On my walk to get the mail this morning, my stream of consciousness thoughts led me to a memory of a story a teacher told us (her class) in Chinese School when I was in elementary school.
Chinese School is an extracurricular program run by a Chinese association to provide classes in the Mandarin language to any child who is interested in (or forced to) learn reading and writing in Mandarin Chinese, with some mild cultural exposure in the form of field trips and class lessons. During the school year these classes are on Saturdays, and in the summers classes are held in the mornings and there is an optional afternoon session children can be enrolled in that’s more physical and less classroom, e.g. swimming classes and Chinese arts and crafts, and performance. The classes are taught by Chinese volunteers, perhaps parents, perhaps teachers in their old hometowns in Taiwan or China. Either way, I don’t think these teachers are credentialized.
Like many Americanized Chinese kids, I was sent to these classes for years, primarily for day care purposes I suspect. And like the other kids, I retained very little of what I’d learned. (You should see it, we’re banned from speaking English in the classrooms, so it’s all quiet, and as soon as the bell rings, everyone explodes into English conversations that we’d been holding in.) But one thing I did walk away with, apparently, is this “fable.”
There was a little boy who was loved very much by his mother. She loved him so much that she let him do whatever he wanted. If he saw a toy his neighbor had and wanted it, he would take it and his mother would laugh at his cleverness. When he got older, he went from taking candy and toys that didn’t belong to him, to taking larger possessions from adults, such as watches and books. His mother supported him and praised him through all of this. One day, the boy stole a purse from a woman on the street. The woman screamed, and to shut her up, he killed her by hitting her on her head with a big stick. A policeman was nearby, and the boy was caught and arrested. Soon, the boy was in jail awaiting execution. The mother came to visit the boy in jail. “Oh, my good boy!” she cried. “How could this have happened? How could they do this to you?!”
The son asked, “Am I still your good boy?”
His mother replied, “Of course, you have always been and will always be my good angel boy.”
The boy asked, “Can I make one request of you, then?”
“Of course, anything,” his mother answered.
“Can I be your good little boy again like I was when I was smaller, and suck from your breast?”
~ Let me break from the story reverie for a moment. At this point in the storytelling, I am almost as uncomfortable as I was when I was, oh, EIGHT years old listening to this for the first time IN CLASS with about thirty other students ranging from ages seven to ten. I had a sense that this isn’t appropriate, and as I squirmed uncomfortably, I saw other students looking at each other, and some boys sunk into their seats. Back to the story. ~
The mother answered, “Of course you may!” and pulled the front of her shirt up and pulled a breast from her bra. She stuck her breast in through the bars.
~ Squirm, squirm! Some kids blush and look down at the tops of their desks. ~
The boy grabbed hold of his mother’s nipple
~ Yes, she said NIPPLE in Chinese, “nai toe”. Gaaaack!!! ~
with his mouth and suckled. He suckled for awhile, he sucked and sucked, and then all of a sudden, with a lot of strength, he clamped down and bit his mother’s nipple right off!
~ Methinks she enjoyed telling the sucking part a little too much, but it did have the proper effect, the second part was totally unexpected and there were audible gasps from the kids. ~
So now the mother was bleeding, and she held her injured breast
~ The teacher was actually pantomining clutching one breast with her hand in front of the class at this point. ~
and she asked her son, “What did you do? Why did you bite me?” And you know what the son said?
He said, “I bit you because this is all your fault. The only time I was a good boy was when I was an infant and still sucking at your breast. After that, I was never good, and you allowed me to be bad, and now I am to be executed.”
~ At this point, we were confused because as good little Chinese kids, we were taught to always respect our elders, so the son blaming his own bad actions on his mother seemed further proof of how bad he was. That must be the moral. ~
And was he right?
~ Some kids in the class shake their heads and utter “no”, the answer we thought she wanted, but most of the kids just stared at her wide-eyed, apparently in traumatic shock. She saw fit to confuse us more. ~
Of course he was right. It WAS all his mother’s fault, for not teaching him right from wrong. That’s the moral of this story.
I think my parents should get their money back for all they’d spent for me to attend Chinese School. What do you guys think?
