“I wrote to you not to associate with any one who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or robber – not even to eat with such a one” [1 Cor 5:11].
One of the most famous traditional Chinese four-character idioms is 孟母三遷 – literally, “Mencius’ Mother’s Three Moves”. It embodies the legend concerning the mother of Mencius, the greatest Chinese philosopher after Confucius, who moved houses three times, solely on account of her desire to make sure that the young Mencius would have a healthy surrounding for his education and growth. Living in ancient China from around 372 – 289 BCE, Mencius lost his father at a tender age and was raised by his mother who never re-married. Conditions were hard, but his mother was determined that the child would be raised properly. She would not hesitate to relocate themselves whenever she considered the environment in which they lived non-conducive to the education of the young Mencius.
Mencius [c. 372 – 289 BCE]
At first they lived by a cemetery. When Mencius’ mother found the boy imitating the paid mourners in funeral processions, she knew that she had to move the boy. They relocated to a place in town close to a market. There, the boy soon began to imitate the language and the cries of merchants. Merchants being a despised lot in Chinese society of the time, Mencius’ mother knew they must relocate again. Just as St Paul would write to his young Corinthian converts to stay away from undesirable elements in society, Mencius’ mother would take it upon herself to physically remove her child altogether from an environment where undesirable elements existed. At the third location, she found a house next to a school. Inspired by the scholars and students, Mencius began to study. Knowing this to be the best, the boy’s mother decided to stay, and Mencius grew up to become a premier scholar in Chinese history. As an expression, then, the famous Chinese idiom refers to the importance of finding the proper environment for raising children.
Today, another famous Chinese personality has been in the news, all for the sake of his children as well. He is Jet Li, the famous Chinese martial art expert turned Hollywood superstar. Speaking to the press about his taking up Singaporean citizenship, he pointed out that he had lived in America and Europe, but in the end, he decided to stay put in Singapore, “all because I wanted to have a good environment where my children could study and grow up in, a place where they could receive education both in Chinese and English, and a location where I could go out to work and yet not have to be worried about their security.”
Wherever they may be, the Chinese people place education on a high premium. In Malaysia, the early Chinese immigrants brought this mentality with them, planting schools wherever they settled. Despite the lack of governmental assistance, Chinese education has survived and even flourished in Malaysia, making untold contribution to the growth of the country. No sacrifice for the education of their children is ever too much for the Chinese parents. And so, when tertiary education was all but denied the non-Malays and the non-bumiputeras within the country, Chinese parents made untold sacrifices sending their children to study overseas.
There is a clear precedent in the Bible. Joseph made untold sacrifices to protect the unborn life of Jesus, to take flight to Egypt for the safety of the Mother and Child, and to live in exile for a while until the danger at home had blown over before returning to Palestine (Matt 2:13). But Joseph, who relocated a few times for the physical safety of the child Jesus, did a lot more than that. Scriptures say he did right by Jesus on three counts. St Luke makes that very clear. The child Jesus lived under the authority of Joseph and Mary in Nazareth, and he increased in wisdom, in stature, and in favour with God and men (Luke 2:51-52). Jesus, St Luke is saying, grew up well and in a very balanced way, in wisdom as in grace. It was a wholesome growth, so that Jesus grew physically, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. Which parents would not be proud of themselves for having done right by their children on all these counts? For us, what is far and away the most touching aspect of Jesus’ personality is the way he treated people, especially the poor, those who hunger or suffer, and those looked down upon by society. In a word, Jesus is most impressive in the way he treated people as human beings! He respected people. He upheld their dignity. The aspect of his “human formation” – how to be a good human being – was obviously well taken care of by His human parents.
Today, Christian parents may find a great deal of space for serious meditation on that Lukan report. They would do well to see that Joseph and Mary exercised good parental guidance to ensure that the child Jesus had a wholesome upbringing. Looking around the environment in which we live, we are particularly disturbed by one phenomenon. There is so much emphasis on formal education, and on getting good grades that there is every danger of parental forgetfulness of a host of other things that are very important, such as character-formation. When all the focus from young is a drive towards “good grades” as the be-all and end-all, there is what one medical doctor in Penang describes as a “dangerous assumption” that “good grades make good doctors”. Underlying all that, is the operative presumption of status and money-making opportunities consequent upon good formal education. So far, absent in the equation are wholesome human values – how to be human.
It would be a sad day for parents to wake up to the realization that, for all their sacrifices, all that they have ended up doing was to help their children become professionally qualified but heartless technocrats. The recent Wall Street collapse that triggered a chain reaction throughout the world – and causing the poor to, once again, suffer the most – was not the work of people who have no brains. The financial meltdown is attributed to the bottomless greed of highly qualified MBA holders who were brilliant enough – but also heartless enough – to create fake investment schemes and sell them as money-making plans to banks throughout the world.
