I Hope My God Can Forgive You
Even today,
I still remember that day.
Inside the courtroom,
the air felt so heavy
it was almost impossible to breathe.
Years of preparation.
Years of pressure.
Years of waiting.
And in the end,
everything was compressed
into those few short days.
But the thing I could never forget
was not the verdict.
It was the final sentence spoken by the opposing attorney.
He stood before the jury,
looked at everyone,
and said:
> “When Americans make mistakes, they admit them.
> But when Chinese people make mistakes, they only blame others.”
In that moment,
it felt as if the entire courtroom suddenly fell silent.
What he humiliated
was no longer just me.
It was
where I came from.
My culture.
My people.
And what made it even crueler
was that because he spoke last,
my attorney never even had the chance to respond.
He attacked me more than once.
Even though he knew
I had four young children.
And he also knew
that because my husband Ming was seriously ill,
I had to travel alone
from California to Dallas,
far away from home,
to appear in court.
Yet in front of the jury,
he deliberately said:
“Look.
Even Alice’s husband
did not come to support her.”
In that moment,
I could barely breathe.
Because only I knew:
It was not that Ming did not want to stand beside me.
It was that—
he was already too sick
to come with me.
I sat there,
feeling as though something heavy
was pressing against my chest.
It was not simply anger.
It was the pain
of knowing something was wrong
and being unable to stop it from happening.
In the end, the verdict came.
We lost.
Out of twelve jurors,
only two Black jurors stood on my side.
Later,
one of the white female jurors
walked toward me.
She bowed slightly
and quietly said:
> “I’m sorry.
> I should have stood with you.
> The pressure was too great.”
I will never forget the expression on her face
when she said those words.
Because I knew
she was suffering too.
And in that moment,
I suddenly understood something:
Sometimes people do not hurt others
because they are evil.
Sometimes it is simply because
they no longer have the strength
to keep resisting the system around them.
After leaving the courtroom,
I walked directly toward that attorney.
I looked at him
and said:
> “I hope my God can forgive you.”
I will never forget
how he stepped backward in fear.
Many years later,
I often asked myself:
Why did I say those words that day?
Because truthfully,
I am not a saint.
I was wounded too.
I was angry too.
I hated too.
I lost nearly half a million dollars.
My husband Ming’s health slowly deteriorated under the pressure.
And I myself spent countless nights
walking endlessly
just to keep myself from collapsing.
So yes—
I had every reason to hate.
But over time,
I slowly began to understand:
Hatred is also a kind of fire.
It keeps burning.
And burning.
In the end,
you think you are punishing someone else.
But often,
the first thing destroyed by that fire
is yourself.
And I had already lived through too many fires.
The fire in Dallas.
The fire of the courtroom.
The fire inside human nature.
I did not want to let another fire
continue living inside my body.
So many years later,
when I went through the pig-butchering scam,
when once again my trust was used against me,
when I was deceived
and nearly lost everything,
I suddenly realized:
What truly traps a person
is not always the loss of money.
Sometimes it is—
whether you are willing
to let those wounds
define the rest of your life.
Forgiveness does not mean
I believe those things were acceptable.
Nor does it mean
the pain disappeared.
It means—
I no longer wished
to hand the rest of my life
to the people who once hurt me.
And many years later,
I finally began to understand:
True forgiveness
is not about excusing others.
It is about—
slowly bringing yourself
back out
from the fire.
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