One of my best friends since kindergarten recently complained that his parents were “torturing” him again by castigating him for remaining single.

“I was very upset last night,” he said in a teahouse in Yangzhou, our hometown, on Februrary 1 (during the Spring Festival). “Each time they see me, my parents sigh and urge me to marry and have a baby as soon as possible. Last night they reprimanded me, their impious son, again for being single.”

My friend was born in 1965 and has a decent job in a multinational corporation in Beijing, but hasn’t found a girlfriend partly because he has lost most of his hair.

“Mom asked me yesterday who would inherit their old house in the future if I do not marry and bear a child?” my friend recalled. “They wished me well, but it’s not something completely in my control.”

I offered my advice: “Be patient and be nice to your dad and mom.” I have known his parents since he and I went to kindergarten.

They are very nice and traditional Chinese parents, caring little about themselves but much about their children. With this unconditional love, however, comes unbearable parental demand.

In my friend’s case, his parents’ demands that he marry and have a baby as soon as possible are no doubt irrational. It amounts to imposing their own standard of a good life on their son.

And yet my friend dares not openly challenge his parents because he is filially pious. He only gets upset when he is alone or while chatting with me, probably his best friend.

His unwillingness to challenge his parents is not all bad. It’s part of the traditional Chinese culture of humility. In Confucian and Buddhist beliefs, demanding parents, however unreasonale they may be, appear in our lives with a purpose to teach us to be humble. In other words, demanding parents are a treasure to children in the construction of their spirit of humility.

After all, one would easily reject an irrational demand if it was made by someone other than one’s own parents. But in the face of irrational parental demand, one has to learn to be humble.

If one learns to be humble to his or her parents, he or she will gradually treat others with humility as well, as Confuius advocated. In Buddhism, parents are one’s biggest Buddhas.

That’s why filial piety and humility were a pillar of traditional Chinese culture for thousands of years until modern times when Western individualism was introduced to China without much critical thinking.

And that’s why I did not encourage my friend to ignore his parents’ castigation, however unreasonable it was.

After all, life is not all rational and arrogance is never a solution.

To persuade my friend to understand his parents, I told him a story about my parents-in-laws, who recently lived with us for more than a month.

In the past, my in-laws spent all their savings to raise three daughters born in the 1960s and 1970s. Now that all their daughters have grown up and lead decent lives, they have begun to relax a little bit.

But during the past month while staying with us in our Shanghai home, they still strived to do all the household chores from cooking to cleaning. They did not want to bother us.

TV addiction

But my mother-in-law has a habit we all hope she could discard: TV addiction. Years of addiction to TV during her retirement has prevented her from seeing things clearly around her.

One day my wife suggested to her mother: “Maybe you could listen to dad playing the piano.” Her mother retorted: “I will never listen to the piano.”

Another day my mother-in-law said to me: “I don’t like whatever you like: calligraphy, painting, music and etc. I have a hobby you don’t understand: watching TV.”

Before my in-laws came to live with us, our home was quiet, except for music time. My wife and I seldom watched TV. But when my in-laws were with us, my wife and I returned home only to be bombarded with loud TV programs.

What could we do with my TV-addicted mother-in-law? I wish I could have switched off the TV immediately, but that would have hurt her feelings as she is our senior.

So my wife and I stopped our musical life and merrily accompanied my mother-in-law as she watched TV. My wife was clever and pious enough to make tea for her mother during these times. Her mother had seldom spent much time drinking tea before.

As I said in an earlier article, regular drinking of Pu’er tea brought my mother-in-law an unexpected surprise: her constipation was cured.

That was how my wife and I “dealt with” her mother’s irrational demand to watch TV any time she wanted. We yielded to her demand, but at the same time we did something good for her health. In that process, we also succesfully persuaded her to reduce the time spent watching TV.

That’s the spirit of humility we learned to cultivate in our communicatoin with our parents who may sometimes come up with irrational demands or behavior.

Some scholars in the West have criticized China for lacking the science of sociology, saying China was never a civil society, that it was largely a country based on family clans. But there’s a fundamental difference between a Chinese and a Western family.

A Chinese family is much more extended in which four or five generations may live together, making it essentially a miniature society.

In the West, parents seldom interfere in their children’s way of life, and children seldom feel the need to be humble to their parents’ demand, especially in the case of irrational ones.

I am not sure if filial piety will survive in China’s future generations, as those born in the 1980s and afterwards are typically influenced by Western individualism and regard filial piety as someting quaint or archaic.

But to me, and many other Chinese of older generations, our demanding parents have forced humility upon us.

If someone asks me what makes me proud as a Chinese, I would say it’s the spirit of humility I’ve learned in a miniature society that is our extended family.

The name of this weekly column comes from the famous Taoist saying that the ultimate good is the way of water.