Sam1
Really Really Experienced
- Joined
- Jul 23, 2002
- Posts
- 300
I found this in the Autumn 2002 edition of “The Wilson Quarterly”. It is the beginning of an article entitled A World on the Edge.
One beautiful blue morning in September 1994, I received a call from my mother in California. In a hushed voice, she told me that Aunt Leona, my father's twin sister, had been murdered in her home in the Philippines, her throat slit by her chauffeur. My mother broke the news to me in our native Hokkien Chinese dialect. But "murder" she said in English, as if to wall off the act from the family through language
. The murder of a relative is horrible for anyone, anywhere. My father's grief was impenetrable; to this day, he has not broken his silence on the subject. For the rest of the family, though, there was an added element of disgrace. For the Chinese, luck is a moral attribute and a lucky person would never be murdered. Like having a birth defect, or marrying a Filipino being murdered is shameful.
My three younger sisters and I were very fond of my Aunt Leona, who was petite and quirky and had never married. Like many wealthy Filipino Chinese, she had all kinds of bank accounts in Honolulu, San Francisco and Chicago. She visited us in the United States regularly. She and my father, Leona and Leon, were close, as only twins can be. Having no children of her own, she doted on her nieces and showered us with trinkets. As we grew older, the trinkets became treasures. On my 10th birthday she gave me 10 small diamonds, wrapped up in toilet paper. My aunt loved diamonds and bought them up by the dozen, concealing them in empty Elizabeth Arden face moisturizer jars, some right on her bathroom shelf. She liked accumulating things. When we ate at McDonald's, she stuffed her Gucci purse with free ketchups.
According to the police report, my Aunt Leona, "a 58?year?old single woman," was killed in her living room with "a butcher's knife" at approximately 8 P.M. on September 12, 1994. Two of her maids were questioned, and they confessed that Nilo Abique, my aunt's chauffeur, had planned and executed the murder with their knowledge and assistance. "A few hours before the actual killing, respondent [Abique] was seen sharpening the knife allegedly used in the crime." After the killing, "respondent joined the two witnesses and told them that their employer was dead. At that time, he was wearing a pair of bloodied white gloves and was still holding a knife, also with traces of blood." But Abique, the report went on to say had "disappeared," with the warrant for his arrest outstanding. The two maids were released.
Meanwhile, my relatives arranged a private funeral for my aunt in the prestigious Chinese cemetery in Manila where many of my ancestors are buried in a great, white?marble family tomb. According to the feng shu monks who were consulted, my aunt could not be buried with the rest of the family because of the violent nature of her death, lest more bad luck strike her surviving kin, So she was placed in her own smaller vault, next to ? but not touching ?the main family tomb.
After the funeral, I asked one of my uncles whether there had been any further developments in the murder investigation. He replied tersely that the killer had not been found. His wife explained that the Manila police had essentially closed the case. I could not understand my relatives' almost indifferent attitude. Why were they not more shocked that my aunt had been killed in cold blood, by people who worked for her, lived with her, saw her every day? Why were they not outraged that the maids had been released? When I pressed 'my uncle, he was short with me. "That's the way things are here," he said "This is the Philippines ?not America. My uncle was not simply being callous. As it turns out, my aunt's death was part of a common pattern. Hundreds of Chinese in the Philippines are kidnapped every year, almost invariably by ethnic Filipinos. Many victims, often children, are brutally murdered, even after ransom is paid. Other Chinese, like my aunt, are killed without a kidnapping, usually in connection with a robbery. Nor is it unusual that my aunt's killer was never apprehended. The police in the Philippines, all poor ethnic Filipinos themselves, are notoriously unmotivated in these cases. When asked by a Western journalist why it is so frequently the Chinese who are targeted, one grinning Filipino policeman explained that it was because "they have more money."
