Author: blschrad

As we saw in the novel from Ha Jin, and her short story “Bad Joke”, free speech can be a difficult issue with the Chinese society. Simple jokes can land people in prison, and they can possibly not even have bad intent, but that doesn’t matter in many cases in China. Speaking out against the government is strictly prohibited, even online. For example, there was a story that came out a while back about the image of Whinny the Pooh’s face being banned in China, even on their internet servers because of a meme that president Xi Xinping found offensive. Some people compared Xi’s face to that of a cartoon bear and the entire country found that image banned. Speech is nothing to take lightly in China, and people can and have been put in prison, and worse for things they have said, or even put on the internet. Chinese society and America differ strongly on this front as free speech is seen in the first amendment of the Constitution. We place that much importance on it. China may pretend that they allow for free speech in their country, but the simple fact is that they restrict their people’s rights to speech in a great majority of cases.

While reading the story “The Woman From New York” from Ha Jin, one of the biggest things that stuck out to me was the fact that suing someone for defamation was inconceivable from the Chinese perspective. They simply could not comprehend that someone would want to sue someone else for money because they tore down their character. They say, “Who had ever heard of a court that would handle such a trifle?”, and “why on Earth would she think of “pay” as a solution? This was a matter of name and honor, which no money could buy”. This is a stark contrast to the way we think in the United States. People often think of lawsuits as the first solution to problems of this matter. We often think that if the defamation can be corrected in a court of law and some sort of compensation can be given to us, then for the most part, all is well again. That is simply not the case in China, people there do not sue nearly as much as we do. We are a society that sues people and entities every day of the year, it is a very normal thing to hear about people suing corporations or even the government, and definitely each other, but that is just not the case in China. I don’t think any of us could imagine a Chinese person suing their government, especially if they can react this adversely to the thought of a simple defamation lawsuit. It is difficult to say whether one way of doing things in this scenario is better than the other, but they are extremely different and I feel that they have impacts on the society at large as well as to how people should behave and what all is acceptable or not.

In my ED 227 class yesterday my class was fortunate enough to have a guest speaker who grew up in Afghanistan to speak with us about his childhood, and how society worked in Afghanistan especially regarding women and religion. He told us that when he grew up in Afghanistan women did not have really any rights to do anything besides be in the home taking care of the house, their children, and their husband. He told us that at the age of 9 years old, girls can begin to be married to much older men, always in arranged marriages. He told us that there was great disparity between men and women both in society and in their religion of Islam, but the essential argument we got from him is that women did not have any rights in Afghanistan, they were seen more as objects than women, or even people. He told us that it is extremely common to see teenage girls, even as young as 9 years old being married to men in their 30’s.

If we compare this to China we see that even though things are certainly not perfect for women in China from the examples that we’ve seen throughout our readings, they are certainly not quite like the conditions for women in Afghanistan. Yes, China does have a great deal of arranged marriages, but they are not marrying young girls to grown adult men. Chinese women are allowed to go out in public and wear clothes that they desire, but in Afghanistan women need to be accompanied by men in public and always need to be wearing their hijab in public.

The great disparity between the treatment and rights of women between China and Afghanistan is really shocking to me and I feel that sharing it on the blog will give good perspective between some of the culture differences between China and a nation in the Middle East.

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.

The excerpts from The Analects that we read for class both reinforced my prior knowledge of Confucius and his teachings, as well as providing me with further knowledge regarding his teachings. Before we read these excerpts I was under the impression that Confucius only emphasized filial piety and education, but since reading these excerpts I know there is far more that Confucius stood for as well. Confucius not only spoke about the aspects of filial piety and education that he stood for the most, but he also spoke about the way that governments should be treating their people to make society the most equitable for everyone. For example, “The Master said: “If good men were to govern a country for a hundred years, they could overcome cruelty and do away with killing. How true this saying is!”. Confucius also writes, “The Master said: “If you govern the people legalistically and control them by punishment, they will avoid crime, but have no personal sense of shame. If you govern them by means of virtue and control them with propriety, they will gain their own sense of shame, and thus correct themselves.”. So, not only does Confucius care deeply about filial piety and education, he also cares a great deal about the way that governments treat their people and how they let societies function.