An Outsider

The suspected murder of her husband with thallium poisoning by Tianle Li, a Bristol Myers Squibb chemist in New Jersey has stirred a lot of discussions in the Chinese community. She went to Peking University and received a chemistry degree before coming to the US to pursue a PhD in chemistry. A friend of mine forwarded me a website in Chinese where the author warned people never to marry a woman with a chemistry degree, as chemists have "a thousand ways to kill you", and least of all someone from Peking University (considered the Harvard of China), because they will be amongst the best to concoct deadly potions. As a PhD chemist by training and also as someone who attended Peking University as a chemistry major around the same time as Tianle Li went there, I could not help but feel a chill by reading about this case.

I do not know anyone involved in this murder case, but a friend of mine was once good friend in middle school with Tianle Li back in Beijing. She was devastated by the news, and wondered if she could have been helpful had she stayed in touch with Tianle Li. Apparently, within a year after the birth of their son, Tianle Li and her husband started fighting which led to the police showing up several times in a year. Whether or not she will be proven guilty is still not clear, but the animosity between her and her now-dead husband was well-known.

From what I heard from my friend, Tianle Li was an only daughter whose father died when she was very little. She was a hardworking girl in highschool and college, who received a bachelor's degree in two majors at Peking University. Maybe she was a bit lonely in that she transferred to Peking University after her freshman year elsewhere, when most people already established friendships. My friend said that she was certainly an introverted girl, who did not have many friends and kept to herself most of the time.

I feel so incredibly sorry for her two-year old son, who is now in foster care. I feel sorry for her dead husband as well. But perhaps more than most people who read about this story, I feel sorry for her, even if she was the murderer. Not that there is any excuse for killing anyone, but there just might be some explanation for what could push an otherwise mild-mannered, sweet-tempered and hardworking person to do something heinous and unthinkable.

Human beings are naturally gregarious creatures. We experience a whole gamut of emotions, which make us human. Starting from a young age, we want to feel that we belong. Nothing feels worse to an impressionable kid than to feel that she is forever an outsider, trying to fit in, to be accepted, to be respected, admired and loved.

Maybe in Tianle Li's case, her whole life has been a thinly veiled sad saga enroute to this final tragic ending. Back in her days in China, few kids if any had only one parent, so she felt like an outsider, with which I can empathize. When she transferred to Peking University, in her class she was the only person who did not go through a whole year of military training and she was once again an outsider. She wanted to major in chemistry but her assigned major was library science, so she was taking classes with students who did not socialize with her. She lived in a dorm room with girls who did not welcome her. When she came to the US, she was once again an outsider. Perhaps her whole life has imprinted in her mind that somehow people were against her all the time. Then came the final blow - the husband who for whatever reason also rejected this marriage to her. Despite her academic success, perhaps she felt that she had always been an outsider trying to fit in, and eventually she gave up in dramatic desperation.

Very few things feel worse than being an outsider always. It must be excruciatingly painful to be so incredibly lonely.