Telling Stories, Saving Families
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not give up the family she and her husband have built through years of
hardships. Lin Zhu leaves the city for good.
Lin Zhu’s departure does not save the marriage. Kang Wei-Ye and
Duan Li-Na have divorced, and their daughter lives with her mother. By a
chance encounter, Kang meets a girl who looks exactly like his secret lover in
his junior high school. The girl is cheerful, lovely, and care-free. She uses his
money, offers him sex, and cheers him up with coarse Jokes. However, because
of a large age difference, they do not have common interests. Kang wants to
establish a family, but the girl Just laughs at his idea of getting married. Being a
free man, Kang constantly feels empty and often finds himself at a loss. He
realizes that romantic sexual love is imaginary while a stable family is real. He
calls Duan Li-Na and begs her to let him return to her and their daughter.
Messages from the Three TV Dramas
The three TV dramas are surprisingly identical to each other. Their
common message is: save the family and traditional values. To Chinese, family
is the fundamental structure of the human race. Since family is the primary
group within Chinese society, family solidarity and family relationships are
constantly recognized throughout their lives. The Conflician tradition expressed
in the saying, “one should cultivate moral character and put one’s family in
order before going on to run the country and bring order to the world,” puts
family affairs in a very important position (Ma 31).
The Chinese family system has been the most complex and wellorganized in the world. It served as one of the two roots for the development of
Chinese humanistic thought. The other one was the concept of Heaven. Since
China is a continental country, for thousands of years the Chinese people had to
make their living by agriculture. They had to live on their land and confine
themselves to the houses where their fathers or grandfathers lived and where
their children would continue to live. For economic reasons, early Chinese
families had to live together. Thus, long before Confucius, there developed the
Chinese family system, which provided Chinese philosophy with “a basis for
regulating relationship between man and woman” (Wang 7). The complex and
intimate family relationships were crucial to the Chinese people in preConfucius time. Yu-lan Fung, a renowned Chinese philosopher, finds that in the
Erh Ya, the oldest dictionary of the Chinese language dating from before the
Christian era, there are more than one hundred terms for various family
relationships (21).
When Confucius started to teach his philosophy, he took the human
heart as his basic concern. Believing that the human heart was the origin of
good, he proposed “a three-point program for the individual to follow: Toward
the self, the moral goal of a person is to be a chim-tzu or gentleman; toward the
family, to be a well-fitting member working for its prosperity and happiness;
toward humanity at large, to be an active participant in a world society dedicated
to the realization of the Golden Rule [Confucian principle of reciprocity]”