由一件事情想到的……
Apologies to those who cannot read Chinese. The title roughly translates as “thoughts on an incident”, which, if you grew up in mainland China, is a most popular essay title for elementary school writing tests. I decided to use the original Chinese because it feels to me like a very distinctive and therefore untranslatable Chinese sort of title.
The Incident
I was killing some time with a friend in a local KFC near the supermarket. In Chinese KFCs there is usually a play zone for children with slides, tunnels and wood houses. Suddenly two parents, one the grandma of kid A and the other the mother of kid B, started to argue with each other loudly. One soon learnt from their shouting back and forth that apparently one kid called the other kid names and the other kid calle him back, and that was when the grandmother gave Kid A the moral support in the form her far more sophisticated and deadly name-calling than a 5-year-old could ever master, which only drew Kid B’s mother into a violent two-on-two.
My usual reaction, as is many people’s, was to just stay cool and sip my drink until the noise dies down and the two parents get tired of the battle for the most vicious accusation - because that is the point of a Chinese argument: not long into the fight it does not matter what started it anymore. The goal is never to work things out, but to simply “win it”, and that means coming up with the most horrible things to say with an air so intimidating that the other party cannot ping the pong back. It is usually a fireball of a fast-paced game and an art in itself, as a momentarily pause for thought instantly means defeat.
My friend, on the other hand, walked up to the mother and said in a very controlled but also very forceful way something that amounts to “like mother like son. You should set an example in front your kid and quit disrespecting the elderly”. The mother did not back down either, and her retort was “Oh, so your mother really raised you well. Look how good you turn out to be. Bravo!” which I did not really get and I did not think it made any sense except perhaps the mother was not prepared to take two enemies at once and was simply throwing random sentences to maintain her intimidation. Then my friend simply said to the grandmother “Ignore her and leave her to scream as long as she wants. Nobody cares” and walked back to his seat next to me.
Thoughts
Well. Certainly my friend and I are very different human beings with drastically different reactions to the same situation. And I have to say I really admire his courage to stand up to what he believes to be social injustice and his going out of his way to help out a stranger win a Chinese argument (for as you see, getting yourself involved usually means strangers are going to insult you and your entire family ruthlessly like you had killed their close relative).
And I always wonder if a sense of justice really has anything with education. My friend does not go to as good a high school or university as I do, but when he sees injustice and disrespect he goes right out to make things right, while I sit back and think “let the human follies run its existentially meaningless course. It always takes two to start a fight, and in such an unproductive way of arguing, no one is innocent and everyone is the bad guy”. Part of me views myself and my reaction to this incident as incredibly snobbish and self-complacent, as if I am above this kind of silliness. In my education I read here and there about the grandios theories about social justice, morality and the government, but when I see its minuscule manifestation in my face I think the appropriate thing to do is watch.
But the other part of me immediately starts questioning whether my friend has comprehended the complexity of the issue (as I naturally would soon come to comprehend no doubt lol ) and whether my friend’s action is actually admirable or morally right. He obviously took sides with the grandmother, and an important reason, as he said in the argument with the mother, was that “the young should respect the old”. That is where I start to doubt: does it apply even if the grandmother also passed very inappropriate remarks on the mother and her kid? Or further, taken out of the Chinese cultural tradition, does seniority in age automatically merits unconditional respect? And I try to analyse my friend’s taking sides in the argument as well. In this kind of argument when both parties are guilty, I think the most productive and moral way to step in as a third party is as an impartial mediator and direct the argument into a peaceful negotiation away from bickering instead of joining one side to take out the other.
