Is the flip side of the Asian notion of respect for authority abuse of the small and the weak?

I once saw a cartoon that would have been amusing had it not been a reflection of a sobering reality. A man is shouted at by his boss; he goes home and shouts at his wife who shouts at their small son who shouts at the dog who shouts at a cockroach who shouts at the spoon it is standing on, which sighs, "The managing director must be in one of his foul moods again."

In real life, this "trickle down" effect of punitive power is far from amusing. Indeed, most of us probably see this act of simultaneously cringing before the strong and inflicting pain on the weak as doubly revolting-the coward and bully rolled into one. There is a special moral odium attached to the man who smiles ingratiatingly through his boss's reprimand and then goes home to unload his seething rage upon his frightened wife.

This behaviour, unfortunately, is very much in our midst, often hidden from the public eye but sometimes breaking into public awareness as one more horrifying statistic of domestic violence. There are any number of reasons for its persistence-the pressures of modern living, the pain of loss of face, the need for a battered ego to repair itself by doing some battering of its own.

It is bad enough when psychological forces work against the weak; it is worse when our culture aids and abets. Asian cultural values, while currently enjoying a vogue because of their proven contribution to the economic success of Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore, have a dark underbelly, which it might be useful to expose to the light now and again.

Take respect for authority. Even its greatest advocate will see that, carried to extremes, it can be seriously damaging. When respect for authority carries with it, as it often does in the Asian context, an absolutism that allows for no qualification, the effect is an intolerable stifling of the human spirit.

Because so much moral opprobrium is attached to disrespect for one's superiors, ever act of challenge is seen as a serious violation of an age-old moral precept.

This code of respect for authority is tersely sumrned up in the Hokkien expression: boh tua boh say, a severe reprimand to those who are unmindful of the proper behaviour towards those higher up on the social scale (the tua, or "big") and those lower down (the say, or "small").

When there is pent-up anger, the culture does not allow it to be expressed openly against the tua, but has no objection to its being vented downward against the say. The largest group among the say, clustered in abject terror around the low rungs of Asian society's ladder are the women, particularly the uneducated, the dependent, the compliant. And the most striking manifestation of their victimisation is wifebeating, a phenomenon far more prevalent in Asian societies than is usually admitted.

Women, being no different from their husbands in their need to vent feelings of frustration, also look downward for release. Their targets are usually females in even more subordinate positions, such as daughters-in-law, step-daughters and maids. Maids report being scratched, pinched, punched, bitten and burned with hot irons by their mistresses. One can guess that the discharge of so much venomous energy indicates a frustration larRer than that caused merely by incompetence or error on the part of a servant.

Education, permitted its true role, can soften culture's hard edges, remove its injustices and re-draw the crude outlines of its traditionally determined roles, so that the present injunction of "You must always show respect for authority" can be transmuted into the more acceptable reflection of "Respect must first be earned".

Only when the tua cease to believe that respect is their right, but instead strive to earn it from the say - in the process being prepared to listen to an unpleasant truth or two - will the pernicious "trickle down" effect of power, so damaging to the human spirit, be done away with.

Dr Catherine Lim is a Singapore-based novelist.
Re-produced from Asia Magazine, 6-8 October 1995

Created : 16th October 1995. Updated : 14th December 1996.
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