Night Market Encounters with Shame and Grace
Tsou Shih-Ching’s Left-Handed Girl
By Stephen H. Chen, Associate Professor of Psychology at Wellesley College.
“Parents should never make their child feel shame.”
I present a version of this statement each semester in my undergraduate seminar, then ask my students to indicate the extent to which they agree with it. I do so using a 5-point scale, partly because I’m a psychologist and we love our Likert scales, but also because even single-point discrepancies can get a discussion going. Is there really never an occasion for shame? Or should parents dole out criticism as readily as they dispense praise?
What divides the camp on shame are beliefs about its effects. Some students view shame as causing lasting, irreparable harm to a child’s well-being. On the other end of the scale are students who see shame as beneficial and even necessary for children’s healthy development. In the middle are the caveats: experiences of shame can be helpful for some kids, with certain parents, delivered in a certain way, but it can be devastating for others. The question, of course, is how a parent knows how shaming will land - not just today, but years or even decades into the future. The middle ground may be the safest place to stake a theoretical claim, but it’s the hardest to put into practice.
A scene of parental shaming is the centerpiece of Left-Handed Girl, Taiwan’s shortlisted entry for this year’s Academy Awards. Its titular character, five-year-old I-Jing, has been leading a secret life of crime in the stalls of a Taipei night market. Once discovered, she’s forced to make restitution with each of her victims - vendor by vendor, apology by apology, stolen item by stolen item.
Up to this point, the scene changes in Left-Handed Girl have been rapid-fire, flitting between different narrative threads; and so this restitution scene feels interminable, even gratuitous, as we follow I-Jing for almost three minutes through four cycles of confession. And while opponents of parental shaming might expect to see I-Jing collapse under the weight of her ordeal, we instead see her shoulder an increasing ownership of her wrongs. At the last station of her journey, she steps forward alone to offer her apologies, with her guardian standing back.
Left-Handed Girl may refer to I-Jing, but she’s only her family’s youngest shame-bearer - the smallest in an intergenerational set of nested dolls. The film traces the generations of women in I-Jing’s family and their different responses to shame, and in doing so, it traces their responses to grace, as well.
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I-Jing’s source of shame is the easiest to pin down. Her grandfather tells her that her left hand - her go-to appendage for eating, coloring, and pressing elevator buttons - is “the devil’s hand.” And while her family members shush ah-gong for his antiquated views, I-Jing takes his superstition to heart. If it’s the devil’s hand, it can do the devil’s work, which in this case is a curated pilfering of I-Jing’s night market neighbors - a bracelet, a toy, and a hair band all contribute to a growing bedroom stash. She does this gleefully and shamelessly, and why wouldn’t she? It is not she who does it, but the sin dwelling in her left hand.
I-Jing’s glee is short-lived. It eventually gives way to sorrow, and this affective shift reflects a framework from developmental psychology on how children come to experience shame in the first place. Michael Lewis1 proposes that children experience shame when they recognize they’ve failed to meet socialized expectations, then attribute that failure to a total, unchanging feature of the self: I’ve failed, and this failure reflects who I am and who I always will be. For I-Jing, the giddiness over what her left hand can do is replaced by tears when she recognizes that it’s caused irreparable harm, and – critically--when she can no longer separate her left-hand’s actions from who she is. When I-Jing realizes that it is the devil hand causing her to sin, she cuts it off in her five-year old way: by covering it with a rubber glove, keeping it out of sight and preventing it from doing more harm to those she loves.
Children experience shame when they recognize they’ve failed to meet socialized expectations, then attribute that failure to a total, unchanging feature of the self: I’ve failed, and this failure reflects who I am and who I always will be.
Whereas I-Jing turns inward in response to her shame, her sister, I-Ann, lashes out in response to her own. She tells off college students at a party for their lewd propositions, but their insults cut especially deep because they’re shameful reminders of her lost academic potential. She confronts her dying father who abandoned their family years prior, and her final words to him ooze contempt. When the news comes that he’s passed, I-Ann spends a few pensive moments flicking cigarette ash onto a childhood photo of her sitting on her father’s lap, both of them smiling. Her next scene, not thirty seconds later, finds her in the back room of a betelnut stand with her married lover, yelling at him to hurry things along. Attachment theory tells us that our parents provide the earliest answers to our deepest questions of self-worth: Am I loved? Am I worthy of attention? Abandonment answers, “No”, and it leaves shame in its wake.
I-Jing’s sorrow and I-Ann’s anger emerge from their shame, and they echo what theologian Simeon Zahl calls “affective predicates”2 of salvation: the felt experiences of guilt, alienation, and mortality in response to encounters with a higher law. They are affective because they encompass a broad spectrum of negative emotions and they are predicates because, particularly in Lutheran soteriology, they set the stage for grace and the liberation of the gospel. Or, as described in Zahl’s translation of Melanchthon: “The Law terrifies; the Gospel consoles.”3
Attachment theory tells us that our parents provide the earliest answers to our deepest questions of self-worth: Am I loved? Am I worthy of attention? Abandonment answers, “No”, and it leaves shame in its wake.
