 4.4 percent annually, meaning that nearly 11 million rural migrants arrived in Chinese cities last year alone--and most likely left their aging parents behind.

Zhang Yang, a fruit vendor in Beijing, scoffed at the suggestion that he should take his parents on vacation, noting that he rarely stops working or has time to visit them in their hometown in Henan Province, roughly 400 miles south of the capital.

"One time I didn't get to go home for four years," he said sheepishly. "Business here is good, but I feel guilty for not being with my parents."

Li Ji, a popular columnist at the state-run Legal Daily newspaper, lashed out at the new guidelines, arguing that they would not be necessary if the government provided better care for its citizens. "If the national health insurance was up to par, children wouldn't have to worry so much about their parents' health, and if companies were required to provide a certain number of vacation days, children would be able to go home more often," he wrote.

Despite the demands of an increasingly fast-paced society, the Confucian idea of filial devotion is deeply embedded in Chinese society. Tradition dictates that children live with their parents and care for them in their old age, a convention that historically provided a safety net.

But the custom is rapidly fraying as children struggle with the logistical and financial burdens of caring for their aged parents.

This has proved particularly challenging in recent years to the huge numbers of only children born after the introduction of strict family-planning rules in the late 1970s. One result, demographers say, is a skyrocketing number of so-called empty nests filled by older people who live alone while their children build their own roosts in distant cities.

According to the Ministry of Civil Affairs, empty nests now account for more than 50 percent of all Chinese households; in some urban areas the figure has reached 70 percent. A 2011 report by the official Xinhua news agency said that nearly half of the 185 million people age 60 and older live apart from their children--a phenomenon unheard of a generation ago.

"The New 24 Paragons of Filial Piety," despite its ham-handedness, tries to address the root causes of loneliness.

It urges children to throw their parents a birthday party each year and listen attentively to their stories from the past. It even asks that children help widowed parents remarry, a task that some parents found objectionable.