Learn Chinese: culture of Unit 6

The dialogue of Unit 6 is about the family. A good opportunity to see the place it holds in Chinese culture, the richness of family vocabulary, and the system for numbering brothers and sisters.

1. The Chinese family, a pillar of society

In China, the family (家 jiā) is a great deal more than a group of people living under the same roof. It is the foundation of social organization, a direct legacy of Confucian thought, which places filial piety (孝 xiào) at the summit of the virtues.

Traditionally, several generations lived together: grandparents, parents, children, sometimes uncles and aunts. In today's big cities, the nuclear family has become the norm. The ties have not weakened for all that: it is very common for grandparents to look after the grandchildren while the parents work. Many of my students describe a childhood spent at their grandparents' home, hundreds of kilometers away from their parents.

The one-child policy (独生子女政策 dúshēng zǐnǚ zhèngcè), in force from 1979 to 2015, turned the family structure upside down. For more than thirty years, most urban families had only one child. Since 2016, you may have two, then three. But the habits have settled in, and many young couples stick to a single one.

2. The richness of Chinese family vocabulary

Chinese family vocabulary is formidably precise. Where English makes do with "uncle", "aunt" or "cousin", Chinese systematically distinguishes:

  • the paternal side from the maternal side;
  • the one who is older from the one who is younger than the parent concerned.

For "uncle", for example:

This precision says a great deal about lineage and hierarchy. Knowing exactly what tie links two people is knowing what they owe one another. Rest assured, these words are not on the level 1 syllabus: I am showing them to you so that you grasp the logic, not so that you learn them today.

3. 大姐, 二姐: numbering the brothers and sisters

In a Chinese family, brothers and sisters are often designated by their rank among the siblings, with the ordinal number placed before the kinship term:

Note that the first one takes 大 dà (big) and not 一 yī (one). Then come the numbers: 二, 三, and so on. The last-born often gets 小 xiǎo (little).

In the dialogue, Bai Xue has an elder brother (哥哥 gēge), an elder sister (姐姐 jiějie) and two younger sisters (两个妹妹 liǎng gè mèimei). In China, the two younger sisters would be called 大妹 dàmèi, the elder of the younger ones, and 小妹 xiǎomèi, the youngest.

The system is still very much alive, above all within families and in the countryside. It expresses the respect for the hierarchy of age that runs through the whole of Chinese culture. After a generation of only children, you may well wonder how much longer it will hold. I do not have the answer.