Love works in mysterious ways

Fans of Star Trek are familiar with the Prime Directive: Never interfere with the development of any culture.

Of course, Star Trek is fiction. But something like the Prime Directive is playing out in our time. Remote tribes in places like the deep Amazon jungle and on North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean have never been contacted by outsiders. It’s estimated that the Sentinelese have maintained their primitive way of life for perhaps 55,000 years.

Their paternalistic guardians in the modern world say they should be left alone, or their culture could be lost.

Should primitive peoples — or anybody else — be barred from truth by those who claim to know better? Do humans have a right to get as much knowledge as possible, so they can choose for themselves what path to follow?

Such questions cascaded through my mind as I read about a Chinese family that told a long series of lies in an elaborate hoax — maintained Randy Wright for 13 years — to prevent their elderly grandmother from knowing the simple truth that her daughter was dying of cancer.

Cheng Jing’s mother was the only child of He Fuyu. They lived in different provinces and stayed in touch by phone. When Cheng’s mother died, she worried about telling the truth to He, her grandmother. “We could not bear to let her endure the pain,” she said.

And so she hired a woman to make phone calls, pretending to be He’s daughter. The fake daughter was given background material on the family to enhance credibility.

When the real daughter repeatedly failed to show up at family reunions (she was ill, family members would say), the elderly woman asked to be taken to see her. They told her no — that would be too hard on you. You’re too old to travel.

It got even more twisted from there. “It takes 100 lies to cover just one,” Cheng said.

The old woman was suspicious from the beginning, not recognizing the voice on the phone. But she went along with the charade anyway.

Not long ago, she died at the age of 100. On her deathbed, she didn’t mention the long-absent daughter, “which confirmed my guess that she’d learned the truth”, Chen, the faker, said.

Do such lies carry an underlying message of disrespect, an implication that a person has no right to make his or her own choices?

I asked numerous Chinese acquaintances about this. Most excused the family, saying the protectionism showed love.

But then I asked: “Would you want your family to lie to you about your own daughter’s death?”

The universal answer was no.