My family is part of the, Philippines' tiny?but entrepreneurial and economically powerful Chinese minority. Although they Constitute just one percent of the population, Chinese Filipinos control as much as 60 percent of the private economy, including the country's four major airlines and almost all of the country's banks, hotels, shopping malls, and big conglomerates. My own family in Manila runs a plastics conglomerate. Unlike tampons Culloden, Henry See, or John Gokongwei, my relatives are only "third?tier" Chinese tycoons. Still, they own swaths of prime real estate and several vacation homes. They also have safe deposit boxes full of gold bars, each one roughly the size of a Snickers bar, but strangely heavy. I myself have such a gold bar, My Aunt Leona express?mailed it to me as a law school graduation present a few years before she died.
Since my aunt's murder, one childhood memory keeps haunting me. I was eight, staying at my family's splendid hacienda?style house in Manila. It was before dawn, still dark. Wide awake, I decided to get a drink from the Kitchen. I must have gone down an extra?flight of stairs, because I literally stumbled onto six male bodies. I had found the male servants' quarters, where my family's houseboys, gardeners, and chauffeurs?I sometimes imagine that Nilo Abique was among them?were sleeping on mats on a dirt floor. The place stank of sweat and urine. I was horrified.
Later that day I mentioned the incident to my Aunt Leona, who laughed affectionately and explained that the servants ?there were perhaps 20 living on the premises, all ethnic Filipinos?were fortunate to be working for our family. If not for their positions, they would be living among rats and open sewers, without a roof over their heads. A Filipino maid then walked in I remember that she had a bowl of food for my aunt's Pekingese. My aunt took the bowl but kept talking as if the maid were not there. The Filipinos, she continued?in Chinese, but plainly not caring whether the maid understood or not?were lazy and unintelligent and didn't really want to do much. If they' didn't like working for us, they were free to leave at any time. After all, my aunt said, they were employees, not slaves.
Nearly two?thirds of the roughly 80 million ethnic Filipinos in the Philippines live on less than $2 a day. Forty percent spend their entire lives in temporary shelters. Seventy percent of all rural Filipinos own no land. Almost a third have no access to sanitation. But that's not the worst of it. Poverty alone never is. Poverty by itself does not make people kill. To poverty must be added indignity, hopelessness, and grievance. In the Philippines, millions of Filipinos work for Chinese; almost no Chinese work for Filipinos. The Chinese dominate industry and commerce at every level of society. Global markets intensify this dominance: When foreign investors do business in the Philippines, they deal almost exclusively with Chinese, Apart from a handful of corrupt politicians and a few aristocratic Spanish mestizo families, all of the Philippines' billionaires are of Chinese descent. By contrast, all menial jobs in the Philippines are filled by Filipinos. All peasants are Filipinos. All domestic ?servants and squatters are Filipinos. My relatives live literally walled off from the Filipino masses, in a posh, all?Chinese residential enclave, on streets named Harvard Yale, Stanford, and Princeton. The entry points are guarded by armed private?security forces.
Each time I think of Nilo Abique, he was six?feet?two and my aunt was four?feet?eleven, I find myself welling up with a hatred and revulsion so intense it is actually consoling. But over time I have also had glimpses of how the vast majority of Filipinos, especially someone like Abique must see the Chinese: as exploiters, foreign intruders, their wealth inexplicable their superiority intolerable. I will never forget the entry in the police report for the motive given was not robbery despite the jewels and money the chauffeur was said to have taken. Instead, for motive, there was just one word ?"revenge."
My aunt's killing was just a pinprick in a world more violent than most of us have ever imagined. In America, we read about acts of mass slaughter and savagery? at first in faraway places, now coming closer home. We do not understand what connects these acts. Nor do we understand the role we have played in bringing them about.
>Amy CHUA is a professor at Yale Law School. This essay is adapted from her forthcoming book, World on Fire:
How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, to be published this winter by Doubleday. Copyright 2002 by Amy Chua.
If you don’t want to be hated don’t act hatefully! The day-to-day realities of increasing shareholder value far out weigh the effects of random spasmodic generosity!
