Chinese virtue

Chapter 25 Lack of Empathy (1)
In the previous chapter, we briefly talked about Chinese charitable activities, and understood that "benevolence" is one of the good qualities of Chinese people.What this chapter discusses is the "compassion" based on "benevolence".Ren refers to a beautiful heart of benevolence, which expresses a wish for blessing, while sympathy is a kindness from the heart, a mutual affection.

What this chapter wants to talk about is the lack of sympathy among Chinese people. Even though Chinese people have done a lot of good deeds, they do very little under the drive of pure kindness. Therefore, we say that Chinese people lack sympathy.

Everyone should remember what I said before. China is a country with a large population. At the same time, China is often harassed by various famine disasters.In other countries, every disaster will reduce most of the population, but in China, it obviously does not have much effect.Because the Chinese people have a very strong idea of ​​family inheritance, even the poor should find ways to marry their sons early and have a few children, even if they are unable to raise them, they will do the same.The final result is that the Chinese live a life like day laborers in order to support their families.Everyday life is the repetition of working and eating.In the process of dealing with Chinese people, careful foreigners will find that almost every Chinese has no cash.The Chinese always ask for wages before working, because only in this way can they have money to eat.In China, even well-to-do families find it difficult to raise enough money when they need it urgently.There is a saying in China called "During the Grain Famine", which means borrowing money for funerals, lawsuits and other things, just like the victims of famine running around.Only those who are rich and powerful are not in a hurry when faced with such a thing.In China, the most obvious fact is poverty, and the life of poverty seriously affects the relationship between people.Chinese people have been affected by this pressure for a long time, and have formed many habits that cannot be changed.Even if life has improved, they have gotten used to hard times.Food and money have become the axis of Chinese life, and no matter what Chinese people do, they are carried out under the guidance of this axis.

Chinese people often work hard to maintain the minimum livelihood, and the entire Chinese nation is shrouded in poverty.If there is a disaster year, the situation will be even worse.The Chinese people have long been accustomed to various disasters, and they have become numb to disasters.No matter what the purpose is, those who do good deeds in China are just to relieve stress and escape from suffering.The Chinese should understand this truth: Whether it is an individual do-gooder or a government rescue, they are just drinking poison to quench their thirst. This method of treating the symptoms but not the root cause will not solve the problem at all.The Chinese approach is like giving typhoid patients a small ice pack to cover their feverish heads, but there is no doctor to treat them, and no medicines and food.Therefore, it is strange that the Chinese do not have a better way to do good deeds, because they lack the institutional norms of large charities and cannot maintain the habit of doing good deeds for a long time.Even a well-educated person would be helpless in the face of such a situation.The wars of recent years are a good example.When a person sees the blood spurting out for the first time, he will be very nervous, and the impression will be very clear, but this situation will soon disappear, and the person will gradually become numb.Anyone who has seen blood often knows that the fear of blood can only happen once.Wars often occur in China, so people have long been used to the results of wars.

The Chinese lack of empathy is also reflected in their attitudes towards the disabled.Chinese people will deliberately avoid some disabled people, such as blind people and mentally handicapped people. If they are deaf, bald and cross-eyed, they may hide even further.Perhaps in the eyes of these Chinese people, physical defects and morality are related.As far as I know, although the Chinese are not indifferent and harsh to these people, they also have little sympathy.Just like what the ancient Jews said: They must have committed sins secretly before they would be punished by God.Westerners are different from Chinese in that they sympathize with these disabled people from the bottom of their hearts.

These handicapped people can only live if they endure the humiliation.The Chinese also sometimes use various languages ​​to irritate these poor disabled people.Draw the attention of those around you by portraying flaws in a less over-the-top, mocking way.For example, a pharmacy clerk said to a patient: "Brother Mazi, which village are you from?" A little too much is like a person laughing at a squint-eyed person: "Slant eyes, crooked heart." There are also some Short-cut jokes, such as: "Ten bald men, nine cheaters, and one is dumb." People will make all kinds of silly jokes about these people's physical defects, and there is a tendency to intensify.So these poor cripples just ignore what they say, and ignore the silly jeers if they want to be happy.

For some people with mental problems, the Chinese are even more outspoken about their shortcomings.For example, say to a child: "This child is an idiot." Maybe the child is not stupid, but if you always say this, the child's undeveloped intelligence is likely to be damaged. It is wrong for the Chinese to treat the mentally ill like this. very common.There are many times when it is precisely this attitude that causes psychosis in others and makes it worse.The lesions of these mental patients have become the jokes of Chinese people, and people with mental illness can only be called "lunatics", "fools", "idiots" and so on.

