Dear Editor,

It was clear several days before Pai Hsiao-yen's body was discovered that murder was one of the possible outcomes of her kidnapping. Nonetheless, the eventual news that the girl's body had been found in a ditch seemed to break the hearts of all Taiwanese. Though a foreigner here, I was one of those people who felt both sadness and fury well up in me the moment I heard the news. The murder of Pai Hsiao-yen affected me like no other crime I'd heard of.

As an American, I of course know of horrible crimes of all sorts: serial killers stalking and killing young women with a certain hair color and build, children randomly gunned down in playgrounds, rapists who dismember their victims and bury them. And yet the stories of such crimes, gruesome as they are, never affected me like the story of this crime. The cases I read of in America were usually involved the mentally deranged. The very gruesomeness of the crimes usually stemmed from the psychoses of the killers. But the murder of Pai Hsiao-yen seemed a crime of a different order. Learning of this deed, reading of it, made me sick at heart. It actually managed to depress me, to make me feel as if a black cloud had descended upon the world.

The public reaction to the murder of Pai Hsiao-yen is unprecedented here in Taiwan. There are of course many reasons for this. One of them is the fear of many people that Pai's kidnappers are not an isolated case, but that in fact they represent a growing class of ruthless thugs whose power and potential for violence is not being checked by the government. I heard people make remarks after the crime such as the following: "I think the only thing that can be done now is to pack up and move away." This remark is understandable after the highly publicized murders of the recent year. Yet I wonder where such people intend to move to. To the US?

According to statistics quoted recently in the China News, there are in the United States 5.3 crime victims for every 100 people yearly. In Taiwan, the figure is 2 crime victims for every 100 people yearly. This would make America more than twice as crime-ridden as Taiwan. In the face of the recent violent crimes in Taiwan, one should not begin to assume that one's friends in the States are better off.

And yet I return to the problem of why it is that the murder of Pai Hsiao-yen seems such a particularly horrible crime, why, in short, it made so many people feel Taiwan was no longer livable. I would say, again, that it is the image of pure brutality put next to the image of an adolescent girl. The victim of this crime was not yet even in the prime of life. She was captured, tortured, beaten and killed, and the whole despicable thing was planned by a handful of men out for the money. That the main kidnappers disappeared, that they were not apprehended, that they were probably being helped by other criminals-all of this served to make Pai's murder yet more infuriating.

It is such offhand brutality that strikes me as the worst element in this most disgusting of crimes. Never had the details of a crime so affected me. To hear of Pai's murder was to feel a black cloud descend on the heart, a blackness that made one disgusted to be a human being, that made one wonder just what was living in the hearts of the men one saw on the streets around one.