Reminds me of a line by the Danny DeVito character in the movie "Matilda": "I'm big, your small; I'm strong, you weak; I'm right, your WRONG!"
One beautiful blue morning in September 1994, I received a call from my mother in California. In a hushed voice, she told me that Aunt Leona, my father's twin sister, had been murdered in her home in the Philippines, her throat slit by her chauffeur. My mother broke the news to me in our native Hokkien Chinese dialect. But "murder" she said in English, as if to wall off the act from the family through language
. The murder of a relative is horrible for anyone, anywhere. My father's grief was impenetrable; to this day, he has not broken his silence on the subject. For the rest of the family, though, there was an added element of disgrace. For the Chinese, luck is a moral attribute and a lucky person would never be murdered. Like having a birth defect, or marrying a Filipino being murdered is shameful.
My three younger sisters and I were very fond of my Aunt Leona, who was petite and quirky and had never married. Like many wealthy Filipino Chinese, she had all kinds of bank accounts in Honolulu, San Francisco and Chicago. She visited us in the United States regularly. She and my father, Leona and Leon, were close, as only twins can be. Having no children of her own, she doted on her nieces and showered us with trinkets. As we grew older, the trinkets became treasures. On my 10th birthday she gave me 10 small diamonds, wrapped up in toilet paper. My aunt loved diamonds and bought them up by the dozen, concealing them in empty Elizabeth Arden face moisturizer jars, some right on her bathroom shelf. She liked accumulating things. When we ate at McDonald's, she stuffed her Gucci purse with free ketchups.
According to the police report, my Aunt Leona, "a 58?year?old single woman," was killed in her living room with "a butcher's knife" at approximately 8 P.M. on September 12, 1994. Two of her maids were questioned, and they confessed that Nilo Abique, my aunt's chauffeur, had planned and executed the murder with their knowledge and assistance. "A few hours before the actual killing, respondent [Abique] was seen sharpening the knife allegedly used in the crime." After the killing, "respondent joined the two witnesses and told them that their employer was dead. At that time, he was wearing a pair of bloodied white gloves and was still holding a knife, also with traces of blood." But Abique, the report went on to say had "disappeared," with the warrant for his arrest outstanding. The two maids were released.
Meanwhile, my relatives arranged a private funeral for my aunt in the prestigious Chinese cemetery in Manila where many of my ancestors are buried in a great, white?marble family tomb. According to the feng shu monks who were consulted, my aunt could not be buried with the rest of the family because of the violent nature of her death, lest more bad luck strike her surviving kin, So she was placed in her own smaller vault, next to ? but not touching ?the main family tomb.
After the funeral, I asked one of my uncles whether there had been any further developments in the murder investigation. He replied tersely that the killer had not been found. His wife explained that the Manila police had essentially closed the case. I could not understand my relatives' almost indifferent attitude. Why were they not more shocked that my aunt had been killed in cold blood, by people who worked for her, lived with her, saw her every day? Why were they not outraged that the maids had been released? When I pressed 'my uncle, he was short with me. "That's the way things are here," he said "This is the Philippines ?not America. My uncle was not simply being callous. As it turns out, my aunt's death was part of a common pattern. Hundreds of Chinese in the Philippines are kidnapped every year, almost invariably by ethnic Filipinos. Many victims, often children, are brutally murdered, even after ransom is paid. Other Chinese, like my aunt, are killed without a kidnapping, usually in connection with a robbery. Nor is it unusual that my aunt's killer was never apprehended. The police in the Philippines, all poor ethnic Filipinos themselves, are notoriously unmotivated in these cases. When asked by a Western journalist why it is so frequently the Chinese who are targeted, one grinning Filipino policeman explained that it was because "they have more money."
