When 8 year-old Huang Na disappeared in October 2004, it became
an obsession. Her face and her story filled pages and pages of our
newspapers every day for over a week.
The girl was later found murdered, her body discovered inside a
carton box thrown off a steep hillside in Labrador Park.
Indeed her story was an absorbing and unusual one. The girl's
mother, Huang Shuying, was a divorcee from China who, or so it was
reported, made her way to Singapore, wanting to give her daughter a
good education. There is, unfortunately, no shortage of news
stories about missing children in Singapore. While some are found,
or make their own way home after running away for a few days, there
are cases where children have disappeared without a trace leaving
their parents with no closure.
What was exceptional in the Huang Na case was the media coverage.
It was overblown even in the English press, and I can imagine it
was twice overblown in the Chinese press. Aspects of the case, such
as the fact that the family was from China, resonate more with the
Chinese-speaking than the English-speaking.
During the first few days, people organised search parties and
printed flyers, a degree of volunteerism rarely seen in Singapore.
When the body was found, the coffin was donated. I believe the
funeral rites were also offered free.
And then it started to get ridiculous. Total strangers by the
thousands turned up at the wake and the funeral. It can't be grief.
We do not feel grief for the loss of someone we do not know. We may
feel saddened, we may feel sympathetic for the family, but it would
be a horribly selfish devaluation of the family's real grief to
claim that we feel likewise.
Nor is it believable that people wanted to comfort the mother. What
comfort is there from an unending procession of utter strangers
mouthing formulistic words?
Most likely, it was morbid curiosity rationalised as sympathy, but
see also the box on the right. Morbid curiosity is a common
weakness among humans, but to reach the scale that it did in this
case required the agency of the media. Our press stirred it up,
going on and on every day about how tragic the story was.
The press milked the story for all the emotional content it could
find: the innocent little girl; the self-sacrificing mother who
only wanted the best for her daughter. Yet, the mother might have
been irresponsible to go back to China for a month, leaving her
daughter in the care of a friend in a foreign country. At the same
time, reporters milked what little salacious information there was:
the mother's relationship with the accused Took Leng How; her
strained relationship with Huang Na's father; stepfather somehow
involved, or not involved. How the mother Shuyin was a flirt, or --
another day another angle -- a scheming woman, knowing how to use
her beauty to advantage. More: she had previously been an
immigration overstayer in Singapore, deported to China, and somehow
managed to come to Singapore again.
The story behind the accused Took was also milked for emotional
content: how he came from a poor Chinese family in Penang,
Malaysia, to work as a lowly vegetable packer in Singapore. Left
behind an Indonesian wife and a baby daughter in Penang. How he
absconded from police custody, only to be persuaded by his father
to surrender himself to the authorities.
What a godsend for selling newspapers!
So it was hardly a surprise that thousands poured into the wake. As
is the custom, each one would make a monetary contribution to help
the family, called, in Chinese, baijin. It means 'white money',
since among the Chinese, white is the colour of mourning. It was
reported that altogether, hundreds of thousands of dollars were
given to Huang Shuying in commiseration.
That the matter had become obsessive-compulsive became apparent
when Took's trial [1] was in progress. Once again, hundreds showed
up at the High Court, as much to relive the details of the tragedy
through hearing the prosecution's case as to just wanting to see
the accused for themselves.
Gambling
This blog had another take on the massive numbers at the wake. Very
believable too from what I know of Singaporeans' behaviour:
"Thousands of people turned up at Huang Na's wake, presumably to
offer their condolences to the family of the dead girl. But, the
newspapers have it that many went there to look for lottery numbers
on anything found at the wake that had numbers on it or could be
related to numbers.
"And, as if to justify the actions of such people, the newspapers
reported that some of these numbers came out in the recent 4-D
draws and people won money as a result.
"This, of course, fuelled attention in Huang Na's funeral. More
than a thousand Singaporeans turned up for her funeral and a report
has it that the priest attending to the funeral rites had to stop
many from offering incense as the situation was getting out of
control."
On the day the verdict -- death by hanging -- was pronounced, it
plumbed new depths of ugliness. Took's family was naturally
distraught, but the crowd gave them no peace or privacy. Leaving
the courthouse, the family had about 300 metres to walk in order to
get to the City Hall metro station, but every step of the way, they
were dogged by a pack of onlookers gawking at them, wanting to see
their reactions to the verdict. One man even heckled them.
Picture scanned from the Straits Times, 27 Aug 2005. The caption
says, "Watching every move: Reporters and a crowd of spectators
follow Took's family as they leave the Supreme Court building and
tail them to the City Hall station.
For goodness sake, this is not reality TV. This is real, crushing
pain. This is not merely a morbid story for our entertainment.
These are real, ordinary folks, caught in life's dilemmas.
The press reported this inexcusable behaviour of the crowd, but put
it down to the social insensitivity of Singaporeans. Well, yes and
no. Indeed, Singaporeans can be terribly callous when it comes to
interacting with strangers and we should feel disgraced by it, but
can we ignore the intense spotlight that the media themselves had
trained on the case and the families? Who fed the emotional
addiction? Who made them and their lives a must-watch drama
serial?
