A Chinese-American Theology of Forgiveness (part II)

Let us, therefore, begin with two Chinese folk tales.  The first concerns two great generals in China.  Liang Shengyu was also a minister in the Imperial court and a close confidante of the Emperor.  Liangpo was another great general who was active in the military.  One day, the former criticized the latter in the presence of the Emperor, a no-no in Chinese Imperial etiquette.  Instead of lashing back at Shengyu, Liangpo simply took the criticism and went home furious.  The two never met up and reconciled their differences.  Unfortunately, a neighboring kingdom declared war against the Emperor, and the latter summoned both Shengyu and Liangpo.  Liangpo, still angry with Shengyu, stayed at home.  Shengyu, already at the Emperor's side, and as the hours passed, he thought to himself, "Oh no!  Liangpo will not show up at all since I shamed him in front of the Emperor that last time.  If I do not admit my mistake, we will be overrun by the enemy!"  And so he came up with a plan to effect reconciliation.

Late the next evening, Liangpo heard a few knocks at the front door and went to answer it.  Upon opening, he found an old man in rags and tatters, with a sword and sticks on this back, kneeling on the ground.  "Who is this?"  The old man on the ground replied, "General Liangpo, I criticized you in the Emperor's presence and I have learned that it was my fault.  I am the one guilty, not you.  General, I have my sword and a bundle of thorn sticks - please, take the sticks and beat me, take the sword and cut off my head.  We must do everything to reconcile so tomorrow we can respond to our enemy." Liangpo helped Shengyu upon his feet and responded, "No.  We've always been friends and will be so forever.  Please forgive me for my mistakes."  And the two men bowed together and worshipped the Deity, and both swore that they would from then on have the same mind. (60-65)

Another folk tale which conveys a similar message is a Chinese version of the "Prodigal Son".  In many respects, the story parallels Jesus' parable.  There was an ungrateful son who essentially gave his parents the "middle finger" and ran off.  The son, however, did not gamble his money away, made some poor financial decisions (invested in unprofitable businesses, etc.) which destroyed his inheritance.

Note the nuance here: the son's wrongdoing is rooted in a spurning of his parents' wisdom.  The parents had more life experience and, therefore, is qualified to teach their son what is good or not.  The son's foolishness lies in how he does not realize this. In his foolishness, he split the family and caused distress to his parents.  Thus, implicit in this parable is the emphasis on how the wrongdoing is not focused on what the son did, but the the effects of what the son caused.  The situation, I think, would be slightly different if the son went off and became, say, a Wall Street tycoon and moved his parents from China to the Upper West Side.  Once again, we note an implicit suggestion that wrongdoing is often performance based.  In the church, particularly between generations, academic performance can be a sore spot in parent-child relationships because the lack of good performance is concomitant to wrongdoing.  By getting a B+ in calculus (what's so hard about dy/dx 5xsin(2x)? ), you incur shame for the family; what will mom say to Wong "Tiger Mom" a-yi when she joyfully declares how her (younger) child has a math paper that was accepted for publication in The Journal of the American Mathematical Society?  At the age of 16?

In the Parable, the son was just a fool.   He consciously made the decision, in the parameters of Jesus' parable, to leave home, say to his dad, "Piss off and die," and gambled his money away.  He reaped the consequences of his inexperience, his foolishness, etc.  But in the parable, when the son decides to return, his father runs and accepts him before he even arrived at the front door!  This was not the case with the "Chinese prodigal son."  First, the son was obstinate in his wrongdoing, to the point where the mom asked around for where her son was.  Somehow, she was able to track him down, and receive updates on how he was doing.  She wrote letters to him constantly, entreating him to come home, to which there were no replies.  Eventually, when the son decided to come home, he first wrote a letter asking for forgiveness and agreeing to be obedient to his parents, to which the mother excitedly writes back and says, essentially, "Yes, yes!  Here's some money for the train ticket home!  Come home quick!"

Where is forgiveness in the Chinese prodigal son?  In Jesus' parable, the forgiveness isn't even verbally responded to by the father - he didn't tell his son, "You are forgiven."  No - the father probably wasn't even really listening to his son when he commanded his servants to fetch clothes and sandals.  And let's not forget that there is a "second prodigal son" in Jesus' parable, the obedient brother.  The fact is that the family remained divided, and Jesus did not resolve that at the end of his parable-telling.  In the Chinese prodigal son, the forgiveness was also not verbally responded to, but we know the son was forgiven, because in the end, family harmony was restored and the parents no longer lived in shame.

In both of these folk stories, we should note some noteworthy parallels.  First, the wrongdoing is almost always correlated with some sort of social disunity or ill.  In "the story of the Generals" the lack of forgiveness threatens the stability and existence of the kingdom; in the "prodigal son" the wrongdoing led to a division in the family and incurred shame on the family name.  This is rather different from Western notions of forgiveness because blame is squarely placed on the shoulders of the offender.  Your background does not really matter so much; even if you had a troubled childhood, it does not excuse you from shooting someone in the knee.  You shot the person in the knee, you pay the consequences, you ask for the forgiveness.  I got shot in the knee, I demand restitution, and I decide whether to extend forgiveness.  Now, in Chinese contexts, forgiveness can be asked, but wrongdoing boils down not to a system of rights and wrongs, but to any action that violates social harmony.

This poses a difficult dilemma for bi-cultural situations.  In the West, the offender and offended are responsible for requesting and extending forgiveness for the offender's specific actions.  Any waffling or fudgy account of the wrongdoing betrays insincerity.  If I simply said "Oh, I'm sorry that during the Holocaust just a few Jews died" my apology would not be interpreted as sincere or even serious for the matter because I fudged the facts - many Jews were murdered.  But in the Far East, forgiveness is not as easily analyzable because wrongdoing is relative to what disturbs social harmony.  So, consider the case where a child does not perform as well as he was expected to for, say, God-given reasons.  Some people simply will never understand calculus, no matter how much they practice. The Western-acclimated child would, of course, view that as just a matter of biological inability.  He will, of course, try his utmost to do well, but the effort to "get there" is much more than just the average calculus student.  For most of us, we would regard that as perfectly fine.  But the same child could be regarded as having committed a wrongdoing by his parents, who by getting a B+ (despite working his tail off to get it) has risked his family's shame in front of other church parents.

Who's wrong?  Who should apologize?  What constitutes a wrongdoing?  In proposing the possibility of a Chinese-American theology of forgiveness, let me sketch out a game plan.  First, we need an orientating guidepost upon which we can stake a provisional definition of a wrongdoing.  The category of "sin" is simply not enough, because what is "sin" is not uniform throughout all parties involved.  Is it "sin" for a child to disobey his parents and pursue a pastoral career?  Is it "sin" for a child to underperform academically? I suggest an unlikely starting point: the two most important commandments of Scripture - the Shema and the commandment to love our neighbors - which proposes a contextual ethic that makes places "sin" squarely in the category of what violates the harmony between God and God's people.  Note that what I am seeking to do is to strike a zhong yong (a middle way) between the Chinese emphasis on harmony and the Western emphasis on individual responsibility and autonomy.  In particular, I emphasize that the two commandments are not independent of each other - if we do not love God first, we cannot love our neighbors; likewise if we do not love our neighbors, we cannot love God.  From there, we will discuss the mechanics of forgiveness when such a harmony is breached. We will then close this series of posts with a case study.