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Read other letters about this article
and one thing that sticks out is the falseness of the old platitude about people being pretty much the same the world over. As people have already pointed out, values differ enormously by culture.
I had the great fortune to learn this at an early age, serving in the Peace Corps in Korea, perhaps the most Confucian of all Confucian cultures. At the end of my term, I worked as training staff for Peace Corps and married a colleague, one of the Korean language instructors. Her family held a variety of reservations, but my wife was and is a strong-willed person who would not have done well, by her admission, married to a Korean man of that age. It helped a lot that I speak Korean and have some understanding of the culture, but the whole marriage has been a continuing education. One thing her family did for me that startled me slightly at the time and even more now that I understand it better was to include me in the family register. Among other things, this means I have dual US/Korean citizenship, but it took real chutzpah on their part to include me in the family, especially given that the family is nobility. You can look up both her great-aunt (Queen Yun) and her great-great aunt (Queen Min) on wikipedia - these women were not retiring, shy, submissive Asian flowers. This was something I was not aware of until we'd been married for quite some years, but there it is, and it does explain a lot. It also is one of those family tales one can use as good examples for the children - viz "Your g-g aunt thought it so important to keep Korea independent that she was killed for it."
My wife is now clan matriarch, and has responsibilities that come with that, yet another bit of education for me. I've seen situations like the LW describes, and understand the conflict the man's parents and the man himself is undergoing. The root in my opinion is the clash between the western, especially American, high value of the individual, against the eastern, especially Confucian, high value of the family. And one can say that, recognize it to some degree, but it it so deeply a part of us that often it's difficult to recognize that it underlies how we react to situations like that.
