介绍:
LW: In China, a recent report says that girls can be more filial than boys. In Confucian philosophy, filial piety is a virtue of respect for one’s parents, elders, and ancestors. Wu You, can you maybe talk us through what exactly the report says here?
WY: Mm-hmm. Because once people are saying it is better to have boys, especially in China because, most reports show that in rural areas of China people prefer boys than girls, since people believe that boys can do all the farm work, and once girls are married they join the other people’s families. And there has been a saying that the girls, once married, they are the same as the water that has been poured away. [LW: Oh my word.] They were saying that, in rural areas, when the girls are married, they become part of the boy’s family. In the modern society, view[s] have been changed, because once you have a girl, once she is married, we are seeing more husbands are working for their mother-in-law, so in that case, the situation has been overall changed, because the boy can become part of the girl’s family.
LW: Yeah, a bit of modernity clashing with traditional values there, I think. There’s something quite similar in South Africa as well, where in certain ethnic, you know, places and cases, there’s still a very strong dowry culture, where, if the girl being married then the girl’s family is paid a certain amount by the husband’s family, or the husband-to-be’s family as well. And in the past this used to be cows, like, before, you know, used to pay in cows. But now it’s sometimes money as well. And it goes up and down depending on whether the girl’s very well educated or very well beautiful, all of these kind of things as well.
WY: Oh, there has been a similar culture in the, in China, in both the old days and nowadays, because we’re calling it the betrothal gifts. That was the betrothal gifts from the groom’s family, from the man’s family, to the bride’s family. So in that case we can see the betrothal gifts can be both cash, gold, or even sometimes a banknote.
LW: Brian, we’ve also talked about now taking, putting the elderly in these nursing homes and taking care of them. But often, the taking care of them part is quite an emotional issue because you’re saying to someone, listen, you’ve reached this time in your life now where, maybe, you can’t, you know, be completely independent on your own. My family still has, you know, there’re still people who live with my family as older generations as well. And, but that’s something that’s starting to change a little bit now as well, so you know, it’s not something that happens overnight it’s definitely, it’s a cultural thing. It’s something that, if done and handled well it could make a big difference to the elderly in their later years, a lot.
BK: Right, and I guess what you’d ideally do is you’d have, well ideally both the parents and the kids would live in about the same place, the same city so that it’s not, if the parents were going to be moved to a retirement home, it would be not too far away where you could see them relatively often. If the kids and the parents are living in two different places, which is not uncommon these days then, it would either be you put them in the retirement home back home, or perhaps you get them to move towards your city and live there, which is good in that then you could see them more frequently but bad in that, you know, they’re moving to this new place, it’s not their home, they don’t necessarily know any people, so it’s a, it’s a difficult sort of choice, but either way, obviously the ideal would be you’d visit your family a lot or at the very least, you know, things like, video calls, there’s all sorts of things you can do in modern society that weren’t available even twenty years ago; call them more often, video call, you can, you know, buy them stuff online very quickly, you know, buy it now, be at their door tomorrow. So there’s ways of taking care of your parents without necessarily physically being with them.