The patriarchal thought of Chinese people is very serious, so once no boy is born in any family, they will be ridiculed or even abused constantly.Just like what happened to Samuel's mother Hannah in the Bible: "Pininna greatly exasperated her and made her angry." No matter what the reason, a mother suffocates her daughter. It wasn't the boy who died.

Another typical example of Chinese people's lack of empathy is what happened to the bride at the wedding.Because Chinese people have a strong desire to carry on the family line, most Chinese brides are very young, they are very shy, and they seem very afraid of guests from all directions.Although there are many customs in China, no matter which region the bride is exposed to, no one cares about their mood.In some places, people can even open the car curtain to see the bride's face.In other places, girls who are not out of the court will make fun of the bride, and they will stand on the side of the road and sprinkle grass seeds on the bride's head.When the bride walks out of the sedan chair and goes to her parents-in-law's house, the parents-in-law will criticize the bride like they go to a stable to buy a horse. I am afraid that this feeling will not feel good to anyone.

Chinese etiquette is very complicated, which I mentioned before, but Chinese people never take other people's feelings into consideration when they speak.A Chinese friend of mine often says embarrassing things, but he doesn't realize it.Once he said: "When I saw a bearded foreigner for the first time, I thought I saw a monkey." Then he said: "But now I get used to it."

Another person once asked a teacher to comment on his students in front of the students. The teacher said: "The one next to the door is the smartest, and he can show his talents when he is about 20 years old. I have seen the two on the next table. The most stupid of my children." When they said this, they didn't take the feelings of others into consideration at all, and they didn't even think about the impact it could have.

In the family life of Chinese people, the characteristic of Chinese people's lack of sympathy can also be reflected.

Although the lifestyles of each family are different, they have one thing in common, that is, their family life is not happy.Because they lack the "emotional union" that Westerners have always valued. Chinese families are more like united individuals than a whole.These individuals have the same interests as well as different ones.So for westerners, Chinese family life is very bad, because there is no sympathy for each other.

Girls in China have always been disliked by their families. They are full of ups and downs from birth to growth, and this influence will accompany them throughout their lives.The experience of the Chinese girl can be regarded as a powerful example of the lack of sympathy in the Chinese people!
In Chinese families, where mother and daughter live under the same roof, it is inevitable that there will be differences of opinion, so quarrels often occur, and over time, a bad habit of cursing and cursing is formed.

There is a saying in China that is very thought-provoking: "If you scold me again, you are still a daughter." Once a daughter is married, her name will be erased from the family tree, and her relationship with her natal family will also be erased.The only thing left is the blood that merged with her natal family.As far as the family is concerned, a married daughter is throwing water; as far as the daughter's mother is concerned, she is already someone else's daughter-in-law, not my daughter anymore.And as a married daughter, she would always go back to her natal home to see relatives.This also varies according to local customs.For example, in some places, daughters always return to their natal homes and can live there permanently.

And in some places, the less the daughter returns to her natal family, the better. If everyone in her natal family is no longer alive, she will never go back at all.Although the customs vary slightly from place to place, in China, the daughter-in-law always belongs to the husband's family.When the daughter goes back to her natal home, the natal family has to help the married daughter with some work, and when the daughter returns to her natal home, she has to take the child back to her natal home, so that the child will be taken care of by someone. Moreover, the natal family is responsible for the child’s expenses during the period of returning to her natal home. .Some families have more daughters, and their visits to their natal families are even more terrifying than the exploitation of the landlords.

So the daughter's father and brothers always try to prevent the daughter from returning to her natal family.But when it comes to festivals, the daughters will not be prevented from returning to their natal homes.

There is a Chinese proverb about thieves called "thieves don't leave empty space".These daughters-in-law will bring a lot of gifts from their hometown (usually food) to their mother-in-law. If the daughter-in-law forgets to bring a gift, she will inevitably get angry from her mother-in-law.

