In Favor of Children and the Vernacular Haley Jung |
| "But I was too young then to understand such things." Lu Xun's
essay titled The Picture-Book of Twenty-Four Acts of Filial Piety states
that popular children's books in China may be a little too discreet with
their messages, causing children to fail to see the important morals of
the stories. He also feels that those who try to stop the use of the vernacular
in writing should be cursed with the "blackest, blackest curse."
If authors are using language hard for children to comprehend, and not have
photos to help them understand the story, children will get the wrong idea
and often get scared of what might happen to them if they don’t do what
the story says to. Children take things too literally and they need things to be spelt out word for word for them. For example, Lu Xun recalls reading the story by Liu Hsiang, Lives of Filial Sons. This story is about a poor family who has a new born baby and no food for them to feed the entire family - including the father's mother. The father - wanting to be a filial son, does all that he can to keep his mother happy and alive, even if it means killing his own baby to have one less mouth to feed. The moral of this story is to teach children to be filial and loyal to their parents at any cause. After reading this story Lu Xun is terrified at the thought be being buried, and hopes that ironically his father wouldn't be a filial son. He trembled overhearing his parents talking about where the next meal would come from and where they would get the money, and he now saw his gentle "white-haired grandmother" as a threat to his life. As Lu Xun looks back at his childhood and the way he interpreted things, he feels like a "simpleton." I don't see how he would have expected differently, though. He was only a small child and very gullible and naive. If a child reads a story about lying on the ice to wait for fish to swim under him to grab, he sees it as a story about lying on the ice to wait for fish to swim under him - not a story teaching you to be patient and wait for things to come your way. At such a young age, one can not expect a child to see the deeper meaning of stories and see the morals of the story behind the extravagant language used while writing these stories - hence Lu Xun's strong support of the vernacular. "Even if men's spirits live on after death and I am sent to Hell for such viciousness, I shall certainly not repent but never cease to curse all those who oppose and sabotage the vernacular." Being filial was a very important factor to the Chinese culture and children would do all they could to be a filial child. Elders want their children and grandchildren to understand this as soon as they can, giving them books and telling them stories that entail these morals. Though they might not see how important it is for the children to actually see that the story is a lesson - rather than something to pass the time with reading, they just want them to grow up with the right morals. |