But I’m beginning to see Fang is right: our Chineseness has something to do with the way the prosecutor is presenting this trial. So I’ve decided to include below some notes I haven’t used because they come out to longer than three lines. I’m sick of short sentences and paragraphs, sick of white space. I also hate bullet points, though they are useful.
There was something in the way Strycker set the scene for the crime during his opening statement last week. Specifically, he described Dagou “laboring,” plowing and shoveling the parking lot the day before the party, how he heaped more snow on top of the piles made by the city plows, which, “like a wall around the restaurant, made it difficult for anyone to see inside.” As if Dagou made a Great Wall, and the Christmas party was some ancient Chinese secret. As if Dagou had tried to prevent anyone from seeing a transgression about to happen in the restaurant.
Strycker also spent a lot of time in his statement describing the restaurant on the night of the party, as if it were a movie setting: red lanterns, walls “glowing with scarlet light,” and the Christmas tree itself an out-of-place American gesture. His list of party details created a vivid mix of cultural idiosyncrasies: Santa Claus, weird dishes, sea creatures, toasts in Mandarin. I grew up attending the Chaos’ Christmas celebration every year. I didn’t recognize the party described by Strycker.
Strycker repeatedly referred to our community as an “enclave.” This echoes the language in which the print and online media have referred to us as an “immigrant enclave,” an “insular group” that is “culturally self-isolating.”
As early as his opening statement, Strycker deliberately distorted the story to make the courtroom (and, more importantly, the jury) find it harder to relate to Dagou.
I just realized I didn’t write down the fact that there is not a single Asian person on the jury. Why didn’t I write it down? Am I so surrounded by white people, in my Haven public life, that I don’t notice? I’m sure they notice me, notice I am not white.
It was a smart tactic of Jerry’s to use her own cross-racial identification bias against Yvonne Winters. But it makes me depressed.
Posted April 27, 11:14 p.m.
One more thing: I remember where I’ve met the chirpy juror in the burgundy boots. She is a middle school librarian, and Nesbit Ng and I were mean to her in seventh grade.
She’s this prim, heavily built woman with bewildered, light blue eyes. She wears black skirts and draping sweaters. We made fun of her, called her “The Lump”; and once, in the middle of study period, I persuaded Nesbit to program all of the computers to burst out into the Chipmunk Christmas song. She was mad.
Posted April 28, 8 a.m.
No one has any idea what O-Lan is going to say when she testifies today, because nobody really knows her. This is not exactly our fault; my mom says she “makes it her business not to be known.” She visits Ma Wa’s store, but Ma Wa says she never converses. Only Mr. Fan has spoken to her for any length of time, because he’s made it his responsibility to welcome every Mandarin-speaking newcomer to Haven. And even Mr. Fan doesn’t know much about her. As far as we can tell, O-Lan has no family and no friends. She seems to need no one.
Posted April 28, 12:30 p.m.
Told Fang and Alice I had to get my own lunch.
This morning, while waiting for the trial to start, I had a fight with Fang about what he calls my lack of focus. (He read the description I posted about Strycker and his water bottle.) He said, “What kind of reporter would spend an entire paragraph in the middle of trial coverage writing a description of the prosecuting attorney drinking from a water bottle?”
Maybe Fang’s right. But I might as well give up on trying to write according to the format. To be honest, Strycker is beginning to give me the willies. He’s like a ghost. His movements are so light, it’s like he doesn’t have arms inside his perfect suit jacket. He’s, what do they call it—immaterial. And to think he’s portrayed us as oddities. Is he human.
Also, the Lump loves him. She gazes at him in fascination, with her eyes riveted on his face every time he speaks. Is he casting a kind of racist spell on her? Or, is it somehow my fault? (Our fault: will our seventh-grade mischief, our pubescent cruelty, give her a bias against Asians? We, who judged the Lump, deserve it. But does Dagou deserve it? Will we be responsible for Dagou’s fate?)
I am starting to sense that in this trial, the boundaries that have kept separate the various compartments of my life (school, home, Asianness, privacy, and misbehavior) are breaking down, and these disparate parts are being revealed to the world.
Here is what happened in trial this morning:
A forensic locksmith testified that the freezer in the basement of the Fine Chao was, in Strycker’s words, “a death trap.”
He said, once you’ve entered and closed the door, the only way to leave is to use a key from the inside. There was an old sign (Exhibit No. 2) kept near the shelf with the key, reading, “KEY TO EXIT FREEZER ROOM. DO NOT REMOVE THIS KEY.”
A handyman who’s done work on the freezer identified and read the sign. The freezer wasn’t up to code—it was grandfathered in, or something.
O-Lan testified.
O-Lan wore her work clothes: black pants, a dark blue shirt, black socks, and dirty sneakers. She clearly doesn’t care. She didn’t make eye contact with anyone, stared at the floor ten feet in front of her.
The interpreter was a youngish guy with a shiny forehead who spoke musically but mechanically in Mandarin and English. My mom says it’s a Malaysian accent. She wondered if he’s new to Haven, but Mr. Fan, who knows everything, says he came out just for the day, from Chicago.
There was a kind of stutter in the beginning of the conversation. Even the interpreter had to get his bearings. I’ve never heard a Mandarin accent like O-Lan’s, thick as a dialect. I never noticed how much attitude she has. I also had the feeling she was frightened.
I was struck by how much of the restaurant work is on O-Lan’s shoulders. The Chaos work hard, but she’s their servant. She unloads vegetables and any supplies. She washes and cuts basically all of the vegetables. During and after the meal, she loads the dishwasher. She runs errands. She cleans the floors and counters, uses the vacuum cleaner, and she also handles garbage and recycling. The cooks are men (Dagou, his dad, and one other cook who was out of town over winter break).