Luck of the Draw for Indonesian Migrant Worker

A matter of luck - Inside Indonesia - a quarterly magazine on Indonesia and it's people, culture, politics, economy and environment

Migrant domestic workers aspire to more than their home communities can offer and are willing to take risks to change their lives

Rosslyn von der Borch

Singapore's Lucky Plaza, a popular meeting place for domestic workers Wayne Palmer

The changing nature of Indonesia's rural economies and an increased awareness of the world - brought about by higher levels of education, greater exposure to the mass media and the ever growing numbers of returned labour migrants - have contributed to a marked change in the aspirations of young rural women. At the same time, the absence of almost any work opportunities beyond poorly paid farming or factory work drives many to seek work abroad, powerfully sustained by their dreams of a better future for themselves and their families.

Women have little or no choice about the external factors that determine the way their migratory experience unfolds. A migrant domestic worker newly arrived in her host country is assigned to an employer about whom she knows nothing. In the absence of any sense of control, she relies on 'luck' to deliver kind and understanding employers.

Migration roulette

Employers and agents often claim that migrant domestic workers arrive in host countries unprepared for the challenges ahead and attribute the difficulties they experience to this lack of preparation. This is true in part, as many migrants find the move from an Indonesian village community and lifestyle to the urban, middle- to upper-class household of their employer disorienting. But it is important to acknowledge that agents, employers and the host community can also make this transition more difficult than necessary.

When I have raised the issue of labour migration with young domestic workers in Indonesia, they have indicated that they are well aware of the high levels of risk attached working overseas. Television and print media coverage of the ordeals endured by some migrant workers make this common knowledge. Prospective labour migrants, then, are generally aware that they will be confronted with a range of difficulties and may experience intense homesickness.

Domestic worker Rini Widyawati secretly kept a diary in which she recorded her observations and experiences during the years she spent working in Hong Kong, which was published after her return to Indonesia. In the opening pages of her diary she describes her stark awareness that she may fail to earn the money she dreams about, but also that the gamble she is taking and may even cause her death. She writes:

A nervousness rises in my heart. Will the future that I seek here be mine? … Will I leave this airport in two years having been successful? … Or will I die here, so that only my corpse will again pass through this airport. This has been the fate of some other Indonesian migrant workers, the reasons for whose deaths are sometimes not clear. Or will I kill myself here when I feel lonely and isolated, with work and family problems piling up on each other? My friends, who have also been migrant domestic workers in Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Singapore, have told me this happens.

Perhaps only willing risk-takers seek work abroad, while the 'risk-averse' stay at home. In any case, hundreds of thousands of women take these substantial risks each year, hoping for high gains that are not possible if they stay in Indonesia.

Cycles of luck

When Indonesian migrant domestic workers go overseas they find themselves pitted against familiar enemies, in particular the structural disempowerment so intimately known to their home communities. It is unsurprising, then, that they speak so often of luck. Wilma, who works in Singapore, comments:

Being a maid is not bad at all, but a lot depends on luck. Luck is important. Because if you go to a family and they bully you, don't give you any days off, lock you in the house, then you're really in a bad place. So you need luck.

The uncertainties that arise when transferring from one employer to another can be immensely stressful. But Susi feels she has always been fortunate in the placement lottery:

I've always been lucky, I think, where employers are concerned. They have all treated me well. Maybe I'm good [laughs] or maybe they're good - or it's just my life, or something like that. It's okay. I can do my work.

Dian commented that she was lucky in having the 'understanding' of her employers:

My first boss and this one, they've both let me do my own thing. She isn't finicky about time. The important thing is that the work is done. Yes, they've both been understanding. I've been lucky in that.

Nina talked about cycles of bad luck and good luck. She experienced the 'bad luck' of being repatriated at short notice by her first employer in Singapore, which infuriated her. However she went immediately to another employment agent in Jakarta and applied to return:

So one month later I came back to Singapore. That employer was Straits Chinese. Her mother was sick and had complications, so she needed another maid. She employed me. But I wasn't lucky. Four months later the lady passed away. But good luck was coming. Because I went to the agency and said I wanted a transfer… In the afternoon the agent called me. She asked me, 'Do you want to transfer to a whitey?' [Very animated tone of voice]: 'Hey, that would be great!' I said. At two o'clock I had an interview. Then I got my employer.

Talk among domestic workers of the importance of luck - and of the personal resources necessary for dealing with adversity - points back to the structural injustice and disempowerment that affects labour migrants, to government and legislative failings in both home and host countries, and often to the personal ethical failings of employers, agents and government officials. Consequently, luck continues to play a part in determining the working conditions of migrant domestic workers, even after years overseas.

Not just passive accommodation

In some cases, migrant workers' reliance on luck may decrease as they gain confidence and are empowered through their experiences as migrants. Given access to each other - especially through days off that can be spent discussing problems and experiences, sharing food and news from home or attending classes - a domestic worker's reliance on luck can begin to be combined with a more complex awareness of her rights.

A reliance on luck in navigating the risks inherent in labour migration can suggest a passive accommodation to fate. But it is also closely linked to the personal capital that can make the difference between a 'successful' and an 'unsuccessful' migration experience. Especially in situations where a migrant domestic worker finds herself 'unlucky', her ability to accommodate her situation and to garner the personal resources necessary to see out her contract or to negotiate change, are tested.

But while accommodation can appear to be in tension with the notion that these women are active risk-takers, it can also be an active state, closely aligned to these women's views of themselves as economic pioneers and as risk-takers. As Nurjannah observed, speaking to me about having acquired the discipline of accommodation:

Lately everybody's talking about foreign workers, about maids. That never happened in the past. Even so, there are still many local employers who use mean and bad words when they talk to their maids. Especially - well I can't say especially who they were - but I was a victim of this myself, long ago, sometimes. But I grew up and now I don't care what they say. I just - I mean - but some girls might feel irritated when the - often employers call them 'sotong (squid) head', something like that [laughs, a bit embarrassed] and sometimes the children say bad things as well. I can handle it. I don't mind. I understand. But some newcomers, they've never heard that word, and they might feel so bad and so irritated and they feel so angry.

