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.
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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.
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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 PoeÂ’s 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.
