She told me she’d been shocked to see him at the airport, his face gaunt, his blazer hanging off his shrunken frame. He’d stopped going to the office and, as far as Winnie could tell, he spent his days watching convoluted K-dramas with plots too difficult to recount. He didn’t even have the strength to complain about his daughter, who’d taken over the factories—a pretty, pampered only child, who’d attended the best schools in the world and yet, according to him, somehow lacked all common sense.
Once Oli received Boss Mak’s test results, he told him the transplant committee would discuss his case and give him an answer in a few weeks, making sure to emphasize how difficult it was to take on foreigners as patients. To this, Boss Mak nodded sagely and said (with Winnie translating), I appreciate your taking the time to consider my situation, nonetheless. I’d like to make a donation of half a million dollars to the hospital to support your very good work.
Now, as you probably know, Detective, ironclad protocols and endless wait lists govern liver transplants in the US, so much so that when Winnie first told me about Boss Mak, I said he’d be better off staying in China, which, I knew from Oli, had a plethora of available livers that were rumored to have come from executed political prisoners. But Winnie explained that like all wealthy people in China, Boss Mak would never voluntarily subject himself to the country’s subpar medical system. He demanded the very best.
When I repeated what I’d absorbed from Oli about the extreme organ shortages all across the country and the near ban on transplants for foreigners following the election, the smile that played on Winnie’s lips was mocking. Everyone knows there are ways to skirt the rules, she said. Didn’t I recall what had happened at the UCLA Medical Center, where four Yakuza bosses had jetted in from Tokyo to claim pristine new livers, the transplants performed by the chair of the department himself? Sure, eventually the L.A. Times did a big exposé, questioning how these foreign gangsters had jumped the line, but what really came of it? The chair remained the chair; the Yakuza kept their livers.
Was I surprised that Winnie would go to such lengths to help Boss Mak? I can’t say that I was, Detective. After all, he was the closest thing she had to family. Her parents barely spoke to her; her aunt in Virginia was dead.
Do I believe the rupture with her parents pushed her into a life of crime? Yes, I suppose so. Don’t the parents always bear at least some of the blame? From what I could gather, her estrangement from her parents happened in two distinct phases, over a period of fifteen years. The first was when she’d had to drop out of Stanford. It was too dangerous to tell her parents the truth—Chinese students were hiring expensive lawyers to fight the threat of prison sentences—but how else could she explain such a sudden departure? She studied the problem from every angle and concluded she had no choice except to say she’d flunked out.
Waiting to board the plane at SFO, she called them from a pay phone at the gate. Later she’d tell me how torturous it was to say the words, especially when she pictured her schoolmates whiling away the hours tossing plastic balls into cups of beer and racking up B’s. It’s true, at our illustrious institution, grade inflation was a joke. I don’t think it would have been possible to flunk out unless you really put your mind to it. Luckily, unlike universities in China, Stanford didn’t send grade reports to parents, so hers never got to see the neat row of A’s she’d earned—yes, even in Writing and Rhetoric. (All the writing tutors at the library had known her by name.)
Following seventeen-plus hours of flying, the long wait for the bus, the hot and dusty ride home, when she finally wrestled her suitcases up the stairs to the apartment, her father wouldn’t come out of his room. Her mother pointed to the table where a few bowls sat beneath a mesh cover. For a few minutes she watched Winnie shovel food into her mouth and then said, Don’t tell anyone why you came back. Just say you couldn’t pay the fees. She rose and went to join her husband in the bedroom.
Winnie was so hungry she ate all the tofu in its congealed brown sauce, the soggy mustard greens, the cold hardened rice. Through the wall she heard the rise and fall of the television, her mother’s titter, her father’s grunt. Three months she’d been gone, and they couldn’t even look at her.
She applied off cycle to Xiamen University. The school made an exception and accepted her, thanks to her stellar high school grades, as well as the prestigious government scholarship that had enabled her to go abroad in the first place. Probably they also felt sorry for her.
You’re the girl who had to leave Stanford, professors and students alike would say. What was it like over there?
She told me her answer varied depending on her mood. It was paradise, she said to her plump, eager lab mate. The campus was so beautiful, it was like biking through a Hollywood movie.
Honestly it wasn’t so great, she said to the gangly, nervous economics TA. If I could do it over, I’d have applied to Oxbridge. More intellectually rigorous. Cheaper, too.
As soon as there was available space, she moved into the dorms. She told me the other students were always amazed to discover she was local, so rarely did she go home.
The second and final phase of Winnie’s rupture with her parents happened years later, after she’d divorced Bertrand Lewis. Her parents had been quite understandably enraged when she’d married him for a green card, so she found it strange that they seemed equally upset when she left him.
After drinks that day with Carla and Joanne, I questioned Winnie about Bertrand. She told me to put aside my preconceived notions about the kind of man who’d marry his late wife’s niece. She claimed that Bert had been nothing but loyal and loving to her aunt. In fact, she believed it was his devastation at losing her that drove him to accept Winnie’s proposal.
The afternoon they drove back from their City Hall ceremony, he shyly popped open a bottle of cheap champagne. It made her cringe. She knew she should put an end to the nonsense then and there, but he looked so hopeful in his good sports coat that she sat down and polished off the whole bottle with him. She was in no mood to cook, so, for dinner, they scarfed down Ruffles potato chips dipped in ranch dressing. It was late when they rose from the table. Her eyelids were heavy, and all she wanted was to lay her cheek on a warm chest. Foolishly, she let him lead her into the main bedroom. She never went in there, always leaving his clean laundry in a neat pile on the recliner in front of the television. He hadn’t bothered to put away the clothes, and the sight of them heaped onto one side of the king-size bed irked her. Why had she wasted time folding every last pair of his briefs? He swept the laundry onto the carpet and grinned, which would have irritated her further, except he looked so delighted with himself that she caught a glimpse of the boy he must have been. And so, she slid out of her jeans and darted beneath the covers, where at least it was cozy and snug.
In the middle of the night, she returned to the pullout couch in the study. She was quick to clarify that once she’d told him how she felt, he never pressured her to sleep with him again. He gave her a place to live for the next three years while she waited for her green card, auditing business school classes at UVA, taking whatever under-the-table work she could find. After a babysitting client requested that she speak only Mandarin to her infant daughter, Winnie started offering her services as a Chinese tutor. This won’t surprise you, Detective: within a year, she’d transformed Bert’s finished basement into an after-school Chinese program for the city’s elite. Business executives, doctors, lawyers, academics, all sent their kids, ages two to eighteen.
But no matter how busy Winnie was with her work, she held up her side of the deal with Bert. She cleaned the toilets, did the shopping, cooked tasty and nutritious meals. The day her green card arrived, Bert took her to an Italian restaurant to celebrate.