thanks for your reply! i read the official seven seas translation.
regarding point two:
first, some personal comments. these are not directed at you specifically, but are rather just my thoughts and feelings on the matter in general. feel free to skip it and scroll down to when i start discussing mdzs proper.
i myself am ethnically chinese. i was raised in a household by two chinese parents and grew up in a community with a lot of other chinese people. based on my experience, chinese parents in general are comparatively verbally harsh to their children and relatively reticent on offering verbal praise or affirmations; instead, they show their love through their actions.
of course, i do not speak for all chinese people, and it is entirely likely and acceptable that different chinese people come to different conclusions than me. but to me, the way jiang cheng speaks to jin ling reads not as verbal abuse (which it might to a more traditionally american audience), but rather as just the typical way in which most chinese parents speak to their children. again, i do not speak for all chinese people - but, to me, there is not much that particularly stands out to me as unusually abusive or unusually cruel in the way that jiang cheng treats jin ling. rather, the ways in which he nags and gripes at jin ling, the ways in which jin ling immediately talks back to him, and the ways in which he overprotectively helicopter-parents jin ling, all read to me as incredibly culturally familiar.
this is in contrast to how yu ziyuan's treatment of jiang yanli, jiang cheng, and wei wuxian reads to me. to me, both yu ziyuan and jiang fengmian's parenting does read as unusually problematic from a culturally chinese lens.
in all honesty, the reason why "jiang cheng abuses jin ling" discourse rubs me the wrong way is not just typical fandom beef, but also that it makes me feel as if my entire culture is being judged. while i cannot speak as to the exact demographics of the tumblr mdzs fandom in 2024, from what i've seen, many of the people claiming that jiang cheng is abusive to jin ling are in fact white americans. as a chinese person, i've already had my fair share of white americans claiming that certain aspects of chinese culture are inherently inferior, problematic, or abusive - therefore, to me, this insistence from many white americans that what largely reads to me as culturally ordinary parenting behavior is in fact abusive feels like an extension of this pattern. to put it in simpler words, it feels to me as if these discoursers are applying their own different cultural standards as the one and only possible truth to my culture, which i'm frankly quite sick of. i suspect that a lot of other chinese fans in the english-speaking fandom feel the same way, which is part of why people can get so defensive about this topic.
(i had similar feelings when book 4 of infinity train released and the tumblr tag filled with a lot of...how should i say it....white american takes on min-gi's parents.)
personal aside over! all of that was not directed at you specifically, but rather were just my personal feelings on the topic. feel free to ignore it. if you are also chinese, then i apologize.
now, onto discussion of the actual story we all care about!
first, it should be clarified that jiang cheng slapping jin ling to the ground in both those cases is not just "unusual" behavior, but rather completely new behavior. as jin ling himself states, jiang cheng does not hit him at all:
It was a while before Jin Ling slowly came to. He felt his neck, where a slight pain still lingered. He was so angry he leapt up and pulled his sword on the spot.
“You actually hit me! Not even my uncle has hit me before!”
Wei Wuxian was shocked. “Really? Didn’t he always say he was going to break your legs?”
“He’s all talk!” Jin Ling exclaimed furiously. “You damn cut-sleeve, what are you up to, I…”
Book 1, Chapter 6: The Malevolent
of course, one can always argue that jin ling is lying to “mo xuanyu” in the chapter 6 excerpt above. i personally find this to be such an asinine reading that it does not merit discussion. one can also argue that jin ling has a much narrower definition of “hit” than most people, such that he only includes severe blows in his definition of “hit,” which would therefore make it logically possible for jiang cheng to hit jin ling and also for jin ling to be telling the truth in the above excerpt.
to determine how jin ling defines “hit,” let’s consider the following excerpt, in which wei wuxian hits jin ling:
“Wei Wuxian was taken aback when he heard this, but then understanding hit him. Caught between laughter and tears, he raised a hand and smacked Jin Ling on the back of his head. “Talk sense!”
Jin Ling let loose an “Ow!” His forced composure finally cracked. The slap might not have hurt, but he felt as if he had suffered a great humiliation, which deepened even further when he heard the girlish giggle of the woman serving tea at the side.
Covering his head, he hollered, “Why did you hit me?!”