So, today, parents have every reason to be appalled by what they see happening amongst the new wealthy second generation, especially those in China. Three real life examples hold invaluable lessons for parents.
In the first case, a young girl advertised herself on her blog, flaunting the wealth of her father and doing her best to pose in an appealing fashion, and inviting boys who have “faces of superstars” to apply to become her boyfriends (whom she calls her “sexual partners for a lonely summer”). Life must be down-right boring with all that wealth and a skin-deep value-system.
The second case features another teenage girl at a talent-contest. When one of the judges remarked on her obvious lack of singing skills, she immediately went on a tirade against him, screaming, “Have you no ears, that you can’t hear? Who says I can’t sing?…” There and then, she wriggled herself out of the bra that she had on, threw it at the judge who criticized her and stormed out of the hall. After two thousand years and a break-neck market economy, one wonders whether that girl could even pronounce the name of Confucius, let alone practise any of his moral teachings which the Chinese world-wide continue to hold proud.
Case number three is another heart-breaking case which took two parents “hardening their hearts” in order to have any vestige of hope for a hopelessly rebellious teenage daughter. An ex-military man in China has started a programme which takes in youngsters whose parents have practically given up hope of ever seeing them become “regular people”, let alone productive citizens. They include the hopelessly lazy and hopelessly rebellious and, to be sure, persistent truants from schools as well. Amongst other things, it is a live-in programme for young “hopeless rebels” that stretches over the best part of a year, and includes a walk of a few thousand miles across China, living in community, doing chores allocated to them and following strict disciplines. Parents sign a contract with the programme director, irrevocably committing their “hopeless” children to the full programme without any right of pre-mature termination, relinquishing parental right of intervention and even visitation except as specified in the programme, consenting to the use of corporal punishment at the sole discretion of the director, paying a fee, and so forth. In the case in question, trainers and their assistants were on hand to bar a girl from leaving once her parents had brought her into the base camp. She challenged the authorities, but to no avail. She threatened her parents, saying, “If you dare leave me here, when I come out, I will go home and kill you both! I promise you that!” Parents who come to the programme for help know they are at their wit’s end. They know that this is their last ray of hope. Against their very natural emotions and inner struggles, they harden their hearts and walk out of the camp, leaving their “monster” children behind. The programme, aired as a TV documentary, has scored a pretty impressive success rate of “conversion”, which partly explains its continuity year after year. All of that is from a nation which has an official one-child policy aimed at curbing a run-away population growth. As a side-effect of that one-child policy, however, we find an ever growing pool of not little angels in China, but potential little monsters in the form of little “emperors” and “empresses”, each attended to by three pairs of adults (parents, and maternal and paternal grand-parents) competing to spoil them rotten, letting them have their ways all the time, and giving them things and more things, instead of giving them values.
Happily, we have also been delighted by reports of role-reversals in China.
Doing well in business, a father in Shanghai wanted to flaunt his wealth through his son who is attending college. So he bought not one, but two high price-tagged imported sports-cars for the son to drive to college, causing quite a stir around the campus. Negative publicity on student websites have persuaded the young man never to drive those cars to college again. Add all that to increasing reports of rich second generation young men and women refusing to work in family businesses, and walking away from financial arrangements foisted on them by parents, one gets the impression that in these cases there is an increasing sign of role-reversals where educated young Chinese are beginning to educate their parents on the deeper meanings and values of life – at least beyond money.
When we read in Luke’s Gospel that the child Jesus, living under his human parents in Nazareth, increased in wisdom, in stature, and in favour with God and men, we know the emphasis on healthy values ranked high in the Holy Family of Nazareth.
In Malaysia, tuition schools big and small have been enjoying a roaring business parallel to the regular school system. Rushing from school to tuition classes seven days a week, little children hardly have time to grow up properly. This is a disturbing phenomenon. Would parents, especially the “busy” ones, consider spending less money on children’s education-by-tuition, and spending more of their own time, energy and “heart” on their kids?
It is never right for anyone to suggest that some mothers gave birth to “little monsters”, thereby releasing them of the kind of responsibility which Joseph and Mary undertook to raise Jesus in triple good-light. All new born babies are little angels. If they soon grow into very difficult infants – hyperactive, aggressive, and so on – on account of medical reasons, that is something else. Otherwise, when little angels grow into monsters, parental guidance in value-nurturing, or more accurately lack of it, may have something to do with it. Does all this not behoove parents and grand-parents, in our present fast-moving and highly “stuff”-centered culture, to be on the alert in raising children on values rather than on things (or as our American friends would say, “stuff”)?
Copyright © Dr. Jeffrey & Angie Goh, September 2010. All rights reserved.
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