英雄和逞英雄

When acts of altruism are exaggerated, they become hollow. The shift from a tradition of melodrama to a growing need for truth and complexity reflects a move up the curve of civilization.

A popular television program has just made a comeback, but it is making waves for the wrong reason. The second season of A Bite of China, a documentary series on Chinese food, is drawing record numbers in ratings, but the biggest controversy it has caused has nothing to do with what we put in our mouths. It is about how far a mother is willing to go for her daughter.

Ziyu, a teenager from Henan province, has been in Shanghai to study the viola. In the five years she has been away from home, her mother has lived in a small rented place in Shanghai and helped her with her daily chores. So the daughter can concentrate on her music, the mother has not returned to her Henan home, not even when her mother-in-law underwent chemotherapy. She is torn between her responsibility as a mother and as a wife and a daughter-in-law.

This detail is supposed to demonstrate the mother's self-sacrifice. But it backfired because a significant number of the public interpreted it as a sign of fixation. Some viewers became so upset they even started harassing the mother and daughter online - to the point that the director of that episode made a plea to target criticism at her and her alone and spare the subjects of her documentary.

If you thumb through Chinese newspapers, you'll come across hundreds and thousands of stories of this nature, stories about officials and ordinary citizens who go out of their way to help others. Of course it is not the altruism, but the self-sacrifice, that is increasingly turning heads - not in admiration but in concern. In a way the changing reaction signals a subtle departure from traditional values and a growing awareness of the balance that is needed in our daily existence.

A typical "heartwarming" story goes like this: A crisis erupts and a policeman (or one of any other profession) rushes to the rescue. He spends days saving a dozen people while totally oblivious to the needs of his own family. At the same time, his wife is giving birth to their first-born or his old mother is dying, but he would not squeeze out time to visit them. Even though he passes his home many times, he does not stop but rushes to save total strangers.

As is obvious, whoever wrote this must have been moved to tears by the absolute selflessness of the hero. In placing a halo around him, he or she has played up the deliberate neglect of the needs of the hero's family - to the extent of dwarfing the fact that he saved a dozen lives. And for thousands of years, Chinese people have eaten up this sort of thing as part of our regular diet of moral lessons.

Yes, it goes back to before the days of newspapers and television reports and movie biographies. And it predates the age when the word "propaganda" was coined. Ordinary Chinese, especially the illiterate, depended on folk operas for their knowledge of history as well as entertainment. Those operas were predominantly morality tales where characters were portrayed in stark black and white. There was no room for nuance.

Take the famous Three Kingdoms saga. To show Liu Bei in a positive light, his archenemy Cao Cao had to be made a villain, complete with a white face (in Chinese traditional opera a white face denotes either a clown or an evil person). Never mind that in historical records Cao was a capable leader of great complexity.

In the same story, the two military counsels who worked together to defeat Cao were heightened to show their contrast. In real history, both Zhou Yu and Zhuge Liang were leaders of extreme intelligence and the former played the pivotal role. But in fictionalized accounts familiar to generations of Chinese, the former was turned into a petty, jealous person while the latter was given almost supernatural powers.

Because reality usually does not lend itself to operatic proportions, Chinese writers and artists (and journalists) tend to hype up or even make up certain details to get the point across. If an adult jumps into a lake to save a child, he has done a mere "good deed"; if he saves three kids with his last breath and drowns, he has performed an act of heroism. To go one step further, if it's a child who saves three other children and drowns, he'll be made into a martyr and there will probably be a national campaign to extol him, with his image plastered throughout the nation's classrooms. I grew up with many such posters.

When I returned to China in the late 1990s, I was surprised to read about teachers calling for an end to such campaigns. They said children should not be encouraged to risk their own lives in such situations. Instead they should ask for help from adults. While it is honorable that some kids give up their own lives to save others, this kind of heroism should not be emulated by other children, they insisted.

The refusal to see real life as a facsimile of melodrama is a sign of the increasing maturity of Chinese society. Tales of unmitigated heroism have met with more and more suspicion in recent years. People question the integrity of the reporting and, if verified, the mental health of the people featured in the stories. If someone is unable or unwilling to help his own family, they reason, how could he possibly extend a hand to strangers?

I have a strong feeling that most of these stories have a kernel of truth in them, but are distorted beyond recognition by people too eager to paint in broad strokes.

There was a "model" policewoman who worked tirelessly, did a lot of good for people in her jurisdiction and died in a work-related car crash. She was essentially an exemplary official molded in the image of Mother Teresa. During a reporting trip to that area, I suddenly thought about asking government officials about the policewoman.

"She was a wonderful person and always helpful," they said. "But she did not have a happy family. Her husband was cold to her."

It made perfect sense: What could have happened was she channeled the unhappiness in her family life into devotion to her job. But in all public portrayals that important detail was removed as an inconvenience, thus taking away the texture of real life that would have authenticated her story and made it so much better.

The readiness to embrace melodrama is an offshoot of an agrarian society with relatively low levels of education and sophistication. This applies not only to melodrama on screen and page, but also in real life. Altruism is a virtue shared by all humanity, but elevating it to a height unreachable by most humans is to take it out of the context of human dynamics and transform it into an abstraction. It is an effective way to cheapen it.

The change in public perception should sound an alarm to anyone whose job is to portray heroism in life. Instead of making it pure, one should preserve the messy reality.

