How have rapid industrial development and the aging of the population affected the expression of filial piety in East Asia? Eleven experienced fieldworkers take a fresh look at an old idea, analyzing contemporary behavior, not norms, among both rural and urban families in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Each chapter presents rich ethnographic data on how filial piety shapes the decisions and daily lives of adult children and their elderly parents. The authors’ ability to speak the local languages and their long-term, direct contact with the villagers and city dwellers they studied lend an immediacy and authenticity lacking in more abstract treatments of the topic. This book is an ideal text for social science and humanities courses on East Asia because it focuses on shared cultural practices while analyzing the ways these practices vary with local circumstances of history, economics, social organization, and demography and with personal circumstances of income, gender, and family configuration.

The phenomenon of filial piety is fundamental to our understanding of Chinese culture. An international team of contributors provides an excellent collection of essays that explore its role in various areas of life throughout history.

In a time of tense Chinese American relations, Filial Piety: Memoir of a Good Daughter relates a uniquely honest experience of a Chinese immigrant. Readers will be enchanted by Chinese traditions and swept into an eyewitness account of the White Terror, the Communist takeover of China, the Chinese American protests, and the obstacles of assimilating into American society. Yet even more powerful than the historical events is the strength of family love. The narrators dedication to her family perseveres through communist, feminist, and technological revolutions; through her stress and guilt as a working mother; and through the tragedy and deathbed triumph of her parents marriage. In one magnificent breath, Filial Piety takes in two cultures, two belief systems, and two marriages to show how this important valuefilial pietyendures.

Of the many ballads, tales, and plays extolling filial piety (xiao)--the foundational virtue of imperial China--none was more popular in that era than the legend of Dong Yong and his heavenly helpmate, Weaving Maiden. Continually revised and embellished over a millennium, the tale's popularity remains, finding new expression in Chinese film and opera in the twentieth century. The five versions of the legend presented here, alongside a selection of related texts, illustrate changing perceptions of xiao from the tenth century through the first part of the twentieth in a variety of genres. An appendix traces the development of the related legend of Weaving Maiden and Buffalo Boy from myth to folktale. Wilt L. Idema's Introduction traces the evolution of the central legend and its significance in the history of Chinese popular culture. Annotations explaining terms and references that may be unfamiliar to Western readers, a glossary, and a comprehensive bibliography further enhance the value of this book for both scholars and students.

Educated men in Song-dynasty China (960–1279) traveled frequently in search of scholarly and bureaucratic success. These extensive periods of physical mobility took them away from their families, homes, and native places for long periods of time, preventing them from fulfilling their most sacred domestic duty: filial piety to their parents. In this deeply grounded work, Ellen Zhang locates the tension between worldly ambition and family duty at the heart of elite social and cultural life. Drawing on more than 2,000 funerary biographies and other official and private writing, Zhang argues that the predicament in which Song literati found themselves diminished neither the importance of filial piety nor the appeal of participating in examinations and government service. On the contrary, the Northern Song witnessed unprecedented literati activity and state involvement in the bolstering of ancient forms of filial performances and the promotion of new ones. The result was the triumph of a new filial ideal: luyang. By labeling highly coveted honors and privileges attainable solely through scholarly and official accomplishments as the most celebrated filial acts, the luyang rhetoric elevated office-holding men to be the most filial of sons. Consequently, the proper performance of filiality became essential to scholar-official identity and self-representation. Zhang convincingly demonstrates that this reconfiguration of elite male filiality transformed filial piety into a status- and gender-based virtue, a change that had wide implications for elite family life and relationships in the Northern Song. The separation of elite men from their parents and homes also made the idea of “native place” increasingly fluid. This development in turn generated an interest in family preservation as filial performance. Individually initiated, kinship- and native place-based projects flourished and coalesced with the moral and cultural visions of leading scholar-intellectuals, providing the social and familial foundations for the ascendancy of Neo-Confucianism as well as new cultural norms that transformed Chinese society in the Song and beyond.

This book examines the experiences of migrant peasant workers in China who care for parents diagnosed with cancer and explores to what extent contextual changes after the economic reform initiated in 1978 affected practices and experiences of caring. In his own attempt to develop a localized methodology, the author considers identifying similarities between Chinese philosophies and Foucault’s theories as the key step for localizing Foucauldian discourse analysis. Three similarities are located and articulated with regard to filial care. Firstly, the complexity of discursive relations identified by Foucault resembles the complicated Chinese notion of the relationality of the self. Secondly, both sides have a tendency to look back to ancient times for solutions and to critique the notion of ‘progress’ in modernity. For Foucault, the way to attain freedom or agency is through technologies of the self, such as speaking truth (parrhesia). Lastly, both value action and practice in their theories. The book then analyzes, through this localized methodological approach, statements made by migrant peasant workers to take readers through their discursive mechanisms to construct filial piety in relation to their subjective care experiences.