Pa Chin's Family Character Analysis

Family by Pa Chin is a captivating novel that describes what life in China was like in the twentieth century. Confucianism, a big religion in China at the time, was heavily focused on filial piety. Filial piety is the relationship of obedience, in which the elders are to be respected by the younger generation (Wu, lecture notes, 2015). This religion was one of the main structures on how the society was ran. Chin represents how the younger generation was upset with how the old traditions of the Confucian system were ran and that they were ready to change it. He does this through the perspectives of many characters but especially in the three brothers, Cheuh-hisn, Cheuh-min, and Cheuh-hui. The three brothers mentioned have a very strict grandfather, Yeh-yeh, who is very traditional in the ways of Confucianism. Cheuh-hisn is the
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He is the most likely to obey the teachings of Confucianism. Yeh-Yeh sets up an arranged marriage for Cheuh-hisn with Jui-cheuh despite the fact that Cheuh-hisn is in love with another woman. Cheuh-hisn does nothing about this arrangement and suffers in silence. “Chueh-hsin became a man with a split personality. In the old society, in the midst of his old-fashioned family, he was spineless, supping Young Master; in the company of his brothers, he was a youth of the new order” (Chin, 1972, 44). His brothers didn’t agree with his reluctance to stand up to Yeh-yeh. He grows more and more weary as time passes and his former love and wife both die. Both of these deaths could have possibly been prevented if he had only spoken out against his grandfather’s demands and defied the system. His wife dies during the birth of their second child. There was this superstition that his elders believed in called the “bloodglow”. The “superstition says that if while