My family is part of the, Philippines' tiny?but entrepreneurial and economically powerful Chinese minority. Although they Constitute just one percent of the population, Chinese Filipinos control as much as 60 percent of the private economy, including the country's four major airlines and almost all of the country's banks, hotels, shopping malls, and big conglomerates. My own family in Manila runs a plastics conglomerate. Unlike tampons Culloden, Henry See, or John Gokongwei, my relatives are only "third?tier" Chinese tycoons. Still, they own swaths of prime real estate and several vacation homes. They also have safe deposit boxes full of gold bars, each one roughly the size of a Snickers bar, but strangely heavy. I myself have such a gold bar, My Aunt Leona express?mailed it to me as a law school graduation present a few years before she died.
Since my aunt's murder, one childhood memory keeps haunting me. I was eight, staying at my family's splendid hacienda?style house in Manila. It was before dawn, still dark. Wide awake, I decided to get a drink from the Kitchen. I must have gone down an extra?flight of stairs, because I literally stumbled onto six male bodies. I had found the male servants' quarters, where my family's houseboys, gardeners, and chauffeurs?I sometimes imagine that Nilo Abique was among them?were sleeping on mats on a dirt floor. The place stank of sweat and urine. I was horrified.
Later that day I mentioned the incident to my Aunt Leona, who laughed affectionately and explained that the servants ?there were perhaps 20 living on the premises, all ethnic Filipinos?were fortunate to be working for our family. If not for their positions, they would be living among rats and open sewers, without a roof over their heads. A Filipino maid then walked in I remember that she had a bowl of food for my aunt's Pekingese. My aunt took the bowl but kept talking as if the maid were not there. The Filipinos, she continued?in Chinese, but plainly not caring whether the maid understood or not?were lazy and unintelligent and didn't really want to do much. If they' didn't like working for us, they were free to leave at any time. After all, my aunt said, they were employees, not slaves.
Nearly two?thirds of the roughly 80 million ethnic Filipinos in the Philippines live on less than $2 a day. Forty percent spend their entire lives in temporary shelters. Seventy percent of all rural Filipinos own no land. Almost a third have no access to sanitation. But that's not the worst of it. Poverty alone never is. Poverty by itself does not make people kill. To poverty must be added indignity, hopelessness, and grievance. In the Philippines, millions of Filipinos work for Chinese; almost no Chinese work for Filipinos. The Chinese dominate industry and commerce at every level of society. Global markets intensify this dominance: When foreign investors do business in the Philippines, they deal almost exclusively with Chinese, Apart from a handful of corrupt politicians and a few aristocratic Spanish mestizo families, all of the Philippines' billionaires are of Chinese descent. By contrast, all menial jobs in the Philippines are filled by Filipinos. All peasants are Filipinos. All domestic ?servants and squatters are Filipinos. My relatives live literally walled off from the Filipino masses, in a posh, all?Chinese residential enclave, on streets named Harvard Yale, Stanford, and Princeton. The entry points are guarded by armed private?security forces.
Each time I think of Nilo Abique, he was six?feet?two and my aunt was four?feet?eleven, I find myself welling up with a hatred and revulsion so intense it is actually consoling. But over time I have also had glimpses of how the vast majority of Filipinos, especially someone like Abique must see the Chinese: as exploiters, foreign intruders, their wealth inexplicable their superiority intolerable. I will never forget the entry in the police report for the motive given was not robbery despite the jewels and money the chauffeur was said to have taken. Instead, for motive, there was just one word ?"revenge."
My aunt's killing was just a pinprick in a world more violent than most of us have ever imagined. In America, we read about acts of mass slaughter and savagery? at first in faraway places, now coming closer home. We do not understand what connects these acts. Nor do we understand the role we have played in bringing them about.
>Amy CHUA is a professor at Yale Law School. This essay is adapted from her forthcoming book, World on Fire:
How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, to be published this winter by Doubleday. Copyright 2002 by Amy Chua.
If you don’t want to be hated don’t act hatefully! The day-to-day realities of increasing shareholder value far out weigh the effects of random spasmodic generosity!
Reminds me of a line by the Danny DeVito character in the movie "Matilda": "I'm big, your small; I'm strong, you weak; I'm right, your WRONG!"
