The Wall of Storms (The Dandelion Dynasty, #2)

by Ken Liu

The only duty any child owes to her parent is to live a life that is true to her nature.”

After contemplating Confucius’s original writings on 孝 (pronounced xiào, a core concept in Chinese culture on the duty owed by children to parents with no English equivalent but often mistranslated as “filial piety”), this is the most accurate and succinct way for me to explain what he meant. I’ll wait a bit until all the angry shouting has died down. Still at it? I’ll wait a little more. Yes, typically when 孝 is brought up, one sees references to obedience and honor and deference and more extreme ideas—most of them elaborations by later commentators (and often entangled with ideas about compliance with political authority). But when you prune all that away and go back to what Confucius actually wrote, what emerges is an abiding concern with finding one’s proper place in the world, with defining the individual self through a set of relationships and connections, with kindness and respect welling forth from a proper understanding of the interwoven character of identities at all levels—add all that up, and what you have is an exhortation to discover one’s true nature in order to express it fully through the community of relationships, which is also the only proper way to honor our ancestors. Those steeped in conventional (mis)interpretations of 孝 are free to continue to shout angrily at me; I don’t really care. I think Kuni Garu would approve of my re-interpretation of Confucius, and that is all the authority I need.