When asked to explain what she meant when she said she understood, Nurjannah added:

For myself, for my own personal wellbeing, what else can I do? Apart from wear it? It's easier on myself if I just wear it. It makes everything easier. No arguments. I just let them go. Later I will talk to them nicely so they will think about what they've said. But some girls can't do that. Especially in the beginning. I was also like that with my first employer.

In the importance placed on luck by migrant domestic workers, then, we can see a pragmatic appraisal of what is possible in their relationships with their employers and as migrants.

A form of resourcefulness

No migrant worker in receiving countries where comprehensive labour laws exist - and are enforced - should have to rely on luck to deliver reasonable working hours, time off from work and fair pay. However, like Nurjannah, many migrant domestic workers are prepared to accommodate a great deal, regarding this as part of the job. The focus of these women is pragmatically fixed on the route to the achievement of their ultimate goal of financial gain, and not on what is 'right'. Even if she becomes the victim of severe abuse, this goal may not be risked through attempts to assert her rights unless the odds are clearly in her favour.

But far from signifying acceptance of their 'lot', the ways that migrant domestic workers accommodate the challenges and difficulties they encounter demonstrate a resourceful negotiation of complex circumstances in which they are largely powerless. It is in this resourcefulness that the possibility lies for them to achieve the life they dream about - a life in which they have a measure of autonomy, more power to consume and knowledge of the world beyond their village.

Rosslyn von der Borch (rosslyn.vonderborch@flinders.edu.au) teaches Indonesian Studies at Flinders University in South Australia.

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An Expatriate Filipino Writes of a Parallel Life - NYTimes.com

By JOYCE HOR-CHUNG LAU

HONG KONG — The story begins with the death of Crispin Salvador, an expatriate Filipino author living in New York, whose body is found floating in the Hudson River. He had been scathingly critical of his home country before his mysterious demise.

Christie Johnston for The International Herald Tribune

Miguel Syjuco's first novel, “Ilustrado,” written after he left the Philippines, won the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2008.

It is part of a novel, a satire of the chaos and violence of Philippine politics called “Ilustrado,” the first book by Miguel Syjuco, an expatriate Filipino author living in Montreal. And — if the book was not clear enough in its theme that art reflects life — the fictional narrator and Salvador’s protégé is also named Miguel Syjuco.

The real-life Mr. Syjuco, a dapper 33-year-old, has been promoting “Ilustrado,” which won the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize, on a tour through the United States and Britain, where it will be released in coming months.

Sipping tea amid the wood paneling of the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club — in a camel blazer with matching red pocket square and red cuff links — he looked the part of a gentleman from a good Philippine family. Mr. Syjuco, who once held entry-level jobs at The New Yorker and other magazines before deciding to devote himself full time to writing, is clearly from the educated upper classes that he skewers in his book.

“My family, my friends, my colleagues — we are the elites,” he said. “We are a wealthy, beautiful country, and we’ve screwed it up so badly. The majority of wealth is controlled by a minority. And we don’t know when enough is enough. The elite don’t want one mansion; they want three.”

Like his fictional counterpart in the book, Mr. Syjuco came from a political family but declined to enter the business himself.

His real-life father, Augusto Syjuco Jr., known as Boboy, stepped down from a cabinet post in the government of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to run for Congress in national elections on Monday. So far, nearly three dozen people have been killed in attacks linked to those elections. While Mr. Syjuco is disparaging of the violence, he says he is not overly worried about his father.

“He knows what he’s doing,” Mr. Syjuco said. “He’s with Gloria Arroyo — in her party. He is entrenched in his district, and he has his bodyguards. So he is more protected than candidates from grass-roots parties.”

Mr. Syjuco said he did not want to draw too close a comparison between his own life and the book, but the parallels — the fictional Miguel Syjuco, an orphan, disappoints his doting grandparents when he fails to live up to their political ambitions — are obvious.

“My dad wanted me to be a lawyer, a politician, the president of his country,” Mr. Syjuco said. “I have two sisters and three brothers, and not a politician among any of them. I was my dad’s great last hope.”

Mr. Syjuco was unheard of before “Ilustrado” won the Man Asian Literary Prize, which shares a sponsor with the Man Booker Prize and recognizes the best Asian novel written or translated into English. Outside of the Philippines, he could not even get short stories published in journals.

“I got rejected left and right,” he said. “I wallpapered my wall with rejection slips, the way F. Scott Fitzgerald was said to have done.”

In fact, when “Ilustrado” won the award, it was still an unedited draft with no publisher.

Understandably, Mr. Syjuco had almost no expectation of winning. “I just wanted to get on the long list so agents would pay attention to me,” he said.

“I remember sitting in front of my computer, waiting for midnight — since the long list would be announced at that moment — and hitting the refresh button over and over. I did the same thing when the short list was announced. When I flew out to Hong Kong for the awards dinner, I thought I’d just eat a lot of Chinese food and get drunk.”

Miguel Syjuco was born in the Philippines to a Chinese-Filipino father and a Spanish-Filipino mother, into a family whose wealth was anchored in a soft-drink bottling company.

His parents moved abroad during the Marcos era, and Mr. Syjuco spent much of his childhood in Vancouver, British Columbia. “The first thing I wrote was in grade five. I tried to write a sequel to ‘Lord of the Rings,’ ” he said.

He returned to the Philippines for high school and college and, as he says, “got onto the right path when I flunked out of economics in university.”

