Chinese parents are famed for the strict requirements they place on their children to perform well at school and beyond. Calling the police when homework isn’t up to scratch, however, would be extreme even for them. Not according to one Nanjing mother.
At around 6 pm on 7 November, a Ms. Ma, who lives in Nanjing’s central Qinhuai District, picked up her phone and dialed 110, the emergency number for the police.
She had just had a dispute with her son over his homework.
Unaware as to the nature of the incident, police from Confucius Temple Police Station rushed to Ma’s home to discover the true situation.
Entering the residence, they found Ma’s son, 11, crying on the sidelines, obviously aggrieved. It turned out that with Ma’s husband away on a business trip, Ma had returned home to help her son with his homework.
Ma told the police that she had lectured her son many times about the importance of completing homework, but that her son would not listen to a word of it. As the situation escalated, the two of them came close to blows. In desperation, Ma felt she had little choice but to to ask the police for assistance.
Ma’s son responded to the police’s questions by saying that his mother’s requirements were too strict and as such he could not accept them, hence the quarrel.
Before leaving the scene, rather than lecturing Ma as to the seriousness of wasting police time on the trivial, the police instead shared with Ma their own methods of helping children with their education.
They imparted to Ma’s son, “Young man, you are already a man, and men cry tears too. But they don’t shed them lightly”, reports The Paper. With the comfort and persuasion of the police, the boy promised to study harder.
While 110 is technically the police’s emergency number in China, in reality it is used to seek mediation in a great variety of matters, anything from disputes over restaurant bills or the occupation of parking spaces.
