This short film with Chinese elements, "Bao Bao", won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. Remember, this short film was shown in the cinema before "Super Agents 2". At that time, I thought I was walking in the wrong auditorium, and I didn't know it was a patch until later.
Inspired by the experiences of children of Chinese immigrants in Toronto, the 8-minute animated short film "Bao Bao Bao" tells the story of a Chinese-style "empty nest mother". The Chinese-style family story framed by "love, family and food", accompanied by a Chinese-style soundtrack, evoked a lot of my memories and thoughts on Chinese-style family education.
food
"The people take food as the sky" This is an old Chinese saying. In daily life, we often talk about the taste of mother or the taste of hometown, which refers mostly to food. Whether it's a parent's favorite dish at home or a street snack, these will accompany the feeling of taste buds and become a symbol rooted in our memories.
This also shows that food in Chinese culture is not only a food thing, but also a kind of family bond and memory.
As Ishizuki said in an interview with Cineplex: Food is a way for parents to express their love, and their love is expressed by booing and greeting, cooking for you, and making you full.
"Bao Bao Bao" cleverly conveys the same memory symbol through the traditional food of buns. At the same time, it also leads to another theme - China's family education culture.
Family
In the traditional Chinese concept of family, there is a saying that "the male protagonist is outside, the female protagonist is inside", the mother bears most of the emotional part, and the father will bear the development of the child's social attributes. However, in the film, the father's appearance is pitiful, the father is running around and working, and he has no time to take care of the big and small affairs of the family, which is the epitome of most families. Many times, the father is more like a symbol in homeschooling, but rarely plays a role.
And this is the current situation of most Chinese family education: the lack of fatherhood.
In the process of parenting without the participation of the father, it is easy for the mother to regard the child as the only one in the self-world, establish a very intimate binary relationship with the child, and thus marginalize the father's position in the family. However, this extremely close relationship will easily become full of control and arbitrariness in the absence of father's checks and balances, which will affect the development of the child's independent character.
Balancing the triangular relationship between parents and children in the family and breaking the traditional identity role is an indispensable process. Why can't mothers work their careers outside? Why can't husbands take care of the housework with their babies at home? All the rules are actually to better adapt to the environment.
As it is said in the "Zhou Yi ZhiXia", "If you are poor, you will change, if you change, you will be general, and if you are general, you will be long-lasting."
love
Love is always an indispensable bond between family members. And the love in the story is also like most Chinese families, parents pour most of their emotions into their children, afraid that they will be hurt, worried that they will not eat well, but do not know how to communicate better with their children. This kind of love is often indirect, implicit but always unconsciously too strong, forming a repression and bondage in the relationship between parents and children.
I vaguely remember a self-deprecation on the Internet: "I am like a dog cub raised by an adult in the family, let me eat when I eat, sleep when I call, be beaten if I don't obey, and breed when it is time to breed." ”
Although the words are a bit extreme, this love has undoubtedly been present in most families. As the child grows, it just changes its name, "This is for your own good."
How to cleverly avoid the devouring of this love? How to effectively live yourself out in this love? The film uses refined metaphors, exaggerated treatments, but does not tell us the answer.
But in my opinion, this devouring love stems primarily from the unequal relationship between parents and children.
In traditional Chinese culture, filial piety and the dignity of the elderly and the young make it easy for parents to put themselves on the top of the parent-child relationship. In the eyes of parents, children are born by themselves, and children will always be children. The child is not an independent "person" before he is a minor (the definition of adulthood is different for each parent), they belong to the parents, they should listen to the parents, they should be grateful for the kindness of the parents, and this emotional burden will always accompany the child to grow.
At the same time, this unequal relationship also brings a clear problem – communication barriers.
How can people communicate smoothly without reciprocal respect? Empathy to understand each other is exactly what is most needed to communicate with children. If parents are not willing to come down from the altar of their parents, accept being opposed, being defended, being left, accepting that their parents are only part of their personal identity, and are not moved by self-sacrifice, then the parent-child relationship can never go out of the heavy suffocation.
In reality, many children are interfered with or forced by their parents in the process of growing up, whether it is studying, working or even marriage. Parents like to instruct their children on what to do with the attitude that I eat more salt than you walk, but rarely ask their children what they want.
Many people may think that I understand this, but in practice it is often the same old way.
We need to understand that being born as a parent is not necessarily a competent parent.
Parents need to cultivate this concept of equality from the very beginning of having children. When parents and children are truly equal, a mutual respect will naturally form and communication will naturally be smoother. In a dad diary from my classmate's husband, there is a paragraph that goes like this: "If I want to pick him up (1 year old), I will ask him first, and I will not pick him up until I observe that he has a "response" reaction." "This is actually a kind of respect cultivation. It's like a glass of water, if you're thirsty you'll just pick it up and drink it, you won't ask because it's an object. Although the child is not an object, how many parents will first ask and observe the child's opinion? Parenting should be more about listening and observing than just saying ,I think... ”。
But at the same time, we must also clearly understand that the collision of Chinese and Western cultures is particularly fierce today, and there have been huge differences between the Chinese thinking of small families and the Western concept of the big environment, thus forming a cultural fault line.
Children who grow up under such a culture shock can easily grow up in opposition to their parents. Parents hope that their children will become dragons but they are eager to protect their children, feeling that they have paid too much for their children and complain that their children are not appreciative; their children think that their parents have too much control and want to do their best to break free from the shackles of their parents.
Facing this invisible cultural fault line requires parents to be more patient and grow up with their children, constantly promote equal communication, and constantly change the way education is conducted. I think that's the attitude that parents should have. As Cary Gibran once wrote:
Your children are not your children.
Their lives are children born of their own desires.
They came into this world through you, but they didn't come because of you.
They are by your side, but they do not belong to you.
What you can give them is your love, but not your thoughts.
Because they have their own thoughts.
What you can shelter is their body, but not their soul.
Because their souls belong to tomorrow, to tomorrow that you can't dream of.
You can do your best and become like them.
But don't let them become like you.
For life does not go back, nor does it stay in the past.