KEY POINTS:
A friend rang me a few months ago to say he had had a fight with his wife and was facing a serious relationship problem.
Describing some of the things she had done, this friend, a Malaysian Chinese, said: "I really feel like strangling her."
I told him
to calm down, and because he lived in another part of New Zealand, asked him to take the next flight to Auckland and spend a few days at my house. He did.
Inevitably we spent the next few days talking about marriage and how romance of the Hollywood kind never existed in real husband-and-wife relationships.
We spoke of other immigrant couples who were also struggling to keep their relationships alive. The biggest problem was that we do not have other family to turn to because we are living in a foreign land, he said.
Moving around his social circles, he said he had to put up a front that all was hunky-dory with his wife otherwise he felt he would lose face. I remember thinking, "Oh, that face thing again."
One of the biggest curses of growing up Asian is the excessive emphasis our culture places on saving face, often resulting in people in trouble suffering silently rather than reaching out for help.
Last week, while working on the story of Qian Xun, the girl nicknamed "Pumpkin" who was abandoned by her father, Nai Yin Xue, in Melbourne, I couldn't help thinking about my friend.
I have met Xue a few times but I cannot say I know him. He had been introduced to me as a grandmaster in martial arts and the publisher of a Chinese weekly magazine.
At social functions, the people who pointed Xue out to me described him as a respected see-fu (master), successful businessman, proud father and a lucky man to have a wife half his age.
But over the past week, another side of Xue emerged. In contradiction to the philosophy of calmness and discipline he taught in his wu-style taijiquan, he was anything but disciplined or calm.
News of him abandoning his 3-year-old daughter and possibly also killing his wife An An Liu (Annie) and the history of family violence had left his followers, friends and the Chinese community in a state of disillusion and shock.
One martial arts exponent who used to train with him said that although he once called him "master", he now considers Xue nothing more than a "low-life criminal" and an "animal".
It was also revealed that although he tried to maintain a front that he was running a successful business and in a happy marriage, the reality was quite the opposite. He was running up huge debts and his late wife's blog talks of a loveless marriage and a string of violent incidents.
Keeping up appearances in business - he had recently boasted to a friend that he was in the process of taking over several Asian media companies - was easy, but controlling Annie was not.
Annie openly wrote in her blog, which can be accessed by millions, about their unhappy marriage, his violent streaks and her involvement with a married man whom she had lived with for two months.
Could Annie's public declarations have been a slap too hard in the face of a man who is so obsessed with saving face? Some of his friends I spoke to also talked of Xue as very depressed in recent weeks.
National MP Pansy Wong, too, was told by some of his friends that he had made comments that life was no longer worth living. He needed help. But this man, who had claimed in a book that he was a gift from the gods destined for greatness and sees himself as a grandmaster, was probably just too proud to seek it.
The state of union they were in where one spouse marries the other for New Zealand residency is more common than we would like to think. And it often puts the Annies in a very vulnerable position.
Sadly, in a culture where face means everything, Asians - especially men - will continue to consider seeking counsel as a loss of face. Failure to seek help often can result in the people nearest and dearest to them being destroyed, as in Qian's case.
Now back to my Malaysian Chinese friend. After spending a few days with me, he decided he needed more time away from his wife and kids, so he flew back to Malaysia to be with his family. He is still there, but the last time I spoke to him, he said distance did make the heart grow fonder and is keen to give his marriage another go.
My friend's decision to walk away the day he fought with his wife stopped him doing anything stupid. If only Xue could have done the same thing. My heart goes out to little Pumpkin. Her mother, Annie, would still be alive today had Xue been man enough to admit he needed help.
