Disowning

"I cannot have you bringing disgrace to the family. If you really are like that, I disown you."

Even now, at the end of the 20th century, some parents say such things. Among the triggering factors which bring disgrace to the family, is homosexuality. Prostitution is another, as can be seen in a story which broke in the Straits Times in April 1998: 

Yeo Leong Hock had just been convicted of bashing a woman to death; he had a history of abusing the women who loved him. One of them had been Tan Chah Boh who fell to her death (believed to be suicide) from their apartment window, 10 years earlier.

Tan Chah Boh's family did not know of her death. Only when this story came out, on Yeo's conviction, did her brother know that she had died a decade ago. He told the Straits Times reporter, " I can't believe it.... I kept reading the story over and over again. I still can't get over it. I can't accept that she killed herself."

Mr Tan (the brother) said that his family had severed ties with his sister after they found out that Yeo had forced her into prostitution. "You cannot imagine how I am feeling now. My last words to her were, 'I rather not have a sister than to have a sister like you'. I now wish I didn't say those cutting words, but at that time I was really disappointed with her."

His sister had confided in their mother that her lover Yeo had forced her to sell herself... she had a target to meet every night, and if she did not fulfill the target, he would beat her. On another occasion, she told her brother that it was her life and her fate to meet such a man and suffer. She stayed with Yeo because she did not want him to abuse the children. She wanted to be there to take the beatings.

That meeting was the last. Her brother never saw her again. "Now, I just wish I had done more."

I have not yet met any Singaporean who has been disowned by his family on account of homosexuality, though I have heard of such threats. If any reader has gone through it, I'd appreciate it if you would write in.

What exactly is disowning, and why is it such a big deal? To disown is to refuse to acknowledge something or somebody as one's own; to refuse to undertake responsibility for that person.

In a traditional society, disowning had three aspects.

The first is easily understood by us today. It's a question of moral standing for the family in the eyes of society. Family members disown the black sheep to avoid the stain on the family name. That act of disowning is essential to recovering some moral credit for the household within the community. In particularly religious societies, this would also be related to restoring the family into the good graces of their deities.

Secondly, the concept of disowning is rooted in the very traditional concept of the family as a single legal unit. Family members are responsible for each other. If one does wrong, another member of the family may have to pay the penalty on his behalf, for example, if someone commits treason but escapes, the monarch may chop off the heads of all his brothers. If a father goes into debt and dies before discharging it, the son goes into servitude till the debt is paid.

The formal act of disowning is absolutely essential if the remaining members of a family wish to distance themselves from the wrongdoings and liabilities of an errant member.

The third aspect, and one which we too easily forget, is that in the past the family was an economic unit too. Property, most often land, was held in common by the family, and the members derived their income from it, through agriculture primarily. To be disowned would mean that your economic sustenance would be cut off, and therefore was a truly serious threat. You'd be reduced to a vagabond. You wouldn't lightly yell defiantly to your old man, "Disown, disown lah!"

Asian societies have only very recently undergone modernisation. The idea of disowning and the cultural weight attached to it, are still very much in the folk culture, and in moments of emotional crisis, it is invoked as a kind of cure-all, when in a calmer moment of analysis, most would agree that nowadays, the legal and economic aspects are meaningless. Only the question of disgrace for the family remains.

Yet even in its reduced significance, it says a lot: that more weight is attached to shame and disgrace than to love and understanding. That, like the Tan family above, sooner to cut the ties that bind, slice off a part of our heart, never want to know again how a son, daughter, brother or sister is faring, than lose face.

Did anyone say 'Asian Values'?

© Yawning Bread 

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