He and some friends put together Local Vibe, an entertainment Web site. But he could not free himself of family ties and expectations, so he decided to move back overseas.

He knocked around the United States, Canada and Australia, studying, writing and trying to stay financially afloat. He had entry-level jobs at The New Yorker, Esquire and The Paris Review, and earned a master’s degree in creative writing from Columbia University. He is finishing a Ph.D. at the University of Adelaide, in Australia.

“Ilustrado” starts off as a murder mystery. When Salvador dies, the draft of a politically biting masterpiece he had been working on disappears. The book then moves into what are, for the Philippines, complicated and interwoven issues of sex and poverty, migration and work, religion and governance.

Its short chapters come in a cacophony of fonts and voices. There are excerpts from the two main characters’ own writing, plus e-mail messages, newspaper articles, blog comments, flashbacks and dream sequences.

The style is postmodern (or, as some prefix-happy critics call it, post-postmodern) right down to the faux footnotes. The novel is short, sharp and funny, though some critics have called it overwritten. (“Yet it was the internecine intensities of the local literati that gossiped Salvador’s life into chimerical proportions.”)

“I don’t particularly like the postmodern tag,” Mr. Syjuco said. “It’s a novel of today, a contemporary novel. The way we consume information is fragmented.”

Mr. Syjuco explained that “Ilustrado,” which means “enlightened” in Spanish, refers to a period in the late 1800s when the Philippines was a Spanish colony and Filipinos traveled to Europe to be educated in the arts, sciences and politics.

“These young men, the ‘enlightened,’ returned home to aid in the 1896 revolution that ousted Spanish control,” Mr. Syjuco said. “There are 8.1 million Filipinos abroad now. They have the potential to be the new ‘ilustrado’ class. But of those 8.1 million, only 500,000 are registered to vote in the upcoming elections. Maybe they have turned their back on the democratic process.”

Mr. Syjuco, who has already sold a second book to a North American publisher, identifies himself as a Filipino author but says that overseas life gave him the distance needed to see his country’s problems.

“I don’t know if I could have written this if I had stayed in the Philippines,” he said.

He declined to predict what would happen in the coming elections.

“My book asks some tough questions, but it’s not the Great Philippine Novel,” he said. “I’m 33. I don’t have all the answers. If I did, I’d be running for president.”

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Rise and Fall of Frank Ma, Last Asian Godfather - NYTimes.com

Image by Yelp.com via Flickr

By ALAN FEUER

IT was 1994 — the Year of the Dog — and Frank Ma was in a quandary.

Mr. Ma, a 40-year-old crime boss, had just arranged the murder of his longtime heroin supplier, who, on his orders, had been gunned down in a Los Angeles parking lot. He had recently found a new supplier: Golo Keung, a member of the Big Circle Boys, one of Hong Kong’s largest criminal triads.

The quandary was this, according to court records: Mr. Keung, in classic gangster fashion, had been asking for a favor. He believed his partner in Toronto had been cheating him. He wanted the partner dead.

Mr. Ma, who had arrived in the United States a decade before from China, had pondered this request for several days, and in early May, witnesses said later, he summoned his lieutenants to his doorman building in Rego Park, Queens. Before talking shop, the half-dozen men played cards: Pick Two, one of the boss’s favorite games. Mr. Ma loved gambling, federal agents say: mah-jongg, casinos, almost any sports event. Wiretaps would later catch him wagering thousands on a basketball game he did not even seem to understand: he picked teams not by standings or statistics, but according to the color of their uniforms.

As the cards were dealt that day, Mr. Ma made an announcement. He was going to take the job for Mr. Keung. There was no way of knowing that the decision would result in two botched murders, an international investigation spanning 16 years, and his own arrest and prosecution. Its effects would ripple from central Queens to Canada to Northern California and back to Manhattan, where, only two months ago, Mr. Ma was sentenced to life in prison in what the authorities describe as the downfall of the last of New York’s Chinese gangsters.

That day around the card table in Rego Park, though, all of this was safely in the future. Mr. Ma asked an underling to secure two weapons for the job. For the hit itself, he planned to use a man from California.

That man, Ah Wah, was good. In fact, as one of Mr. Ma’s associates would later testify, he was Frank Ma’s “most helpful killer.”

Mr. Wah had once killed two men in a graveyard, federal agents say, forcing them to kneel in front of a headstone before putting bullets in their brains. His partner was a man named Luyen Nguyen; people called Mr. Nguyen “Psycho.”

Mr. Wah was from Vietnam and had pledged allegiance in the early 1990s to Mr. Ma, whom he referred to as his “dai lo,” or elder brother, according to the authorities. Mr. Wah’s associates included Paul Cai, another Vietnamese man, and William Nagatsuka, a felon from Japan. Together, they made quite a crew. According to courtroom testimony, the four immigrants killed, robbed brothels, broke into computer stores, stole cars, defrauded banks, illegally cloned cellphones and took people’s welfare checks.

Not long after Mr. Ma’s card game, court papers say, Mr. Wah invited Mr. Cai and Mr. Nagatsuka to his home in Monterey, Calif. Mr. Nagatsuka later testified that Mr. Wah said that Mr. Ma was looking for some “fresh faces” for a hit. Mr. Wah had already gone to Toronto to scout the location: the Seafood Alliance Corporation, a wholesale fish seller. He asked Mr. Nagatsuka to prepare supplies: ski masks, gloves, walkie-talkies. Mr. Nagatsuka’s roommate, referred to in the court file only as Simone, bought the walkie-talkies at a Costco in Alhambra, Calif. The four of them would split $30,000 for the job.