Book 5, Extra 5: The Iron Hook
from this excerpt, we can conclude that jin ling defines “hit” in the same way most ordinary people define the word. therefore, when jin ling says that “not even my uncle has hit me before,” the most reasonable conclusion is that jin ling means to say exactly what it sounds like he is saying: jiang cheng doesn’t hit him.
meanwhile, that jin ling knows that jiang cheng’s threat to break his legs is empty is also repeated elsewhere in the text as well:
[Jiang Cheng] meant that if Jin Ling didn’t come over that instant, he’d break his legs when they got home. But Jin Ling had heard him make that threat so many times now, and not once had it ever been carried out.
Book 4, Chapter 19: Core of the True-Hearted
from these excerpts, we can conclude that while jiang cheng regularly threatens to break jin ling’s legs and/or visit various other acts of violence upon his person (which tbf is not great), jin ling knows that these threats are empty. in fact, jiang cheng has never physically hurt him. to me, jin ling saying that “he had been worried that this time jiang cheng would really break his legs” reads quite similarly to what modern teenagers say when they’re worried their parents will catch them sneaking out at night: “this time, my mom might actually kill me.”
what's notable here is that mdzs is in fact set in a world where physically hitting children to discipline them is normal and expected. just take a look at the gusu lan sect, which physically beat wei wuxian when he was a student there for violating their rules. wei wuxian also hits jin ling at least one more time during the scene in which the above iron hook excerpt is set (two more times if you count “smacked” as a hit), which does seem to imply that slapping children on the head is just a normal thing in this society. however, even in such a setting, jiang cheng does not hit jin ling. and while jiang cheng not hitting jin ling is in fact the bare minimum in our modern world, by his own society's standards, in not hitting jin ling, jiang cheng has deviated quite a bit from the social norm already. i won't say more on the topic here, but i think this fact should factor into one's assessment of jiang cheng and jin ling's relationship.
i also feel the need to point out some more specific details regarding the two incidents of slapping you brought up (in the future, i would appreciate a bit more context, or just some more of the surrounding text, so i can more easily locate the quote in the original corpus; i am, after all, working off of the official seven seas translation, which uses a different chapter system. i'm assuming you found these quotes yourself or took these quotes from a post that fully explained the scenes the quotes were taken from, rather than merely copy/pasted them from someone else’s post without fully knowing the context they came from). the first slap you brought up was during the second siege of the burial mounds, during which jiang cheng hit jin ling after jin ling actively tried to fling himself into a life-or-death situation. if i tried to fling myself into battle and my mom hit me to stop me from doing so, i personally think that would be completely justified.
the second slap you brought up was during the confrontation at the yunping guanyin temple, in the specific scene in which jiang cheng confronts wei wuxian over the golden core transfer. jiang cheng tries to get up in wei wuxian's face, lan wangji seems like he's going to become violent with (an injured) jiang cheng again, jin ling steps between lan wangji and jiang cheng, and jiang cheng slaps him aside. while jiang cheng slapping jin ling is not justified here, it should still be acknowledged that jiang cheng is at his emotionally most devastated moment in the past thirteen years. as thus - as you yourself said - his behavior here cannot be considered representative of what he is like in general.
at the risk of this post becoming too long, i'll jump ahead to your final claim about point two: "Jiang Cheng verbally abuses Jin Ling, the same way his mother verbally abused him." i do not agree with this claim. while jiang cheng is obviously a flawed parental figure in many obvious ways, i do think that he is still doing a far better job with jin ling than yu ziyuan did with him or his siblings. i do also think that this is how mxtx intends for us to read the text.
throughout the text, jin ling repeatedly shows that he is comfortable talking back to jiang cheng and snarking at him in a way that jiang cheng never was with yu ziyuan. when jiang cheng nags at jin ling, criticizes him, yells at him, or even threatens him, jin ling immediately hits back with zingers of his own. to see what i mean, let’s first look at the following conversations between jin ling and jiang cheng, taken from the text. for the majority of the excerpts, i removed everything except for the dialogue itself in order to save on space; feel free to confirm for yourself that the dialogue is the same.
first, let’s consider the following conversation between jin ling and jiang cheng, which occurs jiang cheng finds jin ling after jin ling’s adventure in the nie saber tomb.
