One of the times when I was living in Beijing I saw on the street decorating public walls pictures and text celebrating The Twenty-four Filial Exemplars, or The Twenty-four Paragons of Filial Piety. Then I saw them again, on a different wall, in a different layout, but the same message. They are stories meant to teach the young how to, and to what extent, to sacrifice the self in favor of their parents.
Let’s look at these Chinese virtues. Here they are in translation and original.
Story Number 24 is a learned man with a position in the government who does not let his maid empty out his mother’s bedpan (though presumably he lets the maid empty out his own bedpan), but empties his mother’s bedpan himself, to, I guess, show subservience and intimacy to his mother.
I kind of see his point, in that, I’m cleaning my still diapered two-year-old boy, and he just laughs at me, and while I’m trying to change him, he wiggles his Popo dance on the towel I’ve laid out for him, and schmears Kacke all over the place, and I yell my cri de coeur at the massacre, and he laughs like a maniac. I can totally see how this is a good daily lesson in subservience and too much intimacy, for me. He loves it.
Story Number 23 is a man’s sick mother longs to eat bamboo shoots soup in winter. So he goes out, cries, and despite the season, bamboo shoots up, and with that soup, she recovers her health.
Story Number 22 is a man carves wooden effigies of his deceased parents, and reveres the effigies. But his wife doesn’t, in fact she one days pricks the effigies’ fingers, and blood comes out of the wood. The effigies cry, and the man divorces his wife.
Story Number 21 is a man whose mother when alive was afraid of thunder, so after her death he goes to her grave and walks around it one thousand times whenever there is a storm, in order to comfort her.
Story Number 20 is a man’s mother loved to drink water from a particular river and to eat fish, so the man’s wife would go all the way to the river to draw water and bring it back to the man’s mother, and the couple would cook fish for the mother. Then a fountain miraculously sprang up next door with water that tasted just like the river, and fish daily, too. Then they could constantly meet the mother’s preferences.
Story Number 19 is a boy who in winters uses his own body to preheat his father’s blankets and in summers fans his father’s sleeping mat.
Story Number 18 is a man who sorts the mulberries he gathers into ripe and unripe, saving the ripe pile for his mother, the unripe ones for himself. This so moved even a band of robbers that the robbers rewarded his virtue with three dou of rice and the leg of an ox.
Story Number 17 is a grown man acts like a baby to amuse his old parents.
Story Number 16 is a man who tastes his father’s poop because the doctor says the taste of poop is a health marker. The man then prays to die in his father’s place.
Story Number 15 is a man gives up his job and journeys faraway to find the mother who was separated from him fifty years earlier.
Story Number 14 is a young man defeats a tiger barehanded to save his father.
Story Number 13 is a poor man who starts to bury his three year old son alive in order to save food to prioritize his mother. In the act of digging, he strikes buried gold, so that he doesn’t have to finish burying his three year old son alive after all.
This one is my “favourite.” I’m in august company there, because the illustrious Chinese writer Lu Xun also picked this one out in his critical essay.
Story Number 12 is a man who took his clothes off to melt ice on a river to catch fish for his stepmother, who liked to eat fish, despite her being mean to him.
Story Number 11 is a boy who allows mosquitoes to bite himself in order to divert them from biting his parents.
Story Number 10 is a woman who breastfeeds her old mother-in-law.
Story Number 9 is a boy who was offered oranges by a host, and he hides two oranges into his sleeve to take home to his mother. As the boy is taking his leaves, the oranges fall out.
Story Number 8 is a man who carries his mother on his back to escape bandits, then commits himself to bonded labour in order to support her materially. What is bonded labour? Here “anti-slavery” explains.
Story Number 7 is a man who dresses like a deer to get deer milk for his sick parents, and is almost mistakenly shot by hunters.
Story Number 6 is a man who sells himself into slavery in order to get money for his father’s burial and funeral. A fairy woman is moved by this, so she weds him and does his weaving work so he doesn’t have to.
Story Number 5 is a now-rich man who reminisces carrying heavy sacks of rice long distances for his poor parents when he was a boy, and wishes he could return to those poverty-stricken days if only his parents were still alive.
Story Number 4 is a boy who entreats his father to not divorce his stepmother despite his stepmother treating him badly, because he would rather suffer himself than have his step-siblings lose their mother.
Story Number 3 is a son who is so close to his mother that when she bites her own finger, he feels that pain physically inside his heart.
Story Number 2 is an emperor who always tasted his mother’s medicine before giving it to her to make sure it was ready, for the three years she was sick.
Story Number 1 is a man who was so good to his nasty family that the birds and beasts were moved to help him work in the field, and the emperor gave him two princesses to wed, then abdicated so he could become the emperor, putting the actual princes beneath him.