Filial piety arguably plays the biggest role throughout the story of “Flame”. One of the biggest moments in the story was of the main character leaving the man that she loves, Hsu Peng, for a man that her mother wants her to marry. She is not happy with this, but she decides to go along with her mother’s plan not only because of her wishes for her to marry this man, but also because the other man would allow for her and her mother to be able to eat and in the long run to survive. So it was two fold for her decision to leave Hsu Peng, but she cites her filial duty as the main reason why she decides to leave the man that she loves and marry a man she has never met.
I would argue that something like this would never happen in the United States today or really any Western country for that matter. Sure, the duty and respect that we pay to our parents in our daily lives play a great deal. If I look at my life specifically, I hold a great deal of respect for my parents and their wishes for how I should carry out my life, and for the most part I do my very best to respect their wishes whenever I am physically possible. However, one area that I have tended not to hold my parents in high regard is when they have tried to tell me their wishes, or try to sway me in one way or another regarding my romantic life. And I would argue that most people in America would feel similar to that. The great disparity in filial piety, particularly regarding love and marriage between China and more Western cultures is fascinating to me, and it is difficult to say if one is better than the other. Simply because we have grown up and lived in a culture in which we marry for love and tend to not have marriages arranged by our parents, or even regularly accept their wishes regarding our relationships does not mean that the way China does it is worse. Couples get divorced in both countries, so one method is not fool proof or necessarily better than the other.