5. Filial piety is when children put the desires of their parents over the desire of their own. This is common in Chinese culture. In Lu Xun’s “In The Wineshop”, an example of filial piety is when Weifu comes back into town to do his mother the favor of reburying his brother’s grave to avoid the likely destruction of the grave. When arriving at the grave, he finds no remains of his brother. However, he still buries the new coffin and fulfills his duty as a son. Weifu does this is to respect his mother’s spiritual need of protecting her son’s grave.
6. There are many aspects in this story that stroked it as being a modernist story. There is the obvious loss of faith in religion and patriotism. Both Weifu and the narrator grew up with dreams of being someone; they wanted to revolutionize China and move away from religion. They remembered the times where they used to pull beard off of religious statues, showing their secular motives. Also, both left their village in search of something better, depicting the modernist belief of urbanization. Essentially, Weifu and the narrator symbolize the modernist belief in the story.
I agree with you that there is something Modernist in the situation the characters in the text find themselves in – particularly if, as you suggest, they are suffering from a loss of faith in religion or in their country. Do we see anything in the style or form of the story that seems Modernist?