Who killed Wan Biao?

The best thing about migrants, Rushdie said, is their hopefulness. “And what’s the worst thing?” he asks, in the novel Shame. “It is the emptiness of one’s luggage.” When personal affects have been stripped away, suitcases are for packing the apparatus of business. When all your work is through, you may eventually look at that suitcase and say like Sean Young in Blade Runner realising she is no longer human: “I am the business.” Then you get folded in, and take a tumble off the Harbour Bridge.

There are obvious bases to cover on the Wan Biao murder, and the pundits have lined up with their bats. Jane Phare in the Herald last Sunday came out swinging in an otherwise pretty fair article: “Suddenly a scene from Hong Kong, mainland China or Sicily is deposited on our doorstep.” Gasp! Foreigners! “Add it to the shooting of triad gang enforcer Tam Yam Ah near his karaoke bar in Auckland last year”, four tablespoons of flawed comparisons and a cup of moral panic, “and it's all a little too close for comfort.”

Come on. If Wan Biao’s killers had been real Triads they wouldn’t have messed up by killing him accidentally before a ransom was paid. Even if they had done so, they would at the very least have weighed the goddamn suitcase down with a few bricks before throwing it in the harbour. Rather than chalking up another hit for the ‘Asian crime syndicates,’ this seems another in a very occasional series of botched ‘wannabe kidnaps’. Think last year’s Howick case – tie the kidnapped woman up loosely in an open space, next to her mobile phone? Geniuses! The boys who killed Wan Biao weren’t Triads: they were Try-Hards.

But annoying as they can be, let me get this straight - I’m not blaming the news media for this.

It’s a familiar phenomenon when foreigners become packable units from which value can be extracted for the host society. It used to be indenture, but now Mainland Chinese come here for what Keith Ng notes in his weblog is a substandard education designed to extract fees in exchange for fudged passes. If a city’s-worth of naïve adolescents are imported wholesale to stew in their culturally and linguistically isolated communities, you cannot expect they will act like sensible adults or be able to protect themselves effectively.

But this isn’t the education businesses’ fault either.

Student Triad wannabes can’t seem to pull off a proper kidnap-ransom. They too present as lost, ineffective adolescents. The real kidnap-ransoms don’t make the papers because they actually worked. Ironically, the professionalism of real Triads publicly masks the level of actual Asian syndicated crime, while the fumbles of amateurs are taken as signs of criminal empires.

But I’m not blaming the Triads or the Hong Kong movie industry for their lack of realistic, practical training of bored young thugs in New Zealand.

Ultimately, the bereaved voices I hear drifting in from the sea are telling me that we’ve let him down, this kid and all the others. I mean we, the Chinese people in New Zealand who’ve eaten our own bitterness of migration and not done enough with that knowledge. To let him be folded like that as the newspapers keep saying, seems such a surrender, a capitulation to strategic disassociation and isolation. Why not say it – this was our fault too. Things could have turned out differently. In the 90s when the children of the Asian Invasion were marginalised in our schools and on our streets, New Zealand-born Chinese needed to be there for them and weren’t. Those 90s migrant children have grown up and become ‘Kiwis’, and the new generation of International Students again see those acculturated migrants as insiders who will never include them. Lincoln Tan, immigrant editor of English-language ‘Asian’ newspaper iBall, perpetuated this attitude in Phare’s Herald feature last week by disassociating ‘real’ settled Chinese migrants from any fly-by-night perpetrators of crime – glossing over the point that the victims too come from the same transient marooned communities. Distancing ourselves from any and all Chinese people who make us look bad in New Zealand will do nothing to save their lives nor our face. We are still the hosts. We can still understand them more than others can. Even if they don’t like or trust us we still, I believe, belong to each other. Seeing people disavow a suitcase that just won’t sink, one bobbing in plain sight – that’s what shame feels like.

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