Days later, Mr. Wah, Mr. Nguyen, Mr. Cai and Mr. Nagatsuka flew to New York. Mr. Ma’s top lieutenant, Bing Yi Chen, met them at Kennedy Airport, court papers say, and, after they had eaten at a Chinese restaurant, took them to the boss’s home. There, they met two women, referred to in court papers as Christina and Salina, who, as Mr. Nagatsuka later said, would serve as their “tourist cover in Canada.” Expense money — $2,000 in a paper clip — was handed out.

They left Queens that night in a minivan and, hours later, checked into a small motel near Niagara Falls. The following day, July 19, they surveilled Seafood Alliance, a large, nondescript storefront in an industrial park, checking for cameras and security guards. They sent Christina and Salina shopping and promptly stole a Honda as a getaway car. They met two of Mr. Ma’s Canadian associates at a Baskin-Robbins to pick up two pistols. Back at the motel, court papers say, they cleaned the guns with WD-40 and discussed the next day’s plan: fake a robbery, tie up the victims, shoot them.

•

The men who became America’s first Chinese gangsters arrived here in the mid-1800s, mostly settling in San Francisco, where many worked for prospectors during the Gold Rush, or as laborers on the rapidly expanding transcontinental railroad. Faced with harsh conditions and anti-immigrant riots, they quickly formed social groups, called tongs, that offered protection from a hostile culture alongside basic services like credit unions.

For decades, the tongs, which also dabbled in gambling and prostitution, were mainly Cantonese, but in 1965, with the passage of a new federal immigration act, the scope and nature of Chinese immigration changed. One result was the arrival of a large number of alienated youths from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Some of them were put to work by the tongs as muscle at clubhouses, gambling dens and brothels in California and New York.

It is impossible to know precisely how many men were involved in Chinese organized crime over the decades, experts say. But in just two years, 1990 and 1991, at the height of the gangsters’ power, federal agents in New York alone made 130 arrests, confiscated 200 pounds of heroin and seized $25 million in assets, including $15 million in cash, as well as homes, boats, apartment buildings, jewelry stores, even the Golden Palace restaurant, one of Chinatown’s biggest, which was used to launder money.

This was the world that Frank Ma eventually inherited after slipping into the country illegally in the 1980s, court papers say. Born in China as Sui Min Ma, he started his career in the Boston rackets, moved to San Francisco and, by the early 1990s, federal agents say, settled in New York. By that point, Manhattan’s Chinatown was owned by two main tongs, each one connected with a youth gang. The On Leong tong dominated Mott Street and was allied with the violent Ghost Shadows. The Hip Sing tong controlled Pell Street and ran the Flying Dragons, whose boss, Johnny Eng, had moved into the heroin trade when the Italian Mafia’s role decreased.

(Mr. Ma, now in a federal prison in Brooklyn, declined through his lawyer, Don Buchwald, to be interviewed.)

The government does not believe that Mr. Ma was ever formally associated with a tong, but he would have known the major players — like Clifford Wong, leader of the Tung On tong, or Paul Lai, president of the Tsung Tsin Association, who once served on an advisory panel for Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and even attended the wedding of the governor’s daughter. (Both men were eventually convicted on racketeering charges.)

Mr. Ma was instead a member of the 14K triad, federal agents say, a Hong Kong group founded more than 60 years ago by 14 leaders of the Kuomintang nationalist party. Based in Queens, he oversaw gambling parlors, a luxury car-theft ring, extortion rackets and an immigrant smuggling operation. By his own admission, though, his most profitable business was always heroin — and that, of course, was why he had sent his killers to Toronto.

•

In the morning, their getaway car was gone.

Perhaps someone had stolen it. The men, at any rate, had a backup plan. They had stolen license plates from another car, according to court papers, and they put these on the minivan they had driven from New York. They dropped the women at a park and drove past Seafood Alliance. In the afternoon, when the coast was clear, Mr. Wah pulled the van into a parking spot. Mr. Cai and Mr. Nguyen walked toward the door. It was locked, so Mr. Nguyen fired a few shots, shattering the glass. He stepped inside. Mr. Cai followed.

Waiting in the van, Mr. Nagatsuka heard more shots. Many, many more. Years later, at the murder trial of Bing Yi Chen, he testified as to what happened next:

Mr. Wah “started putting the minivan into reverse, started pulling away from the parking lot. Once we were driving away, we see Paul Cai and Luyen coming out, running fast. Along the way, Paul Cai disassembled his handgun, threw the handgun parts to an empty lot on the right side. We were following at a slow pace along with Luyen and Paul Cai. There was a Home Depot nearby. We went to the back of it. That’s where the plan was to meet, in the back of the Home Depot. Once we turned the corner to the Home Depot, we start hearing the siren.”

They found Christina and Salina and hurried the 80 miles back to Niagara Falls. The next day, they saw news coverage of the murders on TV: two bodies being carted off by the police. They returned to New York City and to Mr. Ma’s apartment. There, court papers say, they apologized to Mr. Chen.

They had escaped unscathed. But, on reading the morning papers, they realized they had killed the wrong two men.

•

Within hours, the case was assigned to Detective Sgt. Douglas Grady of the Toronto homicide squad.

It was a Wednesday, Detective Grady’s day off, and he was at home watching the Blue Jays on television. After six years on the job, he was accustomed to the untoward hours of police work and immediately left for the scene. He found Seafood Alliance’s glass door shot out and bullet casings strewn across the ground. “In my entire career,” he recalled in a recent interview, “I’d never seen so many shots fired at a scene.”

The victims were identified as Samson Yip, 32, a computer technician, whose body was found slumped against the wall, and Stephen Kwan, 36, an accountant, who was lying in a pool of his own blood. Detective Grady saw that both men had suffered “torture shots” to the leg and had been finished off with “coup-de-grâce shots” to the head. Mr. Kwan’s lunch — a hamburger and orange juice — still rested on his desk.

