As a nosy tigher mum, it’s your duty to relentlessly pursue the pastime of interfering with and making your kids lives hell.
As part of this routine, you regularly sit down at your daughter’s computer and start to poke around.
Facebook? Boring…
Emails? Hmm, nothing there…
A computer-wide search for JPG files…? Oh hello!
Staring at you in the face are several nudie photos of your medical school graduate daughter and her filthy indie-rock band member boyfriend.
Now at this point a rational person has two options:
1. confront your daughter and begin a constructive dialogue about what you’ve found or
2. pretend you never saw the photos and leave your daughter to lead her own life.
Being an obsessive tiger mum of course option 2 is out of the question. Option 1? Well due to aforementioned obsessiveness and the typical batshit crazy that comes with being a tiger mum, that’s also out:
My daughter has a strong personality and I don’t know how to talk to her.
Tiger mum’ese translation?
My daughter is sick of my shit and I’ve all but alienated myself out of her life.
Now the extent of parenting my daughter is limited to snooping around her computer when she’s not around.
As such we now enter the world of the irrational. And here’s what Mrs. Tiger Mum did…
When she discovered several sexually explicit photos of her daughter and her boyfriend, Chuang made copies of the photographs and e-mailed them to Wang (the boyfriend).
She also printed out the photographs and sent them to Wang’s father, a university professor, Wang’s fellow band members, her daughter and her daughter’s friends.
Chuang’s (the mother) actions were motivated by her concern that her daughter might go down the wrong path.
Ah, that’ll teach her. Now she’ll be forced to give up that loser and come crawling back to me. Then we can get back on track with finding her a good little engineer to make me some grandkids with…
Not surprisingly that didn’t happen, and when Chuang’s daughter found out she cut her overbearingly intrusive mother completely out of her life, moved out of home and got on with things flew into an outrage and sued her mother.
After investigating the daughter’s case, prosecutors filed criminal charges against Chuang for ‘violating Article 359 of the Criminal Code and spreading obscene material‘.
Article 359 states that a person who, without justifiable reasons, obtains, deletes or alters the magnetic record of another’s computer or related equipment and causes injury to another person may be sent to prison for up to five years.
Copying the photographs constituted a serious invasion of her daughter’s privacy and distributing them caused the young couple deep psychological distress and compromised their reputation, prosecutors said.
This all happened in April 2012 with the case only just going to trial recently.
End verdict? Tiger mum got bitchslapped and was sentenced to five months jail. Sounds harsher than it is though with the judge suspending the the sentence for two years.
With crazy overbearing parents being an all too common theme here in Taiwan, the judge was somewhat sympathetic to Chuang’s plight:
Chen (the daughter) described her mother’s actions as “outrageous” and urged the judge to give her a severe sentence.
In rendering the verdict, the court said that it took into consideration that Chuang’s actions were motivated by her concern that her daughter might go down the wrong path, and gave her a suspended sentence.
With her relationship with her daughter all but destroyed, somehow I don’t think Chuang is going to have the chance to reoffend.
Still, even with a suspended jail term over her head it doesn’t look like Chuang has learnt anything from the ordeal:
Chuang told the court that she thought Wang must be “sick” to have asked her daughter to imitate the poses of adult film stars and she hoped that by sending the photographs to Wang’s father, he would remonstrate with his son.
Chuang added that she sent the photographs to the couple’s friends hoping that they would dissuade the couple from taking “inappropriate photographs.”
“I only resorted to such a parenting method [spreading the photos] because my daughter has a strong personality and I don’t know how to talk to her,” Chuang was quoted as saying in court, adding that she was merely fulfilling her duty as a mother.
When reached for comment on Tuesday, Chuang said she “loves her daughter wholeheartedly” and hoped she could understand her feelings as a mother.
Yeah, good luck with that.
Unfortunately the article doesn’t mention whether Chang’s dad went nutso after receiving the photos. And as for their friends? What did Chuang think was going to happen, they’d all sit down and have a nudie photo intervention?
Christ, half of the Chen and Chang’s friends probably have photos of themselves on their computers and phones too…
Whilst it’s depressingly amusing to note the time and resources Public Prosecutors and courts in Taiwan have to waste on entertaining cases like this, I for one look forward to covering more stories like this.
As generation “stay the fuck out of my life” pushes on past the teenage year, I suspect we’re only going to see increasingly severe clashes as they rally against the older “You came out of my vagina, I am your god” parental generation.
Perhaps painfully slow at times, the social landscape in Taiwan is somewhat evolving. As more of the oldies die off it’ll be interesting to see where things take us over the next few decades.