An Imposition Of Ignorance
A young woman from the PRC named Wu Minxia was one of two teammates to win the gold medal in synchronized diving at the 2012 Olympics yesterday. Her well-earned celebration was spoiled, though…
Wu’s parents decided to withhold news of both the death of her grandparents and of her mother’s long battle with breast cancer until after she won the 3-meter springboard in London so as to not interfere with her diving career. [¶] “It was essential to tell this white lie,” said her father Wu Yuming. … Both of Wu’s grandparents died more than a year ago, but the diver knew nothing of their passing until this week.
!!!
I’m not the parent of an Olympic athlete myself, nor am I a citizen of the PRC. I imagine that those things might exert some pressure on someone like Mr. Wu* and that tempers my judgment of him. Still, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that no, the lie was not essential, and the young Ms. Wu* deserved to know that her grandparents had died. She deserved to know that her mother had been fighting breast cancer for three years and had been pronounced in remission. She deserved to decide for herself how to react to this information. From my perspective, respect for her as a person demand no less.
If that choice was to abandon her athletic career to go support her family, then I say that would have been a heroic act all by itself, albeit one that would have not earned the evanescent moment of fame and glory that she and her nation enjoyed. If that choice had been to accept her family’s offer to bear the burden themselves so she could become an Olympian, that would have been a valid choice too. If it had been me, I’d have wanted to know and I’d have wanted to be a part of making that decision rather than having it made for me.
Congratulations on your gold medal, and condolences for what to you is a recent loss, Ms. Wu. You’d be right to be upset. But I hope that soon enough, you also find it in yourself to forgive your family for their — no doubt well-intentioned — presumption. As to your government and its role in this? I rather doubt the government will be apologizing to you, so I don’t think you owe it much by way of forgiveness until and unless it does.
The rest of us might take a moment to use this disquieting story to contemplate where exactly lies sweet spot between personal life and vocation.
* I find it just a bit odd that in Chinese culture, one’s surname is stated first and one’s given name is stated second, and a part of me wants to leap to grand conclusions about what this reflects about Chinese culture. Prudence, however, counsels me to do no more than to admit the temptation.
The battle with cancer, well, people here in the U.S. hide that sort of thing from their children all the time.
The death thing did make me blink, though.Report
From what I understand, olympic athletes in China are fairly isolated from their family. So it is easy to keep the truth from her. We must also note that the sense of obligation to one’s ancestors is more keenly felt in Chinese culture. We cannot exactly project the gravity of the choice as it would appear to us on to her. If the burdens at both ends are more keenly felt, I can intuitively get why the parents would have not wanted to tell her.Report
I find it just a bit odd that in Chinese culture, one’s surname is stated first and one’s given name is stated second, and a part of me wants to leap to grand conclusions about what this reflects about Chinese culture.
Just like those damn Spanish-speakers putting adjectives after the nouns the modify. The border needs that electrified fence. (Not fence electrified! U!S!A!)Report
It shows that we Asians respect our parents and that you Westerners have no respect for yours….*
*I’ve actually heard this being said with a completely straight face. The impression I get from hollywood is that American parents tolerate a lot of back talk and disrespect from their own kids. But I don’t think it has anything to do with the way you put your surname behind your name.
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If you really respected your parents you’d use patronyms like those nice Russians.Report
Actually, I do. Anantharaman is my father’s name and not technically my surname.Report
Or Middle-Earth-ians. “You wield a powerful blade, Frodo son of Drogo!” (Hobbits have last names, but no other group I can think of does.)Report
What Sam and Frodo say to each other their own hobbit-hole really ought to remain private, Mike.Report
Heh.Report
If you *really* respected your parents then your daughters wouldn’t have names; they’d be called “First (familyname)”, “Second (familyname)”, “Third (familyname)” like the Classical Greeks and Romans.Report
“It shows that we Asians respect our parents and that you Westerners have no respect for yours….*”
This reminds me of when people tell me “in my culture, family is very important,” when what they seem to mean is “my culture values family more than yours does.”Report
You know that my tongue ws very firmly in cheekReport
Meh, what do folks expect from a totalitarian gov’t?Report
Its her parents, not her government which decided to withold the truth.Report
Yea, is there any evidence that the government was involved?Report
Are you both really that naive? The parents knew what would happen to them if they interfered with her training.
“We accepted a long time ago that she doesn’t belong entirely to us,” Wu Yuming told the Shanghai Morning Post. “I don’t even dare to think about things like enjoying family happiness.”Report
Which doesn’t mean exactly what you think it means. They are talking about felt social obligations, not of threats by the chinese government.Report
“* I find it just a bit odd that in Chinese culture, one’s surname is stated first and one’s given name is stated second, and a part of me wants to leap to grand conclusions about what this reflects about Chinese culture. Prudence, however, counsels me to do no more than to admit the temptation.”
I actually think adopting this policy might be the cure that ails us. By putting the family name first and the given name second, the message is, “You are first a member of something larger before you are an individual.” Our way (given name-family name) says, “You are fire and foremost an individual.” I sometimes think we have gone too far in emphasizing the individual, to the point that we have lost sight of our fellow man.Report
This is roughly the generalized cultural speculation that I hesitated to make.Report
From what I understand, it is a pretty well-accepted difference between the cultures, one I think both sides would view themselves as being correct about. Independence versus interdependence. My hunch is that the naming is a consequence of this cultural value rather than the inverse, though I’m sure it reinforces is however subtle and subconscious. And I’m happy to be corrected if I am misrepresenting Chinese culture, but this jibes with the studies I read on their education system. I’m pretty confident in my assessment of American culture.Report
Kazzy,
Great observations on the differences between individualistic societies and collectivistic ones. Some cultures value tradition, family, ancestors, authority, and duty to others. Others value novelty, individualism, the future, “questioning everything,” and freedom.
