TWO CHINESE DOMESTIC MURDERS
H. J. LETHBRIDGE*
Boswell. "You 'Johnson called the East-Indians barbarians. will except the Chinese, Sir?" Johnson. "No, Sir". Boswell, "Have they not arts?" Johnson. "They have pottery". Boswell. "What do you say to the written characters of their language?". Johnson. "Sir, they have not an alphabet, They have not been able to form what all other nations have formed".
Boswell's Life of Johnson
1
George Orwell wrote a celebrated short essay on murder in which he argued that the great classic English murders were mostly domestic and concerned ordinary people. He went on to argue that the violence of external events, such as World War II, had made conventional murder seem unimportant.2 Orwell's essay was published in 1946. A latter-day criminologist is likely to argue that the abolition of the death penalty in 1965 has 'demeaned' murder as a fine art. Before 1965, a murder trial was often an awesome contest - the issue was a matter of life and death. Today a convicted murderer in Britain, or Hong Kong, is likely to experience, on the average, between 7 to 10 years of incarceration. The two cases discussed below, in which both principals were Chinese, raise a number of interesting legal and sociological questions, together with problems of cultural 'confusion'. In each case, the judge and jury had great difficulties in interpreting Chinese behaviour and in understanding the motivation for the crime.
Lock Ah Tam: the man who ran ‘amok'?
Lock Ah Tam was born in 1872 in Canton, the capital city of Kwangtung province. Kwangtung was then one of the major areas for Chinese emigration and a territory from which over half of China's seamen hailed. As a young man, he went to sea as a ship's steward. In 1895 he settled in Liverpool and stayed there for the rest of his life, marrying a Welsh girl. Before 1914,
*Prof. Lethbridge is Professor of Sociology, University of Hong Kong.