后顾之忧
hoù gù zhī yoū · HSK 7
family worries
后 rear + 顾 look-back + 之 's + 忧 worry = the worries waiting behind you
Literally a rear-guard worry: 后 (rear) and 顾 (to look back) combine to mean the nagging concerns at your back, like family duties, that hold you in place. Usually negated, as in 没有后顾之忧 = free of such burdens.
后 — 厂 cliff + 一 + 口 mouth
Originally depicted a ruler or sovereign issuing commands, showing a figure with a mouth giving orders. It came to mean 'queen' or 'empress.' In modern simplified Chinese, 后 also absorbed the meaning 'behind/after' from the traditional character 後, so context decides which sense applies.
顾 — page 頁 + cliff 厃 (phonetic 雇)
顧 is a semantic-phonetic compound: 頁 (head) gives the meaning of turning the head to look back, while 雇 supplies the sound. The original sense was 'to turn and gaze,' which extended to 'consider, care for, attend to.' The simplified form 顾 keeps the same structure with 页.
之 — foot 止 above ground line 一
Originally a pictograph of a foot (止) stepping forward from a baseline, meaning 'to go' or 'to proceed'. Over time the concrete 'going' sense faded, and 之 was borrowed as a grammatical particle marking possession ('of') or as a pronoun ('it'), which became its dominant use in Classical Chinese.