By the next morning, Detective Grady was working several leads. In a nearby parking lot, the police found a knapsack containing ski masks, walkie-talkies, a canister of WD-40, a Niagara Falls baseball cap and pieces from a 9-millimeter pistol. And in a neighborhood park, they recovered two guns and another ski mask and baseball cap.

Witnesses reported seeing a van leave the scene, but no one could identify the license plate. The guns turned out to be untraceable; the masks and clothes were tracked to the United States. Even the victims, Detective Grady said, were puzzling: college graduates with no criminal records. “There seemed to be no reason at all,” he said, “for these guys getting killed.”

One potential investigative path was the walkie-talkies. Detective Grady’s team quickly determined they had come from the Costco in Alhambra, Calif. But the list of people who had bought such radios ran into the dozens, if not the hundreds, he said. He could not — or would not — ask officials in Alhambra to track down every person on the list. Nor could he do it himself. “What? I’m going to ask my bosses to let me go to California? From Ontario? They’d think it was a scam,” he said.

The only other avenue was Seafood Alliance’s owner, David Seto, who, Detective Grady determined, had a reputation for sharp elbows and late payments. So his team investigated Mr. Seto’s finances and discovered that he lived a much more opulent life than importing shrimp or cod should probably allow. They interviewed his workers, competitors and suppliers, but it was not until they examined his investors that they found a startling clue: Mr. Seto had been in contact with a man named Golo Keung.

“Every time we interviewed him, he was nervous,” Detective Grady recalled of Mr. Seto. “He wasn’t forthright — he was dodging and weaving, as they say. He thought that somebody had tried to kill him, but he couldn’t say why or who. It just became clearer that he was the intended victim, that he was the reason these two men were dead.”

When Mr. Seto left the country in 1995, the case went cold. Months, then years, went by without another lead.

“We’d gone to Crime Stoppers,” Detective Grady said. “We’d gone to our informants in the Asian community. We dealt with the constabulary in Hong Kong. But we weren’t getting anywhere.

“There was nothing left as to who did this,” he said. “Or why.”

•

Eight years later, in 2002, Special Agent Bill McMurray of the New York office of the F.B.I. busted a drug ring connected to a Chinese triad called the Wo Lee Kwans. Cooperating witnesses in that case led to the arrest of a killer known as Psycho: Luyen Nguyen.

One day, as often happens in police work, Agent McMurray mentioned his triumph to a friend, Officer John Glenn of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Officer Glenn, it turned out, had once been assigned to Detective Grady’s homicide squad and had never forgotten the seafood murders. On a professional whim, Officer Glenn sent Agent McMurray the one outstanding, albeit long-shot, lead in the case: the list of people who bought those Costco walkie-talkies all those years ago.

The whim paid off. Agent McMurray recognized the name Simone, Mr. Nagatsuka’s former roommate. Psycho had mentioned him while being questioned.

Within a year, the case had broken open. Mr. Nagatsuka, already in custody on other charges, began to cooperate. Bing Yi Chen, Mr. Ma’s right hand, was arrested in Arizona in 2003 and eventually went to trial, where he was convicted of committing murder while engaged in a narcotics conspiracy. The authorities found Paul Cai in Los Angeles, and he pleaded guilty to similar charges. Ah Wah, who had fled to China, was returned by extradition in 2007 and pleaded guilty to racketeering and murder charges. He now awaits sentencing.

Frank Ma, who had also fled to China in 1996, was arrested in Boston after he slipped back into the country in mid-2003. His case took nearly as long to wind through the courts as it had to investigate. He pleaded guilty to murder and narcotics charges. Finally, in February, Judge Deborah A. Batts of Federal District Court in Manhattan handed down the life sentence.

“He’d killed the wrong guys, and it caused a conflict with his supplier back in Hong Kong,” Agent McMurray said in an interview. “Before he left, Frank Ma was this mysterious godlike creature, but in China, on the run, he didn’t have the support to live the lifestyle he was used to. People owed him money in America. That’s why he came back.”

His downfall marked the passage of an era.

“Could there be another Ma-type guy still out there?” Agent McMurray asked. “The fact is our source base is so good that we’d probably be aware of his existence, even if we couldn’t make a case.

“Frank Ma was probably the last of the Asian godfathers.”

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Hong Kong’s Pro-Democracy March Draws Thousands

By KEITH BRADSHER

HONG KONG — Thousands of people joined a pro-democracy march here on Wednesday, although the turnout fell short of a candlelight vigil held nearly four weeks ago to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing.

An enormous crowd for the annual June 4 candlelight vigil, the largest since 1990, had raised the hopes of Hong Kong democracy advocates that the same enthusiasm might carry over to their movement. The movement has been struggling after several small successes from 2003 to 2005, including winning support for blocking the government’s planned introduction of stringent internal security legislation.

The immediacy of democracy demands here has faded somewhat as Beijing officials have ruled out direct elections for the chief executive until 2017 and the legislature until 2020.

The march on Wednesday, on the 12th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to Chinese rule after 156 years of British control, nonetheless drew a large crowd.

Many marchers said they were dissatisfied with government policies to deal with the economy. Unemployment in Hong Kong rose sharply over the winter and leveled off this spring at 5.3 percent — a little over half the rate in the United States, but a shock for a territory where the rate was 3.2 percent last summer.

But the largest single issue seemed to be the limits on democracy in Hong Kong. “The majority comes here for democracy, but there are other grievances against government policy,” said Sin Chung Kai, vice chairman of the Democratic Party.

When Britain returned Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997, the Chinese government initially held out the possibility of full democracy after 2007, including the concept in the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s miniconstitution, but stopped short of an unequivocal promise of how and when to achieve universal suffrage.

