On a recent long-distance bus ride, one of the karaoke songs playing on the video monitor was called "Dong Ni" ("Understanding You"). A nicely dressed young man in a starkly modern apartment wistfully sang, "You quietly, quietly left..." and I thought it was another she-left-me-broken-hearted love song.
Then the scene switched to a young woman caressing the face of a small boy. I thought, "AND she took the kid with her!" The scene expanded to show the woman wearing timeless peasant clothes and the boy sitting in a wooden cart. How could a woman leave Mr. Modernity for the backbreaking labor of the countryside? I was so puzzled by this unlikely twist that I forgot to read the lyrics.
In the next scene, the boy watched the woman pushing a heavy millstone round and round without the benefit of a donkey and the lyrics read, "I never understood the joy or bitterness of your heart, I wish I could understand your heart...." Next, the woman was cooking over a wood fire and the singer was agonizing over how much he had depended on her. The Chinese verb "kao," meaning "depend on," is the one commonly used for a parent-child relationship, and it suddenly hit me: this pop song was an elegy to his dead mother! When was the last time anything like this appeared on America's Top 40?
In a lesson on idioms, our textbook said: "Bob thinks Maria is the best person in the world. In fact, he thinks about her all the time and would do anything for her. Who is Maria?" The book's answer is "the apple of his eye," but to me, it sounds like Maria is probably his girlfriend. I never expected a 22-year old student who had been in a serious romantic relationship for four years to quizzically ask, "Maria isn't his mother? Are you sure? My mother is the only person I think about that much."
I know that Confucian doctrine emphasizes filial devotion, but the Chinese passion for mothers goes far beyond cultural obligation. When our American friends teaching at Yunnan University and the Yunnan Police Institute asked their 18 - 20 year old students who they most admired in the world, 85% said their mothers. While Chinese people obviously respect their fathers, what they feel for their mothers is uncoerced love. What have Chinese mothers done to inspire such emotion? Are they really better mothers than American ones?
I'd have to say no. I observe a range of maternal styles here, from loving attentiveness to almost neglectful nonchalance, just as I do in America. I also see some things here that would be frowned upon in the West. Many Chinese mothers still consider hitting an appropriate method of discipline and if you tell them how smart or cute their child is, modesty requires that they insist--right in front of the child--the kid is actually quite stupid and ugly.
Perhaps the most strikingly different characteristic is what Americans would consider to be the excessive demands of many Chinese mothers. Once, while leafing through a real estate brochure I'd brought from Cambridge, ZXY asked to tear out a page showing a multi-million dollar house, complete with enormous swimming pool, that appealed to her. "I want to show this to my son," she said, "so he knows what kind of house I would like him to buy me when he grows up." I looked at her face, but saw no evidence that she was joking.
One of my Chinese tutors told me a story about a friend of hers who had nearly died in childbirth. After hemorrhaging uncontrollably and passing in and out of consciousness, her condition finally stabilized to a point where her husband could come to her bedside. He was openly weeping, sobbing about the bitterness of childbirth. Deeply moved by his emotion, the wife said, "It's okay, don't cry. I'm alive, the baby is alive, don't worry about me." The husband rubbed his eyes and said, "I wasn't crying for you! I was thinking about the pain I must have caused my mother!"
Chinese people complain about corruption, censorship, traffic, weather, food, salaries, spouses, children, the educational system, and American arms sales to Taiwan, but I have never once heard a complaint about a mother, even when I think it would be perfectly justifiable to criticize her behavior.
When one Chinese friend, a lapsed Muslim, invited her mother to stay with her family in Kunming for a year (something that already stretches the imagination of most Americans), she did not take into account her mother's dietary requirements. Upon arriving, her mother insisted that no one, not even her non-Muslim son-in-law or granddaughter would eat pork in the house. When my friend's husband refused to comply, mom went back to the countryside and my friend asked her husband for a divorce! I've since heard endless complaints about her husband--who had until that point been the most devoted of my friends' spouses--but not a peep about what I consider to be her mother's rude and quite extreme demands.
I don't have any answers yet about why the Chinese adore their mothers so deeply, but in the meantime, I can tell you that while China is not necessarily one of the best places in the world to be a wife, it is the ideal country to be a mother--assuming, of course, one doesn't long for several kids.
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