If the daughter married into a family that was not wealthy, the daughter would become "taboo" as the doctor said when she returned to her natal family.If she has brothers and is already married, there will be a "battle of the ground" when the daughter returns to her mother's home.Like the Philistines and the Israelites, each side would see home as its own territory and the other as the aggressor.If the daughter wins in the end, she will demand "tribute" from her enemies like the Philistines.A daughter-in-law is a cheap servant of the mother-in-law's family. It is not an exaggeration to describe these daughter-in-laws.Since they are looking for servants, of course they will choose those who are in their prime and know a lot of life skills, instead of those who are thin and young.There is such an example that just illustrates the tragic life of a daughter-in-law who is like a "servant": a 20-year-old beautiful young girl married a boy who was only in his teens as his wife.For the first few years of their marriage, she devoted herself to caring for her smallpox-stricken husband.

Chinese girls are tragic, and the suffering they suffer after marriage cannot be described in words.

Every Chinese girl will marry into someone else's family to be a daughter-in-law when she is very young, and she will be firmly controlled by her mother-in-law most of her life.I believe everyone can think of the pain they may have suffered.The girls' biological parents can't help these poor girls, they can only persuade them appropriately, or wait until the daughter can't stand the abuse and commits suicide and ask for some funeral expenses.If a husband injures or even kills his wife, he can escape legal sanctions as long as he uses the excuse of being "unfilial" to his parents-in-law.In China, there are a lot of girls who can't bear abuse after marriage and commit suicide, and even in some places, such things happen one after another.When a mother reprimanded her daughter who failed to commit suicide, she said: "You obviously had a chance, why didn't you die?" This sentence is really chilling.

A few years ago, the "Beijing News" published a memorial to the governor of Henan, which exposed some inhumane situations that occurred at that time: parents do not need to bear legal responsibility for killing their own children, while mother-in-laws do not need to bear legal responsibility for killing their own daughter-in-law. Pay some fines and you'll be fine.Among them, the case in the memorial has a mother-in-law who first burned her child bride-in-law with incense, then scalded the daughter-in-law's face with red-hot iron tongs, and finally threw the poor girl into boiling water and boiled to death.There are still many similar cases on the memorial, because the memorial must be presented to the emperor, so the information should be accurate.Such heinous behavior may not be common, but the suicide of a daughter-in-law as a result of such abuse is not uncommon, and locals have grown accustomed to it.Similar situations have happened to many families I know well.

In China, there are still some women who are not even qualified to be wives and can only be "concubines" for others.

Their status is even lower, and they have no happiness at all. Quarrels and fights happen almost every day in their lives.A foreigner who has lived in China for a long time wrote: "The mayor of my city is very rich, he is a great scholar, a great poet, very talented, but he always deceives the people, and always exploits and These kind-hearted people were physically punished to satisfy their own evil psychology. One of his concubines escaped, and when he was captured, he was stripped naked, hung from the beams of the house and beaten severely."

In China, poor people must pray that they will not get sick.The illnesses of women and children are never taken seriously until they are terminally ill, perhaps because the men are too busy to take care of them, or the men "have no money to pay the medical bills."

In the previous chapter on "filial piety", we have said that the Chinese do not value young children.A child should look at what he will do in the future, not how dragged he is now.The Chinese approach is often the opposite of that of Westerners.If three people go out together, the heaviest and most tiring work must be done by the youngest person.It is the same with the servants, the younger they are, the harder the work.Because of poverty, the people live very hard, and under the pressure of the family, children often run away from home, which is nothing more than a normal thing.These children choose to leave their homes for many reasons, the most common being abuse from their family members.After these children flee their hometowns, they will quickly find employers and live a life of working.I once knew a boy who had just recovered from typhus and wanted to eat something, but he only had unpalatable black corn buns at home, so he went to the street to buy dim sum for [-] cents.When his father found out, he scolded him severely. As a result, he ran away from home in a rage and went to the northeast. There has been no news since then.

George D. Prentice once said a sentence, which is very suitable to describe the status of Chinese wives in the family. He said: "The man is the master, while the woman is just the vassal." It can be said that the family can be passed on from generation to generation; for the woman's family, it can save the child support fee.There are also some hidden purposes, but everyone will deliberately avoid such topics.But in China, these purposes are clear to everyone.

Marriage between men and women among the poor is more purposeful.A remarried widow can always be commented like this: "She doesn't need to go hungry." There is a saying in China: "Remarry and remarry, just to eat; no clothes and no food, just fall apart." During the famine, many men They will leave their wives and children behind and let them fend for themselves.There are also some people who return their daughter-in-law to their natal family, and say, this is your daughter, so take care of it yourself.If the natal family has food, they will eat it, and if the natal family has no food, they will starve to death.There are also some men who snatch the food distributed to breastfeeding women. Although there are not many, this happens all the time.

(End of this chapter)