Girls Should Be Raised in Luxury While Boys Should Be Raised in Poverty

“Girls Should Be Raised in Luxury While Boys Should Be Raised in Poverty” is presented as a governing principle of the Gu family’s upbringing. Its importance lies in the contrast it creates between social expectation and lived experience: Gu Huaian appears to Shen Tang to be the archetypal overbearing president, yet the family’s rule has deliberately denied him an extravagant childhood and required him to become self-reliant. The expression therefore becomes a compact explanation of his habits, skills, and the mistaken assumptions surrounding his identity.

Meaning Within the Gu Family

The expression describes a gendered division in family education: daughters are to be given abundance and protection, while sons are to be made familiar with limitation and effort. In the Gu family, this principle is not merely decorative family wisdom. It is linked to concrete decisions about money, independence, and preparation for adult life. The contrast also helps distinguish the Gu household’s intimate practices from the public image of wealth associated with Gu Huaian and the Gu Group.

The wider family structure reinforces the proverb’s force. When Old Madam Gu and Old Master Gu receive Shen Tang warmly at a large family gathering, their attitude determines how the other Gu family members respond to her. Old Madam Gu introduces Shen Tang to important elders before allowing the younger people to separate, showing that family authority operates through both affection and hierarchy. Against that background, the child-rearing maxim reads as part of a broader Gu family system in which elders define conduct and younger members inherit expectations.

Gu Huaian’s Upbringing

Shen Tang assumes that Gu Huaian, as a wealthy second-generation heir, must have lived extravagantly from childhood. Her image of him is drawn from the stock figure of the overbearing president: a powerful man who should not need to work diligently and who might be unable to distinguish among the basic grains. Her inner commentary exaggerates this imagined type, expecting dramatic displays of dominance rather than ordinary competence. Gu Huaian’s actual history overturns the fantasy.

Gu Huaian explains that the Gu family rule required daughters to be raised in luxury and sons in poverty. Since high school, he studied abroad while receiving only the same amount of money as an average student, an allowance that was barely sufficient for daily life. He therefore experienced financial restraint despite his family’s wealth. The saying is made credible by this specific arrangement: “poverty” does not mean literal abandonment, but a deliberate refusal to let privilege become dependence.

His account also reveals that this upbringing involved labor rather than simple austerity. To support himself, Gu Huaian worked part-time at a Chinese restaurant, where he learned to cook. The skill surprises Shen Tang because it contradicts her assumption that a rich heir would never have had to perform practical work. Gu Huaian immediately qualifies the revelation by warning that he is not necessarily a good cook, but the qualification does not erase the larger reversal. His competence comes from experience imposed by family discipline, not from the effortless refinement Shen Tang expects from his public position.

Gender, Stereotype, and Domestic Competence

The proverb exposes the gap between gendered expectations and individual character. Shen Tang’s first reaction is not simply surprise that Gu Huaian can cook; she connects cooking with a broader imagined performance of masculinity. She expects an overbearing president to display force, arrogance, and theatrical control, whereas Gu Huaian’s domestic labor presents a quieter form of capability. The expression thus gives the scene an ironic structure: a doctrine designed to shape sons through hardship produces a powerful businessman who can also manage an ordinary kitchen.

The contrast is sharpened by Shen Tang’s own situation. The original Shen Tang pursued success and money partly for herself and partly to support children from her orphanage, including an eight-year-old boy who had contracted leukemia. Because the orphanage had little money and she had spent her savings helping it, she was nearly penniless apart from money recently provided by her contractual husband. Her practical responsibility toward non-biological family members places her beside Gu Huaian in a different register of self-reliance: his competence is produced by a wealthy family’s deliberate restriction, while hers is produced by scarcity and care.

The novel consequently keeps several kinds of family obligation in view. Gu Huaian’s upbringing is organized by the Gu family’s gender hierarchy; Shen Tang’s economic decisions are organized by attachment to orphanage children who are not her biological siblings; and the Shen family later confirms blood ties through medical testing. These arrangements complicate any simple definition of family. Material support, imposed discipline, caregiving, and blood relation each create obligations, but they do not carry the same emotional meaning.

Narrative Function and Consequences

As an expression, “Girls Should Be Raised in Luxury While Boys Should Be Raised in Poverty” functions as a key to Gu Huaian’s characterization. It explains why the supposedly privileged heir has experience with limited money and restaurant work, while also allowing the narrative to mock the formulaic image Shen Tang projects onto him. Her expectation that he should behave like a stereotypical overbearing president is repeatedly corrected by the man who actually stands before her.

The saying also contributes to the novel’s recurring interest in rules that regulate bodies and behavior. The contractual marriage includes a three-meter distance requirement and a prohibition on physical contact except when necessary; the film crew imposes closed management and restricts mobile-phone use; and Gu Huaian later orders Shen Tang to write a thousand-word self-criticism when he is angry. Within this environment, family maxims, contracts, workplace regulations, and personal discipline all shape conduct. The Gu family proverb belongs to that same world of rules, but its effect is developmental rather than merely restrictive: it is meant to turn privilege into endurance and dependence into ability.

Its ultimate significance is therefore double-edged. The expression preserves a traditional gender distinction between daughters and sons, yet the scene uses it to dismantle a class stereotype. Gu Huaian’s wealth does not tell the whole story of his formation. Beneath the image of the untouchable president is a son trained to live within an ordinary student’s means, work in a restaurant, and learn a practical skill. The proverb is memorable because it captures that contradiction: abundance and hardship are distributed according to gender, but the result is a character whose real identity cannot be inferred from status alone.