Truly Loving Someone Means Letting Him or Her Be Themselves

Schopenhauer said that the most painful thing in this world is for one's own will to be changed by others. If a person cannot live according to his own nature and wishes, his heart is always in pain. Especially for people with strong personalities, erasing their individuality and making them live like ordinary people, scheming and scraping for a living, is absolutely a spiritual torment to them.

In China, many people live to be "looked up to," to look good in the eyes of others. This bullshit cultural heritage suppresses many people's true nature. What is saddest among our family members is that each makes too many demands on the others, demanding that they strive for respectability. Every demand that arises not from emotional and spiritual inspiration is suspect of raping another's will.

When I was in middle school, my teacher once gave a class on Dream of the Red Chamber and suddenly sighed that China is a country lacking the soil for love. At the time I could not quite understand him; growing up, I gradually realized that Chinese love does indeed have a certain blindness. Once our love enters marriage, it is transformed, by the "face" problem that runs rampant in our culture, into an obligation to strive for vanity.

So our love is bound up with too many non-love impurities. We often force the people we love to abandon their own nature and hobbies in order to win honor in the world of vanity and live like somebody. The result is that in China the standard for "living like somebody" finally becomes uniform: nothing more than more money, a bigger house, a better car, and being a big shot.

In China, it is not only love between spouses that is tainted by such impurities. Parents' love for their children is the same: as soon as their own child is outdone by someone else's child, the parents are as stricken as if they had lost their own parents, nagging all day. When I return home, what I hear most is my father's criticism of me—criticizing how I amount to nothing, how I earn less than so-and-so in the village.

The old man never cares whether I live happily; he only cares whether I live in a way that gives him face. Bound by China's traditional culture of filial piety, I still have to go home and visit him shamelessly, grinning at him thick-skinned when he runs me down as worthless. Luckily I married early, so I at least did not lose my parents' face on this score. My older brother is less fortunate; being unmarried to this day, he cannot escape all kinds of condemnation every time he comes home.

Mr. Qian Xuesen once sighed that China, having poured such enormous educational funds into education, could not produce a master like those of the Republican era. This "Qian Xuesen question" interrogates the weakness of our society.

If the love among Chinese family members, between spouses, between lovers, were not built on all sorts of vanity, China's many talented people might all devote themselves to the work they love rather than chasing fame and profit. With the diligence unique to Chinese people, if not entangled in the face problem, we would surely already be shining brightly in every field.

We always boast that we are an ancient civilization, yet much of the dross of this ancient civilization is truly embarrassing. Our moral decay and the various ugly phenomena in society are also related to this culture of quick results and love of vanity. Driven by this culture, we Chinese indefatigably throw ourselves into the great cause of making money, making more money, making still more money; in the end we disregard shame and morality, stop at nothing, all just to earn a bit more money so that we look better when we return home.

So our love is deformed, and the human nature bred by deformed love is deformed too. How can a group of people with deformed personalities produce a master who needs a great personality as his foundation? Putting bread on the table is not hard; what is truly hard is satisfying the bottomless material demands that arise in family members under the culture of face.

If the love in our whole society were purer—if spouses, parents, and children truly loved each other, cared less about face, just got by without fretting every time someone nearby struck it rich—I believe many of us would be steadier in temperament, purer in our goals, and would do work that is cleaner and more meaningful. Moreover, the quality of family life would be far higher.

What is the mortal world (hongchen)? It is the boundless sea of desire woven from these intricate bonds of blood and love-relationship.