Note too that the caption to the picture above said reporters
themselves were in the pack (though reporters in other countries
also tail their potential newsmakers).
Now this week, it was reported that the mother Huang Shuying, who
is back in China, is adding a third floor to her already
comfortable house. She had considered building a new house
altogether, but decided against it. Ostensibly, she needed the
third floor so that her house is taller than her neighbour's across
the street, in order that (as reported by the press again) she can
gaze across to the hillside where Huang Na's tomb is. If you
believe that, you must be born yesterday.
Financing the addition to the house, or even a new house, is not a
problem. She is more than wealthy now, by the standards of the
small provincial town where she lives, courtesy of the hundreds of
thousands of dollars in 'white money' that Singaporeans pressed
into her hands.
* * * * *
One of the proven ways to sell newspapers is to use "human
interest" stories. This is especially so when the newspaper is
targetted at a readership whose approach to news is one that is not
well demarcated from entertainment.
Among English-language newspapers in Singapore, the New Paper is a
good example. Most of its main stories on any day are told through
the viewpoint of a person. If a story is such that it can't be told
primarily that way e.g. about the rising incidence of such and such
a disease in Singapore, it is still supported by sidebar stories
about how this disease has affected "me". Observing the pattern of
its writing, it seems to be a standing editorial policy.
Too much of this and, in my opinion, people's attention span
atrophies when it comes to news stories without a human interest
angle. It's so seductive a style of story-telling, we get addicted
to absorbing information only through this route. Information
matters to us only because it has impacted us through vicarious
emotionality.
Unfortunately, not all news and analyses can be told like that. The
effects of a terrorist bombing or a murder can, but the reasons why
a general population is reluctant to turn in its extremists, or why
a country's homicide rate is rising, are much harder.
Another case, another disgrace
Even as I write this, another trial is going on, this time, of a
woman who is accused of causing another girl, Sindee Neo, to fall
from a balcony to her death. The accused, Constance Chee, had had
an affair with the girl's father, Neo Eng Tong. When it turned
sour, there was a confrontation between the two, in the course of
which Sindee, Neo's daughter by his Thai wife, died.
One day during the trial, a spectator, Ang Thiam Chye, made a
remark which the victim's mother overheard and found extremely
insensitive. She lashed at him. The father, Neo, got involved too
and the two men almost came to blows but for the intervention of
the police.
The Straits Times reporter later interviewed Ang and asked whether,
in view of the acrimony he has caused by his remark, if he would be
coming back the following days to watch the trial. Of course he
would, he said. "It is more exciting than a drama serial."
Even when it comes to spectacular crimes, not all news stories are
equal. The disappearance of a pretty young girl like Huang Na lends
itself to such telling, but a gruesome murder of a foreign worker
who is here trying to earn enough to support his destitute family
in India or Burma just doesn't arouse the same outpouring of
emotional response. And doesn't quite sell newspapers as
well.
Editors know it. In which case, we should then ask how is news then
skewed as a result?
In the long term, there can be deleterious effects on a national
culture. The ability to absorb "dry" information, to weigh facts
dispassionately, to think critically, suffer. We are swayed by the
infantile utterings of glamourous celebrities, we pay attention
only to those things which have emotive appeal. Our priorities too
are skewed.
* * * * *
It has been suggested that the Philippines is one such example of
political dysfunctioning because of this. I'm no expert on Filipino
society and politics, but from what I've been told, it seems to
explain quite well the dismal picture that we see.
It pains me to read what I do in the papers. I have had wonderful
encounters with witty, warm and helpful Filipinos, but for the last
10 years or so, their country has been lurching from one crisis to
another.
No clear policy options are ever presented to the Filipino people.
Politics seems to be a never-ending jostling of personalities, with
a heavy dose of scandals and mud-slinging (in order to damage your
opponent's personality-based appeal).
Voters give their loyalties to individuals (sometimes
patronage-distributing "big men"), not to ideas. Lately, it seemed
to have got even more bizarre. President Joseph Erap Estrada was a
movie star who always played the hero, and it was said that he won
the presidential election not on the basis of what he has ever done
or was ever qualified to do in terms of governing, but on what he
had represented in his fictional screen roles. Of course he turned
out to be a corrupt flop.
As if to prove Estrada's win was not a fluke, Fernando Poe Jr
challenged Gloria Macapagal Arroyo in the May 2004 presidential
election and almost won too. Arroyo got 40% of the vote, Poe 37%.
Poe was another movie star with barely an education. He too had
played the dashing hero many times.
As reported in the Inquirer,
His image is all he has going for him, but it is everything. On
screen, Poe is invincible. No problem is too big, no task too hard.
Trust that everything is going to be okay in the end. And his fans
believe the reel experience to be real.
In 1986, the Philippine Daily Express reported that Poes fans in
one Mindanao theater were distraught and went on a rampage when he
died in the movie they were watching. (The paper did not mention
the movie title.)
To mistake the character for the real person -- and millions did
judging from they way they voted -- represents a mindlessness that
would be incredible if not for its actual happening.
Yet we shouldn't be smug. Singaporeans' behaviour in
charity-giving, in the way we treat real human pain as little more
than reality TV to be gawked at, should warn us we are just as
fallible. And our media just as culpable.
