Recent scholarship on emotions in late imperial China focuses heavily on the romantic connection between individuals and neglects the affective bond between parents and children. In Orthodox Passions: Narrating Filial Love during the High Qing, Maram Epstein hones in on the parent-child relationship, demonstrating how filiality (xiao) played a prominent role in establishing personhood in imperial times. The book weaves filial narratives from local gazetteers, vernacular fiction, and auto/biographies into a tapestry of filial sentiments. The author demonstrates how fruitful it is to do away with the May Fourth discourse of modernity and to (re)examine Chinese materials within their historical contexts. As she points out, May Fourth intellectuals treated Confucian filial piety as a regressive custom that suppressed individuality and prevented China from becoming a modern nation-state. Those reformers' views hinder us from identifying filiality as a central theme in late imperial narratives. It is time to...

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