Mei Ping Sun was preparing for a trip last summer when roughly a dozen armed FBI agents showed up at the door of her Flushing apartment, she told jurors in federal court in Brooklyn Tuesday. She said she still recalls the flecks of white shaving cream on her ex-husband’s face as they stood outside in the hall with agents.

Over a year later, Mei Ping Sun stands at the center of her daughter’s criminal trial — a case with international political reverberations. Linda Sun, a former aide to Govs. Kathy Hochul and Andrew Cuomo, is accused of influencing state politics as an unregistered Chinese agent in exchange for bribes.

Prosecutors say Linda Sun and her husband, Chris Hu, used a bank account in Mei Ping Sun’s name as part of a money laundering network to conceal gifts and payoffs from Chinese government officials. Hu moved at least $1.6 million through the account between April 2020 and June 2022, according to the indictment and evidence presented at trial.

Defense attorneys argue Hu helped his mother-in-law open the account so she could buy a new condo.

The case's outcome may hinge partly on how the jury views Mei Ping Sun: either as a cog in the illicit scheme prosecutors allege her daughter and son-in-law of running, or as an elderly immigrant woman who needed her younger and more culturally fluent family's help navigating the American banking system.

Mei Ping Sun was born in Nanjing, China, and moved to the United States in 1990, according to her testimony in court Tuesday. She worked as a seamstress for New Jersey-based Charles Komar & Sons apparel company, making samples and repairing friends' clothes on the side.

Her husband, Guo Xian Sun, owned a dry cleaning store in Queens. She said she and her husband divorced during the COVID-19 pandemic, but continued living together in Flushing.

Around April 2020, Mei Ping Sun opened a joint account at Signature Bank with Hu, Linda Sun’s husband. Through a court translator, Sun said she didn’t do “anything” after the account was opened, and the money in it didn’t “belong” to her.

She said she does not read or speak English and relied on her daughter and Hu to help her with banking.

Hu now faces charges of bank fraud related to the account.

In court Tuesday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Alexander Solomon asked Mei Ping Sun whether she’d written an email requesting a $1.6 million transfer from the joint account.

“I do not know English,” she replied. “How would I write an email?”

Mei Ping Sun told defense attorneys during cross-examination that they opened the account to help her buy a condo, though she never ended up doing so.

But prosecutors pushed back, questioning whether this explanation only arose after the FBI raid at the family’s Flushing apartment.

Solomon asked Mei Ping Sun if her daughter told her not to say anything to the agents in a phone call. “No,” she replied.

When Solomon asked why she told the FBI she wasn’t aware of the money in the account, Mei Ping Sun said “I was very scared and I could not remember what I said.”

Prosecutors subpoenaed Mei Ping Sun to compel her appearance Tuesday, and highlighted it in opening arguments last week, saying Hu “even lied to a bank to open up accounts in his mother-in-law's name so he could launder the money.”

Defense attorney Nicole Boeckmann also featured Mei Ping Sun in her opening statement, questioning why the government had moved to compel her testimony at all.

“So she can tell you that an account was opened? That she gave her identification to her son-in-law to open an account in her name? That she doesn't speak very much English?” Boeckmann said. “It's absurd.”