Daddy’s Girl

For someone who readily admits to being spoiled, who starts every day by giving Daddy a hug, who sings to her kuya so he won’t fall asleep when she still feels like chattering away, Jacky Rowena Tiu is one tough and feisty lady. Thrust into the headlines by a daring kidnapping, she survived the ordeal with dignity and sense of self intact, and is fighting another–perhaps more difficult, certainly more drawn out–battle to get her kidnappers convicted and punished.

My meeting with Jacky and her father Rodolfo came about as many things come about here in the Philippines–through a network of friends and relations. An uncle of hers is a friend with whom I had worked on a project, and it was with him and his wife that I had breakfast with Jacky and her father one bright morning week before last.

I cannot say that Jacky was not what I expected; I did not know what to expect. It was a pretty, fair-skinned and petite young woman who shook my hand and apologized for a voice that was just above a whisper. But she was ebullient and animated in conversation, nose crinkling when she giggled. Many who know her and who have seen her after the harrowing ordeal just three months ago are amazed at how little the experience appears to have affected her. It can almost seem like the kidnapping was the plot of a movie she never starred in.

But she confesses to waking up practically every hour throughout the night (she has offered to be a personal wake-up service to her friends: "kahit anong oras gusto n’yo magising, tatawagan ko kayo"), and she does not like to take naps because of the dreams that haunt her. Though she went right back to work after she was released, she admits she has difficulty focusing or concentrating on the work before her. Not surprisingly, her family has become even more protective. When Jacky did not return with the rest of us from the buffet table, a "posse" was sent out to look for her (she had gone to the washroom). She could not convince her father to let her go shopping in the mall; "Da (what Jacky calls her father), sale sa mall," she cajoled, to no avail.

But there is a steely determination not to let the experience–awful as it was ("I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy," she says in an even softer whisper near the end of our meeting)–ruin or run her life. She talks of plans for her life "after I testify", even as her family grapples with the realities of life and business after the kidnapping.

She was held for four days in a house in Tarlac and for another four days in the now infamous house on Tuesday Street in Bacoor, Cavite. She was taken at gunpoint a few meters from their house in San Fernando, La Union as she was on her way to work at 8:20 in the morning. Fortunately, Jacky says, her mother who was in the car with her was left behind by the kidnappers.

From the start, Jacky refused to show her abductors how scared she was. She told the two kidnappers sitting on either side of her in the back seat of her car (a third man was driving) not to stick their guns into her side; they obliged by keeping the weapons on their persons, barrels pointed at her. Then she told them to lower their voices–"I am not deaf," she told them in Hokkien, the language used in the entire operation, since all seven of the kidnappers spoke neither English nor Filipino. They retorted that speaking in a loud voice indicated strength and authority and dynamism; she countered that that may be so in China but they were now in the Philippines and that is not how people here speak.

Jacky spoke to her father four times by cellphone during her eight-day ordeal. Rodolfo is soft-spoken, a lot less articulate and talkative than his daughter, but the pain of the ordeal is palpable in his silence and his quiet demeanor. The night before she was finally released (at around 9:30 p.m. of October 4) was the worst part of it all, Jacky recalls. Sometime late at night one of the kidnappers burst into the room brandishing a chopping board and kitchen knife, threatening to cut off her finger to be sent to her family. He screamed that her father had reneged on the agreed ransom amount. Repeatedly he slammed the knife’s edge onto the chopping board, and demanded that all his accomplices be present when he chopped off her finger; even those asleep were ordered roused. Jacky pleaded that she be allowed to speak to her father; she was sure he would not put her life at risk over money. The kidnapper refused; Jacky bargained and pleaded: "I begged, I really begged," she says.

Finally they agreed to let her call her father. Even under such conditions Jacky kept her head; she asked how much time she had to speak to him. Not long, they answered; she pressed for a specific time, so she would know how brief she should be and how much she could say. In the end, Jacky recalls with an ironic laugh, she itemized her message to her father. Number one, she said, I love you very very much; tell Mommy and A-hia (her elder brother). Next she discussed the ransom (the elder Tiu had not reneged; he told them he only had half the amount at that time and would get the rest only the next day, which was the agreed day of payment), and their threat that she would be killed if the police were involved.

The ransom trail Rodolfo had to follow brought him to a hotel in Binondo, looking for gas stations in Caloocan, parking under a lighted bank sign and finally to the periphery of Luneta, where he was told his daughter would be released. After handing over the money, he made a last desperate appeal for his daughter’s release: drop her off anywhere around the Luneta, and give her cellphone back so she could call him.

The night could not have been darker, the seconds could not have dragged on longer until his phone rang and Jacky told him she was waiting for him to pick her up–at the domestic terminal of naia 2. Their trusted family driver Celso–who started working with the Tiu family a couple of months before Jacky was born–must have wished for wings to get them from Luneta to the airport; Rodolfo had to tell him to slow down because a vehicular accident was the last thing they wanted to happen.

There is no way that you or I can fully comprehend what Jacky and her family went through; we can only imagine the dimensions of fear and anxiety and even desperation that must have taken place during those eight days. We should count ourselves immeasurably blessed to be spared such an experience. And yet there are those so calloused and insensitive–cruel even–who say how "lucky" Jacky was, that she was not raped or killed, and those–even worse–spreading rumors that Jacky’s kidnapping was to "offset" a P30 million debt that her father owed to mainland Chinese characters (Rodolfo admits to having incurred substantial debts to raise the ransom payment, but adamantly denies any debt–P30 million or otherwise–before the kidnapping).

Kidnapping–nay, all sorts of crimes–has become so lucrative here; criminal activity seems to be the form of "foreign investment" we are attracting. The likes of Genta Ogami and these Chinese nationals who kidnapped Jacky find our shores so hospitable for their nefarious activities; is it because they find law and order such a big joke here? Is our social fiber so loose that anything and anyone can fall through the weave of law enforcement?

In Jacky’s case police and intelligence agents, even without the overt help of the victim, were on top of the situation and, as soon as it was ascertained that Jacky was safe, they swooped down and arrested the seven kidnappers. But subsequent events led to one of them being let out on bail, and it was only a loud public outcry–led by an exposé in The STAR–that prevented the others from possibly being likewise bailed out.

"Crime should not pay," Jacky wrote in a letter sent to the editor of The STAR. She is trying her darndest to see to it that, in her case, it doesn’t. In the past authorities have rued the fact that criminals go free because victims–especially kidnap victims–refuse to cooperate. Despite threats to her person and her family, despite the pressures of reliving her ordeal over and over as the case goes through the criminal justice system, despite the brickbats that kibitzers and other vermin throw her way, Jacky is standing up and fighting, not just to right the wrong done to her–perhaps an oxymoron–but so that justice might be more than an abstract concept.