For the grandmother of Left-Handed Girl, the encounter with the law is more literal. The police show up at her doorstep. They have been tipped off about her role in an illegal immigration racket, so she is understandably terrified, then consoled by the good news that I-Jing has unwittingly intervened on her behalf. She escapes this first run-in with the law, but--like all of us--she has no way of evading the next one; all of the highest-quality vitamins she loads up in her suitcase cannot exempt her from the law of mortality. This is why she’s crestfallen when people accurately assess her age, why her birthday party is longevity-themed, and why she’s ultimately crushed by the film’s great reveal – a grand reminder of her mortal coil.
Encounters with the laws of sin and death can set the stage for the consolation of grace. Yet Left-Handed Girl shows us how our responses to grace can vary as widely as our responses to shame. When I-Jing’s intervention gets her off the hook with the police, the grandmother at first overflows with relief and gratitude – I-Jing is declared the “granddaughter she loves the most.” However, we soon see that this consolation is skin-deep and self-focused. She’s been shown grace, but when given opportunities to dispense it herself, she responds like the unmerciful servant in Matthew 18: she calls out others for their failings and scorns those she sees as being beneath her.
In this way, the grandmother’s response to grace is the exact opposite of her daughter’s. Shu-Fen is I-Jing and I-Ann’s mother, and arguably the film’s heaviest shame-bearer. Abandoned by her husband, raising a child of uncertain parentage, Shu-Fen returns to Taipei to make ends meet at a noodle stall. When she comes up short on rent, the indignity of asking her mother for money is made worse when she is turned down. After all, “A married daughter’s like water poured out,” her mother reminds her, and in doing so she brings to the forefront the stigma Shu-Fen bears along with her sisters: in a family holding fast to patriarchal structures, they were born daughters, not sons.
Shu-Fen carries the weight of her family’s shame, yet she’s also its most generous dispenser of grace. Her final words to her dying husband, in contrast to I-Ann’s words of contempt, are a tearful admonishment: I told you not to smoke so much, and the subtitles omit the cultural translation: I still care about you. She makes this explicit later when, to the disbelief and scorn of her family, she scrapes together the funds to pay for his funeral.
Shu-Fen is extravagant, even foolish, in dispensing grace, but she’s reluctant to receive it, even declining a neighbor’s offer to pay her rent. In this way, both mother and daughter see only part of the shame-grace picture. The grandmother’s focus is on the punishment she’s evaded rather than on the riches of mercy she’s received; Shu-Fen sees grace’s invitation extended to everyone but herself. If the grandmother’s parable avatar is the unmerciful servant in Matthew 18, Shu-Fen’s is one of the beggars in Matthew 22 standing outside the door of the King’s feast to which she’s been invited, wedding garments in hand, but hesitant to put them on.
It’s fitting, then, that a banquet is where Shu-Fen begins softening to grace’s invitation. Her boyfriend, Johnny, who has long been fending off her rent collector, now sits through her family’s subtle digs at his social standing. Yet when the family’s ultimate shame comes publicly to light, he’s the one who rises from the table to intervene, to confront their shamers on their behalf.
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The question of parental shame may hinge on whether it’s offered alone or accompanied by the grand caveat of grace. On its own, shame is a crushing load that bleeds sorrow, rage, and terror. Met with grace, these become predicates to consolation. I-Jing’s evening parade of shame ends with tears and a moment of uncharacteristically tender reassurance from I-Ann; the scene immediately following shows them together in a moment of almost blinding joy. I-Jing’s shame comes in recognizing that it’s she, not just her left-hand, who committed the crime. Her encounter with grace comes through each vendor’s words of forgiveness and their invitations for I-Jing, in all her left-handedness, to come back any time.
Stephen Chen is a professor in the Psychology Department at Wellesley College, where he directs the Culture, Family, & Development Lab and teaches courses on cultural psychology. A second-generation Taiwanese American, he worked for a number of years as a school counselor in Asia before returning to the U.S. for his PhD in Clinical Psychology at UC Berkeley. He writes about the intersections of culture, faith, and psychology at https://stephenhchen.substack.com.
Michael Lewis, “Self-Conscious Emotional Development,” in The Self-Conscious Emotions: Theory and Research, eds. J. L. Tracy, R. W. Robins, & J. P. Tangney (The Guilford Press, 2007), 134–149.
Simeon Zahl, “On the Affective Salience of Doctrines,” Modern Theology, 31, no. 3 (2015): 428-44.
“Lex terret, evangelium consolatur. Lex irae vox est it mortis, evangelium pacit et vitae. MW 2.1:83; Melancthon, Loci Communes 1521, p.103” (as translated in Zahl, The Holy Spirit, 165).
Love this piece Stephen! Just watched Left-Handed Girl and left me pondering so much. Really appreciate your reflections on shame, grace, intergenerational relationships with your integrative lens.