134
H. J. LETHBRIDGE
by Mrs. Miao. Miao was not in employment, having just finished his studies in America, though he did state he had been offered a legal post in China and was to take it up when he returned from his lengthy honeymoon. Little is known about his father's finances. Presumably he was an official, but had he lost his post when the Nationalists seized power in 1927, or was he dead by then? It was not only a murder for profit, but a premeditated one, planned before he left America. Miao wanted not only his wife's inheritance but her jewellery and other possessions.
It has been argued that the real motive for the crime was Mrs. Miao's infertility. She had been told at Albany, so it is alleged, that she would be unable to bear children, and the knowledge depressed her husband. An article in The Sunday Express of March 24, 1929, quotes Miao as saying his wife died willingly to allow him to remarry and have heirs. This story sounds implausible. Divorce was not impossible in China in 1928; in any case, it would have been legitimate for Miao to have taken a secondary wife (tsip), as his wife's father, the Macau merchant, had done on several occasions. Adoption was, and is, a common practice in China and often utilised when a married man has no male heir. Even if Miao had been barred by his devotion to Christianity, a monogamous religion, from either divorcing his wife or taking a concubine, religious scrupulousness does not seem to provide a realistic motive for his crime. One surmises that if the statement were in fact made by Miao, it was an afterthought, a justification for a cruel murder and theft. One would agree with Travers Humphreys that Miao was an ‘odd fellow'; but to the non-murderous most murderers must appear odd, simply because they have indulged in, rather than daydreamed about, murder they have crossed the line that separates the good and the not-so-good from the truly bad.
Narrowing the gap
Lock Ah Tam and Dr. Miao Chung-yi exemplify, broadly speaking, the two strands of Chinese migration into Britain: uneducated or lower-class Chinese and educated or upper-class Chinese. In 1901, according to MacNair, there were only 387 Chinese reported as resident in England and Wales; 1,319 in
134
H. J. LETHBRIDGE
by Mrs. Miao. Miao was not in employment, having just finished his studies in America, though he did state he had been offered a legal post in China and was to take it up when he returned from his lengthy honeymoon. Little is known about his father's finances. Presumably he was an official, but had he lost his post when the Nationalists seized power in 1927, or was he dead by then? It was not only a murder for profit, but a premeditated one, planned before he left America. Miao wanted not only his wife's inheritance but her jewellery and other possessions.
It has been argued that the real motive for the crime was Mrs. Miao's infertility. She had been told at Albany, so it is alleged, that she would be unable to bear children, and the knowledge depressed her husband. An article in The Sunday Express of March 24, 1929, quotes Miao as saying his wife died willingly to allow him to remarry and have heirs. This story sounds implausible. Divorce was not impossible in China in 1928; in any case, it would have been legitimate for Miao to have taken a secondary wife (tsip), as his wife's father, the Macau merchant, had done on several occasions. Adoption was, and is, a common practice in China and often utilised when a married man has no male heir. Even if Miao had been barred by his devotion to Christianity, a monogamous religion, from either divorcing his wife or taking a concubine, religious scrupu- lousness does not seem to provide a realistic motive for his crime. One surmises that if the statement were in fact made by Miao, it was an afterthought, a justification for a cruel murder and theft. One would agree with Travers Humphreys that Miao was an ‘odd fellow'; but to the non-murderous most murderers must appear odd, simply because they have indulged in, rather than daydreamed about, murder they have crossed the line that separates the good and the not-so-good from the truly bad.
Narrowing the gap
Lock Ah Tam and Dr. Miao Chung-yi exemplify, broadly speaking, the two strands of Chinese migration into Britain: uneducated or lower-class Chinese and educated or upper class Chinese. In 1901, according to MacNair, there were only 387 Chinese reported as resident in England and Wales; 1,319 in
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