Jin Ling: Didn’t I already come back perfectly fine? Stop nagging me!
Jiang Cheng: Perfectly fine? You look like you rolled in the gutters, and you’re telling me ‘perfectly fine’? Aren’t you embarrassed, wearing your family’s uniform like this?! Hurry back and change this instant! Say it right now: What did you run into today?
Jin Ling: I already said I didn’t run into anything. I tripped and fell; this trek was a total waste of time. Ow! Don’t pinch me like that! I’m not three!
Jiang Cheng: Oh, so you think I can’t manage you anymore?! Let me tell you, even when you’re thirty, I can still pinch you. If you dare run off on your own without saying anything again, the whip will be ready!
Jin Ling: It’s precisely because I don’t want anyone’s help—that I don’t want anyone managing me—that I went alone.
Book 1, Chapter 6: The Malevolent
in this conversation, jiang cheng nags at jin ling, criticizes him, threatens him, and speaks rather harshly to him - and jin ling gives back as good as he gets. for every rebuke jiang cheng snaps at jin ling, jin ling has an immediate and equally snarky retort. not once does jin ling just quietly take it when jiang cheng dresses him down; as my mom would put it, 一句话有六句话顶回去.
now let’s look at the following conversation, in which jin ling interrupts jiang cheng’s interrogation of “mo xuanyu” with bogus information about wen ning in order to rescue “mo xuanyu.”
Jin Ling: Jiujiu!
Jiang Cheng: Didn’t I tell you to stay where you were? What are you doing here?!
Jin Ling: Jiujiu, I have something very important to tell you!
Jiang Cheng: What is so important that you have to say it right now, instead of when I was scolding you earlier?
Jin Ling: It’s because you kept scolding me earlier that I didn’t say anything! Do you want to listen or not? If not, then I’m not going to tell you anymore!
Jiang Cheng: Out with it, then scram!
Jin Ling: I actually did run into something really troublesome today. I think I ran into Wen Ning!
Jiang Cheng: When? Where?!
Jin Ling: This afternoon, about five kilometers from here, there’s a dilapidated house. I only went there because I heard there’d been unusual sightings. Who knew a fierce corpse was hidden inside?
Jiang Cheng: Why didn’t you say so sooner?!
Jin Ling: I wasn’t sure. The fierce corpse moved extremely fast; the moment I went over, it fled, and I only just caught a glimpse of its shadow before it got away. But back at Mount Dafan, I heard those chains that were on him, which was why I wondered if it might be him. If you didn’t yell at me so much, I would’ve told you the moment I got back. And now if he’s run off and you don’t manage to catch him, you’ll have to blame your own bad temper, not me.
Book 1, Chapter 6: The Malevolent
especially snarky jin ling comments bolded. this conversation follows the pattern established in the previous one: even when actively trying to give jiang cheng (bullshit) information, jin ling still has the room to also argue with jiang cheng and snipe at him. in addition, what’s interesting about this specific conversation is that jin ling has just seen jiang cheng at his arguably most emotionally unstable (so far) in jin ling’s entire life: jiang cheng, after all, has just finally gotten his hands on wei wuxian after thirteen whole years. and yet, despite seeing jiang cheng actively flipping his shit, jin ling still feels secure enough to snark at jiang cheng and give him lip.
from the above jin ling and jiang cheng conversations, we can easily conclude that jin ling feels comfortable talking back to jiang cheng. jiang cheng speaks harshly to jin ling, yes - he nags at him, criticizes him, yells at him - and jin ling gives back as good as he gets. for everything jiang cheng says to jin ling, jin ling pretty much always has an equally incendiary retort locked and loaded - and feels entirely comfortable saying it out loud to jiang cheng.
now, let’s contrast the jiang cheng and jin ling conversations with some conversations between yu ziyuan and jiang cheng himself. first, let’s consider the following conversation, in which yu ziyuan comes across a group of yunmeng jiang disciples, including jiang cheng and wei wuxian, shooting at kites.
Madam Yu sent a look at Jiang Cheng. “Horsing around again? Come, let me have a look at you.”
Jiang Cheng scurried over, and Madam Yu squeezed his arm with her slender fingers before giving him a sound slap on the shoulder.
