Telling Stories, Saving Families
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which are unfilial and to have no posterity is the greatest of them” (quoted in
Dawson 163). To have posterity is one of the obligations a filial son has to his
parents because he “has a debt to his parents and his ancestors which demands
not only his respect to his progenitors both living and dead, but also that he
transmit that life to other generations who shall perpetuate the family line from
age to age” (Rudd 119). The family line is just like a rope that began somewhere
back in the remote past and which stretches into the infinite fliture. Baker calls it
“Continuum of Descent.” He points out that once the rope is cut in the middle,
both ends (ancestors and unborn descendants) fall away from the middle, and
the whole Continuum of Descent no longer exists (26-27). A Chinese Confucian
scholar explains the importance of having posterity: “To Confucians, one’s
offspring are the continuation of his own and also of his ancestor’s lives. With
such continuation, his and his ancestors’ lives are looked upon as being
immortal. Therefore, anyone who has cut short the flow of his ancestors’ lives
would be condemned as having committed the gravest sin of being unfilial”
(Hsieh 181).
Traditionally, only a son could be the heir of a Chinese family. Since
China is carrying out the one-child-per-family policy, it is now accepted that a
daughter is equally important as a son in her place of the Continuum of Descent.
The three children in the three TV dramas are one son and two daughters. They
were prince and princesses of the original families, and the direct victims of
their fathers’ infidelity. In Chinese, the word “good” is formed by the
combination of two other words: “woman” and “children.” With a woman (wife)
and children (sons and/or daughters) at home, the man will feel good. Without a
wife and children, the man would feel miserable. In the three TV dramas, when
the husbands fell in love with other women, they were punished not only by
their wives’ tears, but also by the suffering of their own children. And the
second punishment was even severer. The architect’s daughter almost died in the
hospital while he was living with his mistress. Zhong Rui’s love of a younger
woman indirectly led to his son’s kidnapping and injury. Kang Wei-Ye’s
daughter was not physically hurt, but her grades dropped during her father’s
extramarital affair. The messages from these TV dramas are very clear.
Extramarital affairs and husbands’ infidelity are the sources of family tragedy.
The only way for husbands to save the families from being broken, and their
children from harm, is to end their extramarital affairs and return to their wives
and their children. That was what all the three husbands did in the TV dramas.
Conclusion
Like double-edged swords, China’s reform and modernization have
brought both economic prosperity and social problems to the Chinese people.
Under the threat of the side-effects of the country’s development, such as higher
rate of divorce, family violence, bigamy, and extramarital affairs, China’s
popular literature tries to re-educate people by eulogizing the traditional concept
of Chinese family value. Storytelling scholar Margaret Read MacDonald asserts.