The Romance of Bao & Guan
Written by Peter Li-Chang Kuo ( Chinese ) October 25 marks the memorial day of my grandmother, Kuo Chen Shu-Jean (1896–1970). I still remember her saying, “ A person who does not study cannot understand righteousness .” At just two or three years old, I repeated those words after her — only later did I realize how profoundly and enduringly those six characters shaped my life. Before I took charge of the family, we were not always struggling for daily meals; in fact, there was one peaceful year — 1961, when I was eight — I even accompanied my grandmother to see a Taiwanese opera, which told the story of Bao Shuya and Guan Zhong in the Spring and Autumn period. Fig 1: Bao Shuya and Guan Zhong (Cited from Internet) During the turbulent Spring and Autumn period, when the traditional moral codes of " Three Bonds and Five Constants " had decayed, one friendship shone through the chaos and was celebrated for millennia — that between Bao Shuya (c. 644 BC) and Guan Zhong (...