A committee of 800 people, most with connections to Beijing, chooses the chief executive here, who must then be appointed by leaders in Beijing before taking office. Half the legislature is chosen by the public and half by a variety of interest groups, including banks, chambers of commerce, trade unions and lawyers.

The police estimated that 26,000 people had assembled in Victoria Park on Hong Kong Island as the march began. The organizers had said that they expected more to join the march along the way, and they estimated that 76,000 people took part.

The police had estimated the crowd at the June 4 Tiananmen vigil, at the same location in Victoria Park, at 62,800, while organizers put it at 150,000.

The vigil did have some carryover effect on Wednesday’s march. Jupiter Chan, a 24-year-old graduate student, said that the vigil prompted him to come to the annual democracy march this year for the first time since 2003.

“I was touched by the Fourth of June ceremony, and I felt that if I didn’t come this year, I would regret it later,” he said.

New Editor-in-chief for The South China Morning Post

The South China Morning Post just announced a long rumored shift in editorial lineup. Below is the internal memo released a short while ago.

To: All Staff

From: Kuok Hui Kwong

Date: 2 July 2009

To all my colleagues,

It is with regret that I announce Mr. C.K. Lau’s decision to resign from his position as Editor of the South China Morning Post, after a long and distinguished career with us. C.K. discussed with me a couple of months ago regarding his plan to pursue his personal interests. We have mutually agreed that his last day with us will be 10 July 2009. During his tenure at the Post, C.K. has played a key role in strengthening and improving our editorial operations. A committed and well-respected professional, he has contributed significantly to the Post and to the overall media community in Hong Kong.

Effective from 13 July 2009, Mr. Reginald Chua will join us as Editor-in-Chief. On top of managing the day-to-day editorial operations of the Post, Reg will work with me on the long-term strategies for our editorial coverage. Reg has enjoyed a successful career at the Wall Street Journal spanning the past 16 years. He was most recently Deputy Managing Editor at The Wall Street Journal based in New York, where he led, amongst other responsibilities, the development of the Journal’s computer-assisted reporting capabilities and oversaw the paper’s graphics. Prior to moving to New York, he was the Editor of the Journal’s Hong Kong-based Asian edition. Reg graduated with a Master’s Degree in Journalism from Columbia University and a Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics from the University of Chicago.

Effective the same date, Mr. David Lague will be appointed as Managing Editor. As a member of the newsroom’s senior management team, David will oversee editorial quality and standards, training and projects. He will also be involved in daily news operations. A news and features writer with the South China Morning Post in 1987-88, David returns to the paper after more than two decades as a reporter and editor in the Asia-Pacific region. Most recently, he was a correspondent for the International Herald Tribune and the New York Times in Beijing. Before joining New York Times Company, he was managing editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review. David was also China correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian. David graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in science from Murdoch University.

David will work closely with Wang Xiangwei and Cliff Buddle, the Post’s deputies, to help manage the newsroom, steer its coverage, and continue to build on the paper’s strong position. Xiangwei, Cliff and David will report to Reg.

On behalf of the Board of Directors and the Management of SCMP Group, we express our deep appreciation to C.K. for his contribution and persevering dedication, and wish him the very best in his new endeavours. Please also join me in welcoming Reg and extending your full support to him, and in welcoming David back to Post.

Hui Kuok

Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer

Southeast Asia Research Centre Working Papers Series

Click on the Working Paper title to download. Each paper is a PDF, created with Adobe Acrobat.

To obtain a copy of Adobe Reader, click here.

Source page - http://www.cityu.edu.hk/searc/WP.html

The Working Papers series is organised in the following table by year of publication. To look for papers published in a particular year, click the year. Alternatively, simply scroll down the page to browse all papers.

A full set of papers on CD-ROM can be obtained by sending a US$25 draft drawn on the City University of Hong Kong to Ms Josephine Yim, Southeast Asia Research Centre, City University, Tat Chee Ave, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong.

