The university where I teach has a really cool program for the students and the foreign teachers. We have dozens of foreign teachers from all over the world since our university is a foreign language university, and our school also has students whose major is teaching Chinese to foreign students. So the school has created a program where these students can practice teaching Chinese to the foreign teachers.
I love this program because it gives us foreign teachers the chance to learn Chinese and to understand a little bit about how our students feel when they are learning our languages. This program also gives the students the chance to interact with teachers who have been teaching a language for years.
Several years ago, I decided that I didn’t really want to study for a Chinese test, so I decided to ask the students to study things with me that I was more interested in. I love reading, and I love learning about China, so the students started sharing texts with me that they had studied in middle school in their Chinese classes. I love these texts for several reasons. First, these texts are written by Chinese people for Chinese people. When I read these texts, I’m getting “real” Chinese—not something just written for a foreign student in a textbook. I also love these texts because through them, I can get a deeper picture of how Chinese people think.
Since the Chinese education program is standardized, basically everyone I meet has studied these exact same texts. Sometimes when I talk about the texts with my friends, they remember the texts and the lessons they learned from them. I love getting to know and understand China in such a deep way.
My student teachers have also done an excellent job of giving me the background of these texts. Many of these texts are pretty challenging, and I often have to labor through the passage, asking about the meaning of lots of words, but I love the challenge, and I’m thankful for the students who patiently explain the words, the background of the stories, and the message behind the stories.
Today, I’m going to share one of the stories with you, but if you can find a Chinese person to help you with some of the more literary words, that would help a lot!
背影 (Beiying) by 朱自清 (Zhu Ziqing) (View of somebody’s back)
(Read the full passage here at this Chinese website)
I really liked this story, and it’s also one of the most famous ones that I’ve read. Sometimes when I mention the stories to people, they already forgot about them, but almost everyone remembers Beiying.
The background of the story is that the father and the son had a pretty bad relationship. The father had his own company, but he later had several wives, and he spent all his money. One time he even took his son’s salary from the son’s university, and understandably, the son was pretty angry about that. So the father and son hadn’t seen each other for more than two years.
At the beginning of the passage, the author describes how the son’s paternal grandmother has died, so he goes home for the funeral and again interacts with his father. The father has had some hard times. In addition to losing his mother, he also lost his job. But at the end of the funeral, the father insists on taking his son to the train station. While there, the son’s most vivid memory is watching his father’s back as he climbs down to the railroad tracks and then up the other side to buy some oranges for his son. The father is a bit overweight, so this is a bit challenging, but he manages it and refused to allow his son to do the simple task for him.
At that time, the train tracks were in a lower area, and people could climb down and walk across them to get to the other side to buy something.
Even though the son is embarrassed by his father and thinks that he doesn’t need his father’s help, he is also touched by the effort his father takes to show him simple kindnesses.
In China, taking care of parents is really important, and filial piety (a word that I rarely, if ever, heard before coming to China) is considered a very admirable character trait. This story captures some of the struggle of loving our parents when they are unlovable.
The father has made many mistakes, and the son struggles to respect him, especially since the son thinks he is old enough to take care of himself. But because of his father’s simple gesture of climbing across the railroad tracks to buy oranges, the son can’t hold back his tears.
The story doesn’t end with a directive to care for our parents. The message is more subtle than that, and the message recognizes the struggle that people have in loving and caring for imperfect people.
If loving others were always easy, then there wouldn’t be so many stories and directives reminding us to do that. But loving others (and especially loving the people that we love the most) is hard.