Billi: "Did you tell Grandma?"
Dad: "No, BiIli. I can't go against my family's wishes."
Uncle: "Billi, you have to understand some things. You went to Western countries very early, and you see life as an individual, which is the cultural difference between the West and the East . Orientals see life as a collective Family. Society. You want to tell grandma the truth because you are afraid of taking responsibility, because the responsibility is too great. If you tell her, you will have no burden. The reason why we don't tell grandma the truth is to share her thoughts pressure."
Uncle's point-and-click preaching (one of the many more cultural preaching scenes in the whole film) makes me want to refute. Not to mention why he thinks that he wants to tell his grandmother that he is "afraid of taking responsibility" (to belittle others and elevate himself?), the judgment that "Oriental people regard life as a collective" is not only general ("Oriental" is Who?).
I think that the uncle who stayed in Japan probably brought the concept of family and society too close, both of which are counted as "collective". But in most cases, "family" is private and "society" is public. From family, to clan, to locality, to "society", there is still a long distance. At least in Chinese history, the old man is not as old as the other. is the norm. Scholars in the late Qing Dynasty frequently compared with China after discovering Western political culture, often saying that the Chinese "have private morality but no public morality", "have the qualifications of the people but have no national qualifications" (Liang Qichao), "do not understand socialism, only know A family's happiness" (Lusheng's "A Dream of a Stupid"), and the "Great Harmony" theory of "Ritual Fortune" is attached to the Western democratic society, calling for the transformation from the world for the family to the public for the world (Kang Youwei). The family is opposed to the society that belongs to the public. To put it bluntly, it is to accuse the Chinese that there is no real "collective" concept, but the West has it. To the people of the May Fourth culture (poisoned by Western ideology), the home is the trap of patriarchy, the epitome of autocratic monarchy, and the cage that must be broken through to realize a free society. The filial piety of the patriarchal society, which is based on the family, and "one family member, obeys the order of the head of the family" is the root of the old society's despotism. They are still depicting the oppressed humanity within the high walls of patriarchy. In this context, Dad's sentence "I can't go against the wishes of my family" is a bit like the helplessness of the family bondage.
In addition, there are also communities established in Chinese history that have successfully cut off family ties and broken family ethics. The "collective" that truly transcends the dimensions of the individual and the family has been realized under the new regime of the twentieth century, vigorously for many years. But is that an "Oriental" ideal?
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