2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008

2001
Working Paper & Date	Author	Title
1, April 2001	Kevin Hewison	Pathways to Recovery: Bankers, Business and Nationalism in Thailand
2, April 2001	Kanishka Jayasuriya	Governance, Post Washington Consensus and the New Anti Politics
3, April 2001	Kanishka Jayasuriya	Southeast Asia's Embedded Mercantilism in Crisis: International Strategies and Domestic Coalitions
4, May 2001	Kevin Hewison	Nationalism, Populism, Dependency: Old Ideas for a New Southeast Asia?
5, May 2001	Herb Thompson	Indonesia: The Denouement of Forest Management Following Economic, Environmental and Political Crises
6, May 2001	Zang Xiaowei	Resource Dependency, Chinese Capitalism, and Intercorporate Ties in Singapore
7, May 2001	Raymond Chan	The Sustainability of the Asian Welfare System after the Financial Crisis: Reflections on the Case of Hong Kong
8, May 2001	Kevin Hewison	Thailand: Class Matters
9, June 2001	Maniemai Thongyou	Sub-contracting Industry in Rural Villages: Fish-nets in Rural Thailand
10, June 2001	Mark Beeson	The Political Consequences of the Southeast Asian Region's Economic Vulnerability
11, June 2001	Michael Vatikiotis	Fixing Southeast Asia: Mixed Blessings
12, October 2001	Michael Kelly Connors	Ideological Aspects of Democratisation in Thailand: Mainstreaming Localism
13, October 2001	Raymond Chan	The Welfare System in Southeast Asia: Development and Challenges
14, November 2001	Vivienne Wee	Gender and Development in Post-Crisis Southeast Asia
15, November 2001	Kevin Hewison	Liberalism and Globalisation
16, November 2001	Vivienne Wee	Political Faultlines in Southeast Asia: Movements for Ethnic Autonomy as Nations of Intent
17, November 2001	David Brown	Why Might Constructed Nationalist and Ethnic Ideologies Come Into Confrontation With Each Other?
2002
18, January 2002	Amy Sim	Organising Discontent: NGOs for Southeast Asian Migrant Workers in Hong Kong
19, January 2002	Michael Jacobsen	Cross-Border Communities and Deterritorialising Identities. Assessing the Diaspora Triangle: Migrant-Host-Home
20, January 2002	Philip Bowring	East Asia: Centrifugal or Centripetal
21, January 2002	Graeme Lang	Deforestation, Floods, and State Reactions in China and Thailand
22, March 2002	Vivienne Wee	Ethno-nationalism in Process: Atavism, Ethnicity and Indigenism in Riau
23, March 2002	Thomas M. McKenna	Saints, Scholars and the Idealised Past in Philippine Muslim Separatism
24, March 2002	Kanishka Jayasuriya	Globalisation, International Standards and The Rule of Law: A New Symbolic Politics
25, April 2002	Alex H. Choi	Non-Governmental Organisations and Democratisation: The 1992 Bangkok Uprising Revisited
26, May 2002	Michael Jacobsen	Nation-making and the Politicisation of Ethnicity in Post-Suharto Indonesia
27, July 2002	Andrew Brown Bundit Thonachaisetavut Kevin Hewison	Labour Relations and Regulation in Thailand: Theory and Practice
28, July 2002	Nick Thomas	From ASEAN to an East Asian Community? The Role of Functional Co-operation
29, July 2002	Michael Jacobsen	‘To be or what to be – that is the question’. On Factionalism and Secessionism in North Sulawesi Province, Indonesia
30, September 2002	Vivienne Wee Kanishka Jayasuriya	New Geographies and Temporalities of Power: Exploring the New Fault Lines of Southeast Asia
31, September 2002	Vivienne Wee	Social Fragmentation in Indonesia: A Crisis from Suharto’s New Order
32, September 2002	Mark Beeson	East Asia and the International Financial Institutions: The Politics of Regional Regulatory Reform
33, September 2002	Richard Robison Garry Rodan Kevin Hewison	Transplanting the Regulatory State in Southeast Asia: A Pathology of Rejection
34, October 2002	Vivienne Wee	Will Indonesia Hold? Past, Present and Future in a Fragmenting State
35, October 2002	William A. Callahan	Diaspora, Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism: Overseas Chinese and Neo-Nationalism in China and Thailand
36, October 2002	Pasuk Phongpaichit Chris Baker	‘The Only Good Populist is a Rich Populist’: Thaksin Shinawatra and Thailand’s Democracy
37, October 2002	Catherine C.H. Chiu	Labour Relations and Regulation in Hong Kong: Theory and Practice
38, November 2002	Malcolm Falkus Stephen Frost	Labour Relations and Regulation in Cambodia: Theory and Practice Full Version (The file is large, downloads may be slow) Main Report, Appendices, Figure 1
2003
39, January 2003	Martin Painter	Marketisation, Integration and State Restructuring in Vietnam: The Case of State Owned Enterprise Reform
40, March 2003	Raymond K.H. Chan Moha Asri Abdullah Zikri Muhammad	Labour Relations and Regulation in Malaysia: Theory and Practice
41, April 2003	Michael Jacobsen	Reconceptualising the Ethnic Chinese Diaspora in Southeast Asia: Exploring the Outer Limits of Ethnic Affiliations
42, April 2003	Michael Kelly Connors	The Reforming State: Security, Development and Culture in Democratic Times
43, April 2003	Anne Loveband	Positioning the Product: Indonesian Migrant Women Workers in Contemporary Taiwan [A SEARC CAPSTRANS Paper]
44, April 2003	Kevin Hewison	A Preliminary Analysis of Thai Workers in Hong Kong: Survey Results [A SEARC CAPSTRANS Paper]
45, May 2003	Kevin Hewison	The Politics of Neo-Liberalism: Class and Capitalism in Contemporary Thailand
46, May 2003	Michael Jacobsen	Tightening the Unitary State: The Inner Workings of Indonesian Regional Autonomy
47, May 2003	Vedi R. Hadiz	Decentralisation and Democracy in Indonesia: A Critique of Neo-Institutionalist Perspectives
48, July 2003	Huei-ying Kuo	Nationalism Against Its People? Chinese Business and Nationalist Activities in Inter-War Singapore, 1919-1941 (The file is about 3.5MB, downloads may be slow)
49, August 2003	Vivienne Wee Amy Sim	Transnational labour networks in female labour migration: mediating between Southeast Asian women workers and international labour markets [A SEARC CAPSTRANS Paper]
50, August 2003	Allen Chun	Who Wants To Be Diasporic?
51, September 2003	William Case	Malaysia: New Reforms, Old Continuities, Tense Ambiguities
