A mother who cried for an hour in court after beating her daughter to death for not being able to recite "Bright Moonlight Before My Bed"
By correspondent Pan Zijie, Xu Yu and Zhu Junwei stationed in Jiaxing
This is a tragedy.
On the evening of March 29 this year, Xiao Nu (a pseudonym), a woman who had moved from her hometown in Guizhou to Jiashan County in Jiaxing City to work, accidentally killed her three-year-old daughter because she couldn't recite Li Bai's "Thoughts on a Tranquil Night."
At 3 PM the day before yesterday, Xiao Nu stood on the defendant's bench at the Jiashan County People's Court, charged with involuntary manslaughter.
The trial lasted for an hour, and Xiao Nu cried for the entire duration. Finally, when Xiao Nu said in her self-statement, "I loved my daughter very much, but now even if I die, I can't bring her back to life. In the next life, I'm willing to be her horse or ox," many of the observers were moved to tears.
Angry at her lack of progress, the mother severely beat her daughter
The atmosphere at the trial scene was extremely oppressive. When Xiao Nu entered the courtroom in handcuffs, I saw that she was crying softly while looking down the whole time.
During the trial, through Xiao Nu's self-statement and the testimonies of her two sons, I finally came to understand why this young mother was so "heartless" towards her three-year-old daughter.
Among Xiao Nu's three children, the daughter was the youngest. Because of the deeply ingrained idea of favoring boys over girls in her mind, and also due to their family's lack of wealth, her two sons have always been raised by Xiao Nu herself, while her daughter was raised by her grandmother.
Therefore, Xiao Nu's relationship with her daughter was relatively distant.
In February this year, noticing that her daughter had grown slightly older, Xiao Nu and her husband brought her to Jiashan. However, not long after, her husband found a job in Jiangsu and left the four of them behind.
It was clear how difficult it must have been for Xiao Nu to take care of three children alone. Nevertheless, she still wanted all three of her children to excel in their studies and began to strictly "educate" them. One of the "lessons" she gave her three-year-old daughter was to memorize Tang poetry.
However, since Xiao Nu's daughter had been living in her hometown in Guizhou and didn't speak Mandarin, coupled with her playful nature, she couldn't pronounce the lines of Tang poetry correctly. She would often mispronounce "疑是地上霜" as "‘你’是地上霜." Later, after Xiao Nu taught her repeatedly, the little girl simply refused to read it altogether.
At this point, driven by high expectations for her daughter, Xiao Nu resorted to using a stick to discipline her. Every time her daughter acted up, she would hit her with a wooden stick. If her daughter tried to dodge, Xiao Nu would hang her up and beat her.
At 2 PM on March 29, Xiao Nu once again taught her daughter to recite poetry, but her daughter disobeyed again. Consequently, Xiao Nu started slapping her daughter's head repeatedly. Eventually, the daughter died due to massive intracranial hemorrhage.
The mother may face a sentence of around four years
Throughout the trial, Xiao Nu kept crying, not just while recounting the process of killing her daughter, but even when questioned by the judge, Xiao Nu continued to speak while crying.
When she mentioned hitting her daughter's head forcefully, Xiao Nu burst into tears, causing the trial to be interrupted momentarily.
Since this case has been a local focus, many citizens attended the trial yesterday. After hearing Xiao Nu's self-statement, these Jiashan residents were deeply moved, and some shed tears.
However, the law is merciless. During the trial, the prosecutor from the Jiashan Procuratorate stated that Xiao Nu had beaten her daughter multiple times for various reasons, resulting in her death less than a month after arriving in Jiashan.
From the photos of her daughter's death, bruises were visible all over her body, indicating that her actions constituted involuntary manslaughter, and she should be punished under the law.
Finally, the prosecutor recommended to the court that Xiao Nu be sentenced to around four years in prison.
Due to the complexity of the case, the court did not announce the verdict on the spot.
After the trial ended, I interviewed the judge handling this case. The judge also expressed deep regret.
The judge said that the occurrence of this tragedy was due not only to Xiao Nu's impulsive, ignorant, and backward personality but also to the pressure of life and the frustration in her heart, which were one of the roots of her crime. "Therefore, if our society could pay more attention to the living conditions of migrant workers and offer them more care and help, perhaps Xiao Nu's urgent desire for her daughter to succeed wouldn't have become so distorted."