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I readily agreed to write this foreword, not because I share the same Chinese last name (as in “Shen”) with the two authors.Perhaps our families may be related through a common ancestor who lived hundreds or even thousands of years ago. However,for now, we must assume that we are not related.
I readily agreed to write this foreword, not because one of the authors who appears in the book as the father — Attorney Hongshan Shen — was an undergraduate classmate of mine.We spent four years together next to the Porter Tower and the Weiming Lake and in the Peking University Library (the famous PKU picture of “a tower, a lake, and a library” with homophonic pun in Chinese as “a picture of a mess”).
Rather, I enthusiastically agreed to write this foreword because I met the main author of this book — Yi Shen — three years ago (although I am more used to calling her by her English name: Emily). In 2017, I was a visiting scholar at University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and had brought my nine-yearold son with me during my tenure in the United States. During Thanksgiving of 2017, I drove to Hongshan’s home for a visit and met Emily there. Emily left me with a deep impression as a cheerful, sophisticated, sports-loving, and curious young girl.Emily elegantly chatted with me — her father’s classmate —who she had never met before, led us to play volleyball in the yard, and gave me a saucer she had made, complete with her beautiful English signature. After dinner, Emily left the table politely to study mathematics online with her classmates.
Needless to say, when Hongshan mentioned that Emily had spent more than two years with him to complete this little book that, in many ways, serves as a record of the legal discussions between them, I was very curious about how and what growth story Emily — this sunshine girl — would share with us.
Do parents have the right to decide for their children on whether they should be homeschooled or go to school for education?
When helping your classmate take care of his/her property, if you accidentally lose the property, do you have to compensate your classmate for the loss?
Suppose you found a lost puppy on the side of the road,kept the little puppy with you and took good care of it. Now not only have you saved her, but you also attended her when she gave birth to her baby dogs. During the process, you have cultivated sentiments and emotions for the puppy and her babies. Can the owner of the puppy just take them away from you?
For students who love volleyball and participate in volleyball clubs, suppose they played on behalf of the club and suffered serious injuries during the games, and the medical expenses were huge. Would the injured students and their families bear the expenses themselves?
You brought your friend to play with your neighbor’s dog at the neighbor’s home. Your friend was accidentally bitten by the dog. Should the neighbor be responsible for your friend’s treatment expenses? Should you be responsible?
Suppose that in order to save your drowning and struggling mate, you didn’t have any choice but to render him unconscious in order to stop his struggle. Though you saved him from drowning,you caused a concussion. Do you have to bear any consequence for this?
Suppose a school offered you a Letter of Admission. You celebrated for this offer and rejected several other schools’ offers. However, the school that offered admission then notified you that the letter was sent by mistake and was therefore revoked. Does the school have the right to do so?
Your family went to a big mall on Black Friday. Your mom and dad asked you to look after your younger brother while they shopped. However, your brother slipped near a fountain and suffered a fracture. Should the mall be responsible?
Suppose your classmate was being bullied by one student of another school. Your classmate fought back with a baseball bat after being provoked and injured the bullying student. Should the classmate take responsibility for this?
You participated in the school’s painting class and created a painting which was satisfactory to your teacher. The painting was then displayed in the school gallery. Can the school print the painting on the school calendar without your prior consent?
Ten questions with strong legal tones — who has rights and who has obligations/responsibility — are drawn out one by one by ten growth or even dream stories of the heroine Ellie. Between the lawyer father and the daughter Ellie expand interesting and enlightening discussions on the ten questions:issue spotting and factual analysis through the lens of a dynamic Socratic dialogue. Ellie stands out as a kind, lively girl who enjoys helping others while also imbued with a deep intellectual curiosity. Her benevolent father encourages these questions and works to help her understand complex principles and concepts.Behind them is her supportive mother, who stands silently,steadily, yet indispensably and supports the family.
Obviously, these stories did not truly happen to Emily.Nevertheless, we can see vivid projections of Emily’s study and life. As for the issues involved in these stories, I believe that Hongshan and Emily have had discussions regarding these kinds of scenarios, and I believe that many young readers and their parents will find the ways in which Ellie and her father discuss these confusing situations to be very familiar and helpful.
Rather than being stuck on an island like a version of Robinson, we live in a society based on complex relationships with others — in fact, our first set of relationships are with our parents. In what Fu Yan
calls a “group-self” (
qunji
) relationship, we continue to receive education about what should and should not be done, most of which are about how to deal with others. The narrative of “what should and should not be done” actually has connotations of rights and obligations, some of which are moral, some disciplinary, and some legal. A variety of rights and obligations constitute a social order that is intricate but basically well-organized.
However, our lives are not always peaceful and tranquil;conflicts of interest and entanglements between people are inevitable. The transitions from childhood to adolescence and then to adulthood involve learning how to identify and work through conflicts. This can be a very difficult and confusing process. This might be a shifting process from “not knowing any sorrowful taste” to “understanding all the sorrowful tastes.”
There are many perspectives and methods for solving doubts and confusions. The law can serve as a guide by which we can finely distinguish the rights and obligations in different scenarios, just as laid out in this book: case by case, it analyzed the rights of parents over children, the duties of shopping malls owing to customers, legitimate defense and excessive defense, etc.
One may not choose law as the main subject of their own study and research; but one can never live completely without interacting with the law, never solve the problems encountered completely without using legal thinking, nor grow up or mature— in academic terms, “socialized” and “civilized” — completely without any legal awareness or knowledge. Our growth, and the growth of our children, needs to be nurtured by the law, and we need to adequately acknowledge the nurture as well.
Fictional narratives, Socratic Q&A, the transnational context (especially reflected in the western names of the characters and the Chinese legal concepts), and the bilingual texts, are all what make this book fascinating and intriguing.I believe that young readers will love it, and they would be interested to know how the same stories and discussions are narrated in different languages. I believe that parents can also learn from this book some legal knowledge to protect, help,and nurture their children, and explore a way to discuss similar confusions with their children.
I am thrilled and cannot wait to see the texts and pictures right from the screen of my laptop to be transformed into a book with a strong ink fragrance.
Such is my foreword.
Kui Shen
Professor, Peking University Law School
July 22, 2020