Honor to Us All" is a song that carries very similar concepts to the scene where the matchmaker arranges for Lindo Jong to marry Huang Taitai to where she is receiving training on how to be a good wife. In the story, Lindo is matched with Huang Taitai, a local boy from a wealthy family. After a flood destroys the house she is living in, her family decides that it is time for her to live in the household where she will eventually be with her future husband. Servants at the house teach her to cook, sew, and do several other tasks a wife should “know how to do.”
The song "Honor to Us All" talks about how a girl can honor her family “by striking a good match,” and by a girl “bearing sons.” It also has many connections to the scene. In the song, it talks about how “men want girls with good taste. It talks about how a good wife should be calm, obedient, should work fast pace, should be able to reproduce, and that they should have “a tiny waist”, which means a good wife should look appealing. In the book, they also follow many of these beliefs. They teach
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The song gives meaning to objects such as, “an apple for serenity. A pendant for balance.” And, “Beads of jade for beauty.” In the book, it says that her mother gave Lindo a necklace made from a tablet of red jade. It also gives meanings to other objects, such as the red candle itself. Both also discuss the importance of ancestors and family. The singer in the song says, “Ancestors. Hear my plea. Help me not to make a fool of me. And not to uproot my family tree. Keep my father standing tall.” In Lindo’s situation, her family is one of the only things that motivated her to keep trying so that she could not disgrace them. The Taitai household placed a great importance on their ancestors. They hung pictures, cleaned graves, and treated the words of their ancestors with the utmost importance. This is what helped Lindo to eventually escape the
Yan Zhitui states that, "women take charge of family affairs, entering into lawsuits, straightening out disagreements, and paying calls to seek favor...the government offices are filled with their fancy silks." (Differences between north and south, 111). Yet, even in the Qing dynasty women were still restricted by and expected to uphold more traditional ideals, especially in the public eye. So, in the end, through her virtue, Hsi-Liu’s two children we able to become upright. Here, there is a split between what a woman is supposed to be according to old Chinese tradition, and the realities facing women in Tancheng. The loss of her husband, and economic hardship had forced His-Liu to behave in a different way, as if she were usurping the power from the eldest son so she could teach the two boys a lesson about being good family members. While she still maintains the ideals of bearing children, and being loyal to her husband, even after he dies, out of necessity she is forced to break from Confucian ideals of being only concerned with the domestic issues. This too put her at odds with the more traditional society around her, as the villagers pitied her sons, but vilified the Hsi-Liu for being so strict with them (Woman Wang, 65). Had she remarried, she would have been looked down upon even more because she would had broken her duty to remain faithful to her deceased
Both poems are set in the past, and both fathers are manual labourers, which the poets admired as a child. Both poems indicate intense change in their fathers lives, that affected the poet in a drastic way. Role reversal between father and son is evident, and a change of emotion is present. These are some of the re-occurring themes in both poems. Both poems in effect deal with the loss of a loved one; whether it be physically or mentally.