‘I thought about it, but I never intended to actually do it.’
‘Why not?’
‘For the sake of purity.’
‘Purity?’
‘I killed her for the sake of killing her. I didn’t want to sully that with anything impure.’
My lawyer finally cut in. ‘This proves that despite the depraved nature of his crime, he did not act completely without principle.’
He then read out a statement that had been signed by over four hundred neighbours, classmates and acquaintances. They swore upon their good names that I cherished the old and weak – that I was fundamentally honest. They collectively appealed to the court to show leniency.
My lawyer began to read each name in turn, but the judge broke him off. He was trembling, as if to say that these few lowly sheets of paper were unworthy of the mighty will of the people displayed thereon. Ma and the lawyer must have used a lot of sweets and red envelopes of money to obtain those signatures. My lawyer probably started it off with a couple of dozen signatures of his own before soliciting friends and relatives.
Then came a statement from my aunt. She had reflected on her own behaviour, her inflated sense of superiority, her rough and arbitrary manner. She had failed to recognise that I was still only a young boy, she said, and in doing so had subconsciously contributed to my destruction. Her statement went on to outline twenty or so instances of discriminatory and unjust treatment, including purposefully leaving fifty cents out on the table to see if I would steal it, only giving me leftovers to eat, etc.
After my lawyer finished reading, he came over to me, his brow wrinkled, his eyes shining fiercely like torches, as if he didn’t know me.
‘I want you to answer my following questions honestly.’
‘OK.’
‘Do you swear?’
‘I swear.’
‘Was it not the case that you really wanted to kill your aunt?’
‘You could say that.’
‘Yes or no?’
‘Yes,’ I said, raising my voice.
‘Objection. These are leading questions,’ the prosecutor began.
The judge told my lawyer to be careful. But he was already in the throes of an intensely passionate performance. He thrust his hands his pockets and began pacing.
Suddenly: ‘Why did you kill her?’
‘Bigotry.’
‘What do you mean, bigotry?’
‘I was an outsider. They looked down on me. It was an all-encompassing, overwhelming bigotry.’
‘And how did it make you feel?’
‘That I was already a criminal. Every day, they stripped me naked.’
‘Did it make you want to cry?’
I looked up at him in bafflement. He kept signalling with his eyes for me to speak.
‘Could you explain this feeling of pain to us more clearly?’ he continued.
I didn’t know how to answer, so I lowered my gaze and said nothing. Maybe I shook my head.
‘Look,’ he said, pointing at me like a piece of evidence, ‘he struggles to put the humiliation into words.
‘So why didn’t you kill your aunt?’ he continued just as suddenly.
She wasn’t worth it, I thought.
‘Because you couldn’t kill someone as strong as her,’ my lawyer began answering for me. ‘So you chose to kill a classmate, to frighten your aunt. To tell her you weren’t such a pushover. It was your childish way of getting back at her.’
The prosecutor thumped the table and decried this as mere sophistry. The judge replied with his gavel. But my lawyer was in mid-performance. The hands went back in the pockets and he strode over to the public gallery. He looked at each of them in turn, with purpose. When they were all suitably stunned, he lifted his pen and began pointing at them individually.
‘You are all guilty.’ He paused before continuing. ‘You give him pressure to do well in his exams. You look down on him because of where he’s from.You roll your eyes, you ignore him, you treat him like an outsider, call him a peasant. To you, he is a slave. You make him part of an underclass. You don’t give two hoots about him. In fact, you think he is an imposition on your safe little world. You think he deserves this life. And you feel no guilt about it, am I right? Now you can’t forgive him. But let me ask you something. What gave you the right to sit there all stately, like emperors? Does it make you feel good?’
Almost shaking with fright at his own words, he sat back down.
But the prosecutor would not be outdone. He stood up.
‘I agree with you. So perhaps we should be sentencing the aunt to death instead? Or how about all of us? Execute all of us. And set him free. Does that sound right?’
‘Yes,’ my lawyer replied, his voice husky. ‘I agree completely.’
‘Well, I don’t. Because I don’t think the situation is as you describe it. Not in the slightest. If the defendant merely wanted to scare his aunt, he could have killed her cat or dog or something. There was no need to involve anyone else. If he felt he needed to kill a classmate to prove his point, he didn’t need to stab her thirty-seven times. And why put her in the washing machine? Why do you think he did that?’
He paused to give everyone time to think this through. He then pointed his long, bony finger at me, like a gun. I cocked my head. The trembling finger took its aim at me again. I couldn’t escape.
‘Hatred!’ he cried. ‘Bitter hatred. He committed such a cruel act out of hate for Kong Jie. That is the only explanation.’
He asked me if I had asked her out. No, I said. He asked again if she had rejected me. I said no. He was happy with my answers, as if this somehow made me more of a criminal than if I had said yes. He then began his own speech, drawing on the theories of Freud, Jung, inferiority complexes, princesses and plain, ugly desire. He had memorised sayings and quotations, while trying to convey the gushing fluidity of a waterfall. When he hit a verbal blockage, he glanced down at his notes. But each blockage brought about a new cascade of bluster. He finished by collapsing back into his chair, as if coming down with some grave malady.
Upon the prosecutor’s insistence, my aunt was finally brought into the court. She took a few steps and stopped. It was as if she was the one on trial. Eventually, she tottered up into the witness stand. She didn’t look up. Her brow glistened with sweat.
The prosecutor asked her to repeat what she had seen at the scene of the crime and her voice quivered through the description. The courtroom frightened her, I could tell, but everyone mistook it for the horror of the memory.
‘The defence counsel has argued that it was your unjust treatment of the defendant that caused him to commit the crime. What is your response?’
My aunt’s huge frame convulsed (like a skyscraper about to fall). ‘That is incorrect.’
With that one sentence she made her betrayal, abandoning all that Ma and the lawyer had persuaded her to say.
‘So that wasn’t the reason for his crime?’
‘It has nothing to do with me.’
‘Did you mistreat your nephew?’
‘I wouldn’t call it mistreatment.’
‘Then what would you call it?’
‘They should be more generous. His mother asked me to look after him, said he was my responsibility. I even moved out of my own home so as not to disrupt his studies. He put on at least five kilos while he was living with me. Ask him.’
My lawyer stood up to speak but I raised my hand. The judge motioned for me to speak.
‘Aunt, where’s your jade Buddha?’
‘What jade Buddha?’
‘The one taped to the bottom of your safe.’
‘I don’t own a jade Buddha.’
‘Yes, you do. How many gifts have you and uncle received over the years?’
The woman looked dumbstruck and then flopped to the ground, as if in a bad soap opera. A few people rushed to help her up. No one felt more sorry for themselves in that moment than she did. But now she wouldn’t dare talk about compensation. Ma paid her back a long ago. Whatever. She got what she deserved.