In my reviews of the past century, I am not sure I agree with you on which model has done the better job of caring for our fellow man. Indeed their model pretty much screwed the fellow man until they began to adopt aspects of our model.
Or is this all just luck too?Report
Lies American parents often tell their children…
– A magical man comes down the chimney to give you presents to celebrate the birth of God’s baby.*
– A magical fairy brings you money for losing teeth.
– Mommy and Daddy will never die (!!!).
– Your fish didn’t die. It was doing the backstroke, then Daddy took you for ice cream, and now it is swimming again. Also, it got new stripes in the interim.
– Masturbate and you’ll go blind/grow hair on your hands/get acne/etc.
I’m not defending the Wu’s actions. I’m also unwilling to criticize them without knowing more details about the family’s structure and relationships. I am attempting to point out a bit snarkily that the criticism levied here seems to be, at least in part, motivated by the fact that the Wu’s are Chinese.
* I am NOT saying that the traditional Christmas story is a lie. I am saying that the Santa myth and it’s forced relationship to the birth of Christ is a lie.Report
Let me stipulate clearly, if I failed to make the point clear enough in the OP, that I do not think her parents acted out of ill intent. I think they acted out of a desire to make a decision that they thought in the moment was in their daughter’s best interests, and under a constellation of pressures that are only imaginable by most of the rest of us. That doesn’t mean that I think they made a good decision. Especially if it is true, as Murali states and as I have heard elsewhere, that Chinese culture places an even higher premium on respect for one’s ancestors than does the Euro-American culture with which most of us are familiar — given the truth of that assessment, that would only increase the imperative that she know what has happened to her grandparents, at least to my way of thinking. But I absolutely do not think these are evil people.Report
And I apologize if I implied otherwise. You did duly note that you thought they were well-intentioned. There just seems to be a bit of otherizing or exotification going on. Maybe I’m seeing it where it is not. I probably stated it unfairly, as I’m more wondering IF their ethnicity unfairly informed your criticism and should not have said that it indeed was. There is absolutely room to criticize the Wu’s and there is absolutely room to consider how their ethnicity, culture, and country’s government might have impacted their criticism-deserving decision. There just seemed, to me at least, a bit of an air of, “Look what these crazy people did/do!” going on.Report
” I find it just a bit odd that in Chinese culture, one’s surname is stated first and one’s given name is stated second, and a part of me wants to leap to grand conclusions about what this reflects about Chinese culture. Prudence, however, counsels me to do no more than to admit the temptation.”
Passive aggressive sniping is so boring. We all know what you want to say anyway, just say it.Report
Not everyone’s political views is just an outpouring of their id.Report
I didn’t find out about the (separate) deaths of two of my grandparents until months after the fact. My parents weren’t really keeping it from me–they apparently just didn’t think it significant enough to mention. To be fair, one was already severely cognitively incapacitated by Alzheimer’s and the other by a stroke, so they were pretty much functionally dead already, but still.Report
By the way, the parts of Chinese mailing addresses are also ordered from most to least specific, such that the province comes first and the building’s street number comes last.Report
Least to most specific, rather. Or most to least general. Dates, as well, start with the year and end with the day.Report
Which is a good way to enter dates when filing them electronically since with a numerical date it makes numerical order and chronological order the same.Report
Any standard database system should have a date type which supports a variety of input and display formats which are all stored the same internally. If you’re sorting dates by lexical representation, you’re doing it wrong.
The only scenario I can think of where it would make sense to sort dates by lexical representation is if you have a bunch of files whose names begin with dates.Report
Yes, but Windows Explorer doesn’t.Report
Windows Explorer can be configured to sort by date. Just click on Date Modified and it will sort. Click again and it will change back and forth from ascending to descending.Report
True, but that only works if the date modified (or the date created) is the date you want to use.Report
True dat. I have a little gang of C++ and Java classes which do nothing but handle this problem. When I’m obliged to work with Windows, I usually just install Midnight Commander anyway. MC handles dates better.Report
You’re talking about file names, right?Report
Correct. I have to sort my camera pics year-month-day, for instance, for them to show up in the right order.Report
You need EXIFsort.Report
Apropos nothing, the banner ad I get for this page says, “Has Ann Romney ever worked a day in her life? Vote Now.”Report
If adjectives come after nouns, then first name comes after last name. This is just a linguistic thingy, not indicative of anything.
If you wanted to draw some conclusions, you could have a VERY fascinating discussion on the tendency of different peoples to use first names versus last names to identify other people.
e.g.
The Japanese tend to use last names a LOT, even among friends. Using someone’s first name is a form of intimacy.
The Koreans, on the other hand, tend to use first names, or titles, rather than addressing people by last names (I get this from reading Korean entertainment and discussions about medical records). This might be because most people in Korea have one of about ten last names.Report
If adjectives come after nouns, then first name comes after last name.
Except in, you know, all of the world’s Spanish-speaking countries.Report
In both Japanese and Mandarin, adjectives precede the nouns they modify, just as in English.Report
In Spanish-speaking countries, usually people have two surnames, taken from both the father and the mother. Lots of interesting exceptions to this rule, both in the given name and the surname.Report
One also goes “Smith Mister” or “Smith Miss” in Chinese. Or “Smith John Mister”, etc.Report