A hard look at heroes - and their heroics

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.