A Yi - A Perfect Crime

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.

Next came our old neighbour Mr He. It must have been a while since he’d been let out into such a large space and he was clearly itching to say his piece. He spiced his descriptions liberally, filling them with invented misdemeanours on my part: ‘You could say, he’s done it all.’ His lips furled, unleashing scorn as if he was the government. But to me he was just a putrid, decaying old man.

‘You hit me,’ I said.

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Yes, you did.You dug your nails into my neck, cursed me, slapped me across the face. You humiliated me to the core.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘You hit me whenever you felt like it.’

This was fun. He didn’t know how to stop me. I could see him clench his fists.

‘Is your dog dead?’ I asked. This took him by surprise. ‘I fed him rat poison.’

The old man’s face went red and he began shouting.

‘Are you fucking human? You had to kill the dog too?’

My lawyer sighed. I was being childish, probably. The prosecutor smiled. Surely nothing proved the ruthless cruelty of a killer like this?

After that a police officer was called. He said that normally even the toughest thugs lost it in prison, cried, asked to see their families. I was the only one to remain calm and detached, as if none of it bothered me.

‘His only request was for a McDonald’s.’

‘It was a KFC,’ I said.

As soon as my lawyer suggested a plea for leniency, the public prosecutor scrambled to his feet and cried that such a crime could never be pardoned. As the scales tipped to the left, my lawyer decided to change tactics and add weight to the right, which he did by producing a certificate signed by a midwife stating that I had not yet turned eighteen. The prosecutor argued for an investigation, including an inspection of our household registration documents and my school records, as well as witness testimonies and a trace of my mother’s movements eighteen years ago. They weren’t impossible requests. He simultaneously reminded my lawyer that pressuring a witness into giving false testimony was an offence under the law.