Tabloid Morality

I don’t usually like to read tabloid reporters. A few days ago the Shin Min papers had a large picture of Lin Qingxia in a bikini 25 years ago. Now, you may wonder, who could complain about that? Speaking as a person who reached puberty around the same time that they started airing advertisements of her as a “spokesman” for Lux body wash, and having pictures of her on TV frolicking around in the bathtub, I thought it was a wonderful thing.

But the headlines were this: she never married Qin Han, who was her co-star and 1 of the most handsome Taiwanese guys 20 years ago. And that is because Qin Han was then married to a wife who told him: you can divorce me and marry any woman you want other than Lin Qingxia. Otherwise I will mess up your wedding and commit suicide at your ceremony. I was like, damn. It was bottom of the barrel stuff. Bringing up shit that is of no contemporary relevance (except for the wonderful bikini photos), and poking into other peoples’ private business is not nice.

However there were some stories that I thought that were good calls, and you got to give the tabloid reporters some credit for stirring up moral outrage where it is due. One of them was the case of petrol thieves. Of car owners, owing to the high price of petrol, pumping gas, and speeding off whenever they feel like it. It highlighted the ugly behaviour of these motorists (technically they are thieves and therefore criminals) and I like to think that this reduced the number of petrol thieves in the short term. But it also highlighted the plight of the petrol pump attendants - apparently the oil companies were deducting the cost of the stolen petrol from their already meagre salaries. This is really alarming, although when you think about it, there has to be some form of disincentive for them against allowing petrol theft to happen. And there’s the bad PR for the oil companies so they got to think about whether or not they appear to be too inhumane.

Then there was this other story of this teacher who walked out of the supermarket with goods without paying for them. Apparently he was completely distraught about being caught. He pleaded for clemency towards the police man who refused to give it to him. First, let’s not judge whether he was telling the truth, that he really forgot to pay. Forgetting to pay is not the same as shoplifting, although you could say that whether the person tried to hide the goods is a pretty good test to distinguish.

The thing is that teachers are really held accountable to higher moral standards than anybody else. They exist in a different universe from other people because they are appraised by children, rather than adults. Adults will already have understood moral grayness and in some ways can be more flexible than children. The simple fact is that his career as a teacher was over. And that’s one reason why I will never be a teacher of secondary schools or below. Because I can never stop swearing. I won’t mind trying to be a lecturer, where I don’t have to think so hard about holding my tongue.

The thing is that he told the policeman that his job as a teacher was stressful and the policeman was stupid enough to question that. He obviously does not read the papers or blogs. Every blog I have read tells me that teaching is a stressful and overworked profession, even though they may not be as underpaid as they always was.