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The China Adventures of Arielle Gabriel

Hong Kong Travel Diaries: Saturday August 13th 2005

The days begin to go by so quickly, that went so slowly when you first arrived jet-lagged at this seemingly exciting  travel destination.
 
The over-crowding and the stupefying heat of Hong Kong, with no wind whatsoever for days, not even the mildest breeze, are beginning to make me wonder what I ever saw to celebrate here, though with a 500 page travel site, I want to continue to maintain some positivity!
 
I found out about the Milkshake Murder Case here that all the Ex-Pats are talking about.  Apparently, the story is making news all over the planet.
 
The conversation on the Internet is most inflammatory, and there will be more shocks to come in this story, as the lawyer for the defendant has yet to begin his predictable smear of the murdered husband.
 
According to the Net Gossip, some 75% of Ex-Pat men run around on their wives here down in the bars of Wan Chai. And I thought Wan Chai was for discount designer clothes! Some of us want to put clothes on, others to take them off!
 
I sorta wonder what the wife went through, to culminate in such a violent homicide, against  a husband who seemed to make rather too quickly a personal fortune of 18,000,000 USA just by being a trader for Merrill Lynch?
 
Interestingly, the friends of the wife depict her as a flawless and wonderful human being, and the friends of the husband do the same testimonial work for him.
 
The murder itself is bizarre in its conflict between careful planning - the wife drugged the husband's drinks early in the afternoon, so that she could assault him with a heavy household object later in the evening - and an unconcern about being caught - asking the househod servants to remove his rotting corpse, rolled in a carpet, three days after the death.
 
I can only guess her mind was truly hopelessly disturbed. Even Joe said to me today as he looked about the waters as we floated along towards Central on the Star Ferry:
 
There is a lot of water around she could have used.
 
That's exactly what one of the women in a Net Discussion said, I agreed.  And asking your servants to help you dump your husband's corpse?
 
It was evidentally a very unhappy marriage, and in the interests of fairness to both parties, as well as the Hong Kong judicial process, it is pointless to arrive at more heated opinions at this stage of the trial, which still continues in this city.
 
*****
 
Sorry, I cannot help but think of the cold and successful planning of Taiwanese wives who hire hit killers from either Hong Kong or Taiwan to kill the working-class mistresses of their husbands who own businesses or operate factories in Gaungdong, China.
 
They do what many Chinese business people, and Westerners as well, avoiding taxes - they utiize the confusion of internationa boundaries and the grey areas in the law to pull off their marriage-related murders.
 
They do not attack the man directly, they kill the woman who is of low social class, risking the wrath of the male members of her family, who may not even have the money to travel out of China.
 
And they do not kill the rival with their own hands, they pay men to travel from one area to another.  The Cultural Gap between East and West is not looked into too much here, not at all.
 
The liberal slant of the Western media cannot digest a woman paying men to have a poor girl of rural China killed out of jealousy, and then deserving empathy herself as a victim of violent marital psychology.
 
The Taiwanese husband may even love his young and pretty girl, who is not really a bad sort, just desperate to earn some physical comfort for her aged parents, siblings, and have a child that may even go to university one day.
 
His grief will certainly be shadowed by the crowing victory of his mate, who is difficult if not impossible to prosecute, and whose viciousness can be understood if not excused by us Westerners,  as multiple marriage with the children brings a faux respectabity in Chinese culture, mocking violently the first marriage, and suffocating all normal emotional feeling in the first wife.
 
And to thread my two stories together, this is why law courts in many countries of the world have a secondary standard for the judgement of spousal violence.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Lamma Island * Lantau Island * Cheung Chau Island
Hong Kong * Mui Wo * Peng Chau Island
Tung Chung * Shenzhen * Nanning * Hunan Province
Bobcaygeon * Pointe Claire * Montreal
Peterborough * Lake Sturgeon * Ontario
Vancouver * Richmond * British Columbia

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The China Adventures Of Arielle Gabriel

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