In the Chinese-speaking world, sentences often end before they are truly finished. And yet, listeners understand. That’s the efficiency of language—and the subtlety of power.
“You shouldn’t do that.”
“Be considerate of your parents.”
No explanation needed, no room for reply.
Beneath such phrases lies an entire apparatus of discipline: a structure that defines what is proper, normal, praiseworthy—and, by contrast, what is deviant, questionable, or excessive. This system wasn’t designed by any single authority, but rather trained into all of us. And the cruel twist is this: once we learn to “read between the lines,” we also learn to write them. We graduate from being disciplined to becoming the disciplinarians.
“It’s for your own good” is less a gesture of care than it is a syntax of command.
In this context, ethics are not deliberated; they are implied, repeated, presumed.
“Just listen to your elders.”
“Parents would never harm their children.”
“A woman’s place is at home.”
These aren’t arguments. They don’t need to be. Their power lies precisely in not pretending to persuade. They bypass reason and activate something far more potent: shame, guilt, fear.
Discipline does not aim to make you understand. It aims to make you internalize.
Once internalized, discipline becomes self-policing. You begin to question yourself—am I being too selfish? Too extreme? Am I giving off the wrong impression? Eventually, surveillance is no longer necessary. The judge has taken up residence in your own head.
You see this machinery at work in every corner of the internet. A creator who leaves her political stance ambiguous is instantly interrogated: “How can you be so heartless?” “Why don’t you make your position clear?” A woman writer speaks honestly about her ambivalence toward motherhood, and the verdict arrives not as dialogue but as decree: “You’re unfit to be a mother.” No one is interested in her struggle. They want to know why she has failed to perform the right emotions, take the right position, strike the right tone.
That is the nature of discipline. It doesn’t seek to know you—it asks that you conform to a template. Deviation is not curiosity; it is error.
The most insidious form of discipline is the one that comes disguised as kindness.
“We’re just reminding you.”
“We only want what’s best for you.”
“Think of others, won’t you?”
But this so-called kindness demands submission, silence, self-correction—not freedom.
And often, it’s not the state, the elders, or the institutions that enforce it most zealously. It’s us.
We leave anonymous comments. We caution the young with the smugness of “someone who’s been through it.” We wield the language of “rational debate” to smother feeling. We believe we’re speaking truth, offering goodwill—but in fact, we’re parroting a grammar long taught to us, a structure we’ve absorbed and now willingly replicate.
Because the real allure of discipline has never been order. It is power—the intoxicating sense of superiority that comes with saying: I know better. I see more clearly. I am safeguarding society.
Discipline grants us, if only for a moment, the illusion of authority in a world where we otherwise feel powerless. I may not be able to change the system—but at least, I can correct you.
And so we suffer under control, even as we sharpen our own tools of control. We resent being silenced, even as we practice silencing others.
Can we escape this system? Perhaps not yet.
The grammar of discipline is already embedded in our daily lives. It’s in the slogans, the polite phrasing of “just a suggestion,” the rhetorical kindness of “it’s for your good.” It can be stifling without ever being brutal, suffocating while sounding entirely reasonable.
So perhaps the first step is not to reject it outright, but to recognize it.
To notice the commands hidden within casual remarks.
To notice when gentleness becomes a tool of suppression.
To notice when we, too, begin speaking in that same voice.
This, perhaps, is the task of writing: to carve a pause between every command and every act of obedience; to softly ask, in the face of every “you should”—why? For whom?
And if we can hold space for that small act of refusal—for that tentative “I’m not sure”—then perhaps we have already begun to dismantle the first layer of discipline.