“Not a bit of progress in your cultivation. You’re almost seventeen and still acting like an ignorant child! Running around with this lot, doing mischief all day—do you think you’re the same as them? Hell knows which gutters they’ll be crawling in the future, but you’ll be the leader of the Jiang Clan!”
Jiang Cheng staggered from the force of her slap. He hung his head, not daring to argue back.
Book 3, Chapter 11: Supreme Courage
as established above, when jiang cheng criticizes jin ling, jin ling immediately talks back and insults jiang cheng in turn. when jiang cheng tells jin ling to do something, jin ling regularly just ignores him. but here, when yu ziyuan tells jiang cheng to do something, he does it immediately without comment or complaint. and when yu ziyuan criticizes jiang cheng, jiang cheng does not dare argue back; instead, he remains silent.
now let’s look at another conversation, in which the jiang family discusses qishan wen’s mandatory indoctrination camp for sect heirs:
Jiang Cheng: Don’t be mad, Mom. Just me alone is enough.
Yu Ziyuan: Of course you’re the one going! As if your jiejie can go? Look at her, still peeling lotus seeds so cheerfully! A-Li, stop peeling. Who are you peeling them for?! You’re a lady, not someone’s servant!
Jiang Fengmian: San-Niang.
Yu Ziyuan: Am I mistaken? You don’t like the sound of that word, ‘servant’? Let me ask you, Jiang Fengmian. Do you plan on having him go?
Jiang Fengmian: It depends on what he wants. He can go if he wants to.
Wei Wuxian: I’ll go.
Yu Ziyuan: How lovely. Go if you want to, but you won’t be forced to if you don’t. Why is A-Cheng the one who has to go? Raising someone else’s son like this—Sect Leader Jiang, what a good, generous man you are!”
Jiang Fengmian: San-Niangzi, you’re tired. Why don’t you go back and rest?
Jiang Cheng: Mom…
Yu Ziyuan: What are you calling me for? Trying to be like your father and tell me to quiet down? You’re an idiot. I’ve already told you, you’ll never be able to compare to the one sitting next to you. You can’t compete with him when it comes to cultivation, to Night Hunts, not even shooting a kite! It can’t be helped. It’s not your fault your mom can’t compare to someone else’s mom, after all. If you’re no match for him, that’s just how it is. Your mom is simply indignant on your behalf. How many times have I told you not to hang around with him? And yet you speak up for him! How did I give birth to a son like you?!
Book 3, Chapter 11: Supreme Courage
two things here. first, what yu ziyuan says to jiang cheng in that last line of dialogue (“what are you calling me for…”) is straight up worse than literally anything jiang cheng says to jin ling in the entire story. it is one thing to criticize your child’s performance, to yell at them for throwing themself into dangerous situations, to tell them to go away when you’re in the middle of a dangerous task (and yes, these things are already questionable) - it is another thing entirely to directly tell your child that his father does not love him. it’s another thing entirely to directly tell your child that his father will never love him, simply by virtue of facts your child cannot change. yu ziyuan does not just criticize jiang cheng’s performance, as jiang cheng does do with jin ling - yu ziyuan insults and belittles jiang cheng’s entire personhood, as well as his relationships with other family members.
second, let’s look once again at how jiang cheng behaves here. he, along with all the other jiang children and also jiang fengmian himself, remains largely silent during yu ziyuan’s rant. were this a conversation between jiang cheng and jin ling (and any third parties), every other line of dialogue would belong to jin ling: as seen above, for every sentence jiang cheng said, jin ling has something to unabashedly hit back with. but in this conversation with yu ziyuan, jiang cheng (and everyone else) instead says as little as possible.
as seen in these two yu ziyuan excerpts, when yu ziyuan yells at jiang cheng, jiang cheng remains quiet and does not dare argue back. he only speaks up to weakly respond to yu ziyuan’s direct addresses towards him, to try and pacify yu ziyuan's anger, and to discourage wei wuxian from further angering yu ziyuan. this is very obviously not how jin ling behaves with jiang cheng. what, then, is the difference?