Genuine situations and emotions run deeper than embellished ones.利他主義的行爲被誇大之後，就成了虛僞。越來越多的人從傳統的被煽情轉變爲對真理和事件複雜性的探求，這反映了文明的進步。

一期受歡迎的電視節目重新開播了，但是，它火得有點莫名其妙。《舌尖上的中國》是一期關於中國美食的高收視率紀錄片。節目中最具爭議的一集是，它與食物本身無關，而是反映一位母親如何支持女兒的。

女孩子鈺來自河南省，她曾經在上海學習中提琴。離家求學的5年期間，爲了方便她專心學音樂，母親一直居住在上海小小的出租房裏照顧她的生活起居。即便是婆婆化療期間，紫玉的母親也未曾回河南老家侍奉。紫玉的母親身負母親、妻子及兒媳三個角色，有太多的責任需要承擔，她分身乏術、無從取捨。

這一細節的描述意在突出母親本人的奉獻精神。然而，結果卻適得其反。因爲，大部分公衆把母親的行爲解讀成了執戀。一些觀衆如此不滿以致於他們甚至開始在網上騷擾母女二人了。該集節目的導演出面請求公衆只去批判自己，不要涉及紀錄片中的人物。

如果你瀏覽中國報刊，你會讀到成百上千的同類報道，某官員或者某人如何竭力去幫助別人。這當然不是利他主義，但是，對於文章中所展現的自我犧牲的觀念，人們的想法變了。面對那些自我犧牲的行爲，人們沒有了往日的羨慕，而是滿心憂慮。這一轉變標誌着傳統價值觀的剝離，越來越多的人意識到，我們日常生活需要平衡。

一個典型的“溫馨故事”是，危機爆發了，一名警察（或者是一名其他職業的人）挺身而出、參與救援。他花費幾天的時間參與營救，救出了十幾個人。然而，他卻對自己的家人不聞不問。此時，他的妻子正在生頭胎，他年邁的母親即將離世，但是他卻擠不出時間去看看自己的家人。即使他回過家幾次，但是，他都沒停下來去看看自己的家人一眼，就馬上投身到對陌生人的救援工作中去了。

很顯然，寫這篇報道的人肯定被這位英雄的無私而感動。賦予英雄光環的作者故意忽視了英雄家人的需求，那些需求同拯救幾十條性命相比，微不足道。數千年來，中國人接受這種道德教育，就如同吃家常便飯一樣。

是的。回到沒有報紙、電視報道和傳記電影的時代，這種道德教育的出現比“宣傳”這個詞語被創造出來的時代更早。中國老百姓，尤其是那些不識字的，通過戲劇來了解歷史、娛樂身心。這些戲劇大部分是道德故事，故事中的人物非黑即白。故事情節大致相同。

比如，戲劇《三國演義》中，爲了表現劉備這個正面人物的形象，他的敵人曹操就必須是化妝成白臉（中國傳統戲劇中，化妝成白臉的不是小丑就是壞人）。然而，史料記載，曹操是一位性格複雜而又有能力的領導人。

《三國演義》中，作者通過着重描寫蜀國和吳國的兩位軍師聯合抗擊曹操來對比兩人的不同。正史中，周瑜和諸葛亮都是極有智慧的領導人，而周瑜是核心人物。但是，在這部爲數代中國人熟知的小說中，周瑜被描繪成一個氣量小、嫉妒心強的人，諸葛亮幾乎是被賦予了超能力。

由於史實通常不適用於戲劇，中國作家和藝術家（甚至記者）甚至編造某些細節來服務中心主題。如果一個成年人跳進湖裏去救小孩，他只是做了一件“善事”，如果他用盡最後一口氣，救了3個孩子後溺亡，他就是英雄。更進一步講，如果有一個小孩救了另外3個小孩後溺亡，救人的小孩就被追加成一名烈士，很可能會在全國舉辦一次活動來頌讚他。他的肖像會被張貼在全國的教室裏。我小時候就見過許多這樣的貼報。

20世紀90年代末，我回國的時候，竟然讀到了老師呼籲停止此類表彰活動的文章。他們說，遇到那種情況的時候，不應該鼓勵孩子們冒着生命危險去救別人。孩子們應該向成年人尋求幫助。儘管一些孩子捨身救人是可敬的行爲，但是，這種英雄主義不應該被其他孩子模仿。

拒絕把現實生活當作煽情劇的複製品是中國社會越來越成熟的標誌。近年來，完全的英雄主義已經受到越來越多的質疑。人們懷疑報道的真實性，如果報道是真實的，人們懷疑接受專題報道的人物是否精神有問題。如果一個人不能夠或者不願意幫助自己的家人，他怎麼可能伸出援手去幫助陌生人呢？

我深信，大部分的報道都有一點點事實。但是，事實被一些急於報道的人大手筆渲染後，被扭曲到了面目全非的地步。有一名“模範”女警察，她孜孜不倦地工作，在審判中爲羣衆做了許多好事，最後，她死於一場與工作相關的車禍。本質上，她是官方按照特蕾莎修女的原型塑造的模範。在去該地區採訪的時候，我突然想向政府官員瞭解一下那名女警察的情況。

他們說：“她人很好，樂於助人。但是，家庭生活並不幸福。她老公對她很冷漠。”

這就合理了，家庭生活不幸使她全身心投入到工作中來排解內心的痛苦。但是，爲了方便起見，所有的公衆報道把這一重要細節省去了。繼而，從現實生活中抽出的事實使她的故事看起來真實可信，變得更好。

農業社會的文化水平相對較低，觀衆時刻準備接受煽情劇的觀點。這不僅僅適用於電視電影及書中的煽情劇作品，還適用於現實生活。利他主義是人類的美德。但是，把利他主義上升到大多數人都達不到的高度無疑是把它抽離出生活，化爲抽象。這是貶低利他主義最有效的辦法了。

對於這些在生活中有着扮演英雄角色職業的人而言，公衆觀念的轉變是一個警示。生活再糟糕也要去保留它的原貌，不要去美化它。

真實的情境和感情比粉飾過的更爲深刻。