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Old story of wicked stepmother overlooks our aging society’s fear of loneliness
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Recently my brother paid a visit to a family friend surnamed Zhang, whom we had lost touch with for many years.
Zhang, 76, now lives with his second wife, who he married again after his first wife passed away some years ago.
He suffers from a heart trouble and is slow in following conversations, but is otherwise in good shape.
When Zhang’s son led my brother to see Zhang, neither the son or Zhang himself felt it necessary to introduce his wife.
Upon hearing this, I was not overly surprised.
In Chinese culture, there has been a deep-seated suspicion of stepmothers.
When I was still a boy I got to know about this stereotype image of a stepmother from a story meant to instill filial piety.
A Confucian disciple was so ill-treated by his stepmother that she would line his winter clothes with reed catkins, rather than the better quality cotton she used for her own two sons.
Once the son, ill-clad and shivering, bungled a job he was doing and was whipped by the father. During the beating, catkins began to fly out of the seams of his clothes, revealing his stepmother’s cruelty. The father wanted to divorce the mother, but the son knelt down, pleading with the father to relent, for she was at least a dear mother to two of his brothers.
This image of cruelty is sometimes extended to foster and adoptive mothers.
There was recently national outrage over an adoptive mother in Nanjing who kicked and whipped her 9-year-old adopted son after he had lied about his homework.
Stereotypes
She escaped arrest only after a public hearing decided it was not in the interest of the victim to have her locked up (“Prosecutors rule out arrest in alleged abuse case,” April 20, Shanghai Daily).
But I don’t think Zhang’s son’s failure to introduce his stepmother was due to any ill-treatment he might have suffered. After all, when Zhang remarried, his children were already grown up, and have never lived with their stepmother.
But staying in different homes does not mean the end of stepparent tensions.
However, remarriages for widowed parents are becoming more common, especially in cities, where people tend to take a more enlightened view of this issue. A natural explanation for remarriages is a fear of loneliness.
These days, most elderly couples have to adjust to having an empty nest, and this can be doubly desolate if they have to survive in their empty nest alone.
There are practical considerations too. It’s comforting to think that as we become more infirm there will be someone there to help care for us.
But many children dislike the idea of their parents marrying again, generally for economic reasons.
In recent years, we have heard frequent tales of children quarreling with, abusing, or evicting their biological parents, in disputes about family assets.
And the sudden appearance of a stepparent naturally affects children’s entitlements, often leading to resentment.
Children would probably be more tolerant if they considered the plight confronting the elderly — themselves in the not-too-distant future — due to China’s aging population.
Human ties
In Shanghai, according to the latest statistics, by the end of last year, among residents with hukou (household registration), those aged 60 or above numbered over four million — 28.8 percent of the total registered population. More than 750,000 were over the age of 80.
We still take such evidence of longevity as signs of progress. We extol the progress in standards of living and take pride in our access to medical care.
But we are less sensitive to the fact that the aged also have emotional needs. They require attention, respect, someone to talk to — or indeed to quarrel with.
In cities this is increasingly a luxury, as a considerable proportion of the elderly end up having to get by alone.
There are sad reports of the bodies of elderly people not being discovered until many days after their death.
Even more tragic, there are people found dead who have no one to mourn for them.
In Japan, where an aging population — and associated loneliness — has been a problem for some time, in 2008 the authorities arranged the funerals of 32,000 people who had lived alone and died alone.
In our consumer society, when one ceases to respond to adverts — when one is too old to be cheered up by even the prospect of a cruise trip — one ceases to be of consequence in the production-consumption equation.
We can only take solace in the human ties we still manage to enjoy.
It is good to be reminded that however healthy we appear to be now, there will come a day when we must depend on others to take care of us.
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