孟母三迁

Pronunciation: mèng mǔ sān qiān Literal meaning: Mencius's mother moves three times

Origin & Usage

Liu Xiang's Biographies of Exemplary Women tells how the mother (母) of Meng Ke (孟) — Mencius — moved house three (三) times (迁) for her son's sake. They lived first beside a graveyard, and the boy took to imitating funeral processions and mourners' wailing. She moved to a house by the market, and he began playing at hawking wares and haggling over prices. Only when she settled beside a school did he copy the ritual, courtesy and study he saw around him, and she said this at last was a place fit to raise a son. The story made Mencius's mother the standard figure of maternal devotion in Chinese culture. The idiom is still used of parents who uproot the household for a child's education, sometimes admiringly and sometimes with a light edge.

Examples

English: "They changed neighbourhoods twice to put their daughter near a better school"

Chinese: 为了让女儿就近上更好的学校，他们搬了两次家