to me, the most noticeable difference is that jiang cheng is afraid of yu ziyuan in a way that jin ling is not afraid of jiang cheng. why is jin ling able to so freely talk back to jiang cheng, in a manner that is disproportionately disrespectful in a society that so heavily favors filial piety and respect of one's elders? is it not because he has never suffered real consequences from talking back to jiang cheng? that jin ling freely talks back to jiang cheng indicates to me that he is not afraid of jiang cheng - that he knows jiang cheng's threats are empty, and that that he can get away with hitting back at jiang cheng’s harsh comments with snipes of his own. such as blatantly snarky comments like “If you didn’t yell at me so much, I would’ve told you the moment I got back,” which i think many people would consider disrespectful even by modern standards.
this is not the case with yu ziyuan and jiang cheng himself! unlike jin ling, jiang cheng remains quiet because he does not have this same confidence - he cannot say for sure that yu ziyuan will not completely lose it if he talks back at all. he does not have the same security or sense of safety jin ling does. jiang cheng saying something like “you’ll have to blame your own bad temper, not me” directly to yu ziyuan is frankly unimaginable.
consider the following excerpt, in which jin ling starts crying on the way to lotus pier after the second siege of the burial mounds, directly after he confronts wen ning for the deaths of his parents:
“A voice suddenly rang out from across the river just then. “A-Ling!”
…The voice they heard was Jiang Cheng’s, and he stood at the ship’s railing.
The moment he saw his uncle through his teary eyes, Jin Ling wiped his face haphazardly and sniffled. He looked this way and that, then gritted his teeth before flying over on his sword and landing beside Jiang Cheng.
Jiang Cheng grabbed him. “What’s going on?” he demanded. “Who bullied you?!”
Book 4, Chapter 19: Core of the True-Hearted
jiang cheng’s initial reaction is to show concern for jin ling. meanwhile, it’s very difficult to imagine yu ziyuan saying something like “who bullied you?” in response to jiang cheng crying. instead, it seems far more likely that her initial reaction would be to shout at jiang cheng for crying in public, and that she would not budge from the position of shaming him for it afterwards.
to sum up a rather long subsection, jin ling does not behave around jiang cheng in the same way jiang cheng behaved around yu ziyuan. this much is obvious. jiang cheng was afraid of yu ziyuan in a way that jin ling is not afraid of jiang cheng - this alone proves that jin ling's relationship with jiang cheng is not the same as jiang cheng's relationship with yu ziyuan. jiang cheng is obviously not a perfect parent; however, to say that he treats jin ling in the same way that yu ziyuan treated him is false.
in addition, i do also think that mxtx intends for us to read jiang cheng as having done a better job with jin ling than yu ziyuan did with him. mdzs, despite all its tragedy, still ends on a highly idealistic note - specifically because of the juniors. the juniors, through their kindness, innocence, and willingness to believe in wei wuxian when the adults all castigate him - through specifically jin ling's willingness to forgive wei wuxian, wen ning, and jin guangyao at the end of the story - represent hope for the future.
mdzs establishes this hope through a related theme: the breaking of cycles. lan wangji, wei wuxian, and jiang cheng himself all did better by their children than their parents did by them. lan wangji himself was raised in a strict, repressed, and moral-absolutist sect that did not tolerate much dissidence - yet the juniors he teaches are happy, inquisitive, and willing to stand against convention for what they believe in. jiang cheng was raised by one of the most resentful women in the jianghu, and jiang cheng himself has similarly pickled in thirteen years' worth of resentment - yet the child he raised forgives wei wuxian at the end of the story. people are not born inherently anything; rather, they are the result of their upbringings, experiences, and decisions made based on said experiences. that the thirteen-year-old jin ling chooses forgiveness at the end of the story indicates the cycle is being broken.
you are of course free to read the events in mdzs and conclude for yourself that jiang cheng treats jin ling in the same way that yu ziyuan treated jiang cheng himself, that no progress was made on that front. but i firmly believe that mxtx instead wants us to conclude that there is hope for the future. that wei wuxian's generation is doing better by their children than their parents did by them, that the adults of the story are actively trying not to pass on the resentment and pain of the previous generation. that jiang cheng, despite all his flaws and all his shortcomings both as a person and as a parental figure, is still capable of breaking the cycle of pain and being there for jin ling in a way that yu ziyuan was never for him.
the idea that mxtx deliberately wrote the story to make jiang cheng yu ziyuan 2.0 undermines much of the hope she aims to put in the ending, and instead makes for a much bleaker ending.
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