52, September 2003	Vedi R. Hadiz Richard Robison	Neo-Liberal Reforms and Illiberal Consolidations: The Indonesian Paradox
53, September 2003	Li Qi Bill Taylor Stephen Frost	Labour Relations and Regulation in Vietnam: Theory and Practice
54, November 2003	Michael Jacobsen	Chinese Muslims in Indonesia: politics, economy, faith and expediency
55, November 2003	Stephen Frost Catherine C.H. Chiu	Labour Relations and Regulation in Singapore: Theory and Practice
56, December 2003	Adrian Vickers	The Country and the Cities [A SEARC CAPSTRANS Paper]
57, December 2003	Kathleen Weekley	Saving Pennies for the State. A New Role for Filipino Migrant Workers? [A SEARC CAPSTRANS Paper]
2004
58, January 2004	Ken Young	Southeast Asian Migrant Workers in East Asian Households: Globalisation, social change and the double burden of market and patriarchal disciplines [A SEARC CAPSTRANS Paper]
59, January 2004	Kanishka Jayasuriya Kevin Hewison	The Anti-Politics of Good Governance: From Global Social Policy to a Global Populism?
60, February 2004	Michael Jacobsen	De-linking the Chinese Diaspora. On Manadonese Chinese Entrepreneurship in North Sulawesi
61, March 2004	Vedi R. Hadiz	Indonesian Local Party Politics: A Site of Resistance to Neo-Liberal Reform
62, March 2004	Andrew Brown Kevin Hewison	Labour Politics in Thaksin’s Thailand
63, May 2004	Kevin Hewison Garry Rodan	Closing The Circle?: Globalization, Conflict and Political Regimes
64, May 2004	Mark Beeson	Multilateralism, American Power and East Asian Regionalism
65, July 2004	Graeme Lang	Cultural Intrusions and Religious Syncretism: The Case of Caodaism in Vietnam
66, July 2004	Alex H. Choi	Migrant Workers in Macao: Labour and Globalisation
67, July 2004	Stephen Frost	Chinese Outward Direct Investment in Southeast Asia: How Much and What Are the Regional Implications?
68, August 2004	Florencio R. Riguera	Environment and Social Justice: Familiar Norms and Contingent Settings – A Philippine Case Study
69, August 2004	Adam Fforde	Vietnamese State Owned Enterprises: ‘Real Property’, Commercial Performance and Political Economy
70, September 2004	Adam Fforde	State Owned Enterprises, Law and a Decade of Market-Oriented Socialist Development in Vietnam
71, September 2004	Dennis Arnold	The Situation of Burmese Migrant Workers in Mae Sot, Thailand
72, September 2004	Khoo Boo Teik	Searching for Islam in Malaysian Politics: Confluences, Divisions and Governance
73, October 2004	Vedi R. Hadiz	Indonesia: Order and Terror in a Time of Empire [A SEARC-Asia Research Centre Paper]
74, November 2004	Joy Y. Lam	Religious Conversion and Reconstruction of Identities: The Case of Chinese Muslim Converts in Malaysia
75, November 2004	Philip S. Robertson Jr. Somsak Plaiyoowong	The Struggle of the Gina Workers in Thailand: Inside a Successful International Labour Solidarity Campaign
2005
76, May 2005	Martin Painter	Thaksinocracy or Managerialization? Reforming the Thai Bureaucracy
77, June 2005	Graeme Lang Cathy Hiu Wan Chan	The Impact of China on Southeast Asian Forests
78, July 2005	Vivienne Wee	Melayu, Indigenism and the 'Civilising Process': Claims and Entitlements in Contested Territories
79, August 2005	Michael H. Nelson	Analyzing Provincial Political Structures in Thailand: Phuak, Trakun, and Hua Khanaen
80, August 2005	Maniemai Thongyou Dusadee Ayuwat	Social Network of Laotian migrant workers in Thailand
81, December 2005	Michele Ford	Accountable to whom? Trade unions, labour NGOs and the question of accountability in Indonesia
2006
82, November 2006	Michele Ford Nicola Piper	Southern Sites of Female Agency: Informal Regimes and Female Migrant Labour Resistance in East and Southeast Asia
2007
83, January 2007	William Case	Democracy’s Quality and Breakdown: New Lessons from Thailand
84, February 2007	Jan Stark	Malaysia’s Foreign Policies and a New Asian Regionalism
85, April 2007	Stephen McCarthy	The Politics of Piety: Pageantry and the Struggle for Buddhism in Burma
86, May 2007	William Case Phoebe So	Hong Kong’s 2007 Chief Executive Election:Comparators and Consequences
87, May 2007	Michael H. Nelson	People’s Sector Politics’ (Kanmueang Phak Prachachon) in Thailand: Problems of Democracy in Ousting Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra
88, June 2007	Edo Andriesse	Personal Power Networks and Economic Development in Satun (Thailand) and Perlis (Malaysia)
89, October 2007	Vivienne Wee	A Cultural Economy of Regionalisation: Ethnicity and Capital in the Changing Relations between China and Southeast Asia (in Chinese)
90, October 2007	Michael Jacobsen	Decentred Diaspora or Grounded Cosmopolitanism? – On Negotiated Identities and International Linkages in Southeast Asia (in Chinese)
91, October 2007	Stephen Frost Marry Ho	Mainland Investment on the Move: State-owned Enterprises and Outward Direct Investment in Southeast Asia (in Chinese)
92, October 2007	Wang Wangbo	The Characteristics of Southeast Asian Chinese Investments in Mainland China since 1978 (in Chinese)
93, October 2007	Vivienne Wee Michael Jacobsen Tiong Chong Wong	Oscillating between Economic Opportunities and Contextual Constraints: Assessing the Positioning of Southeast Asian Ethnic ‘Chinese’ Entrepreneurs in relation to China (in Chinese)
94, October 2007	Michael Jacobsen	De-linking the Chinese Diaspora – Manadonese Chinese Entrepreneurship in North Sulawesi (in Chinese)
95, October 2007	Edmund Terence Gomez Chin Yee Whah	Malaysia in China: Transnationalism, Business Networks and Enterprise Development (in Chinese) (Part I and Part II)
96, November 2007	Andrew Selth	Modern Burma Studies: A View from the Edge
97, November 2007	Troy Johnson	Voices from Aceh: Perspectives on Syariat Law
2008
98, February 2008	Michael H. Nelson	Thaksin’s 2005 Electoral Triumph: Looking Back From the Election in 2007
99, May 2008	Astrid S. Tuminez	The Past Is Always Present: The Moros of Mindanao and the Quest for Peace
100, June 2008	Andrew Selth	Populism, Politics and Propaganda: Burma and the Movies
101, November 2008	Andrew Selth	Burma’s Coco Islands: Rumours and Realities in the Indian Ocean