Over a shared slice of tiramisu, his eyes moistened. I’ve enjoyed your company, he said. It’s going to be lonely without you.
She moved into an apartment of her own after that, though she continued renting Bert’s basement for her tutoring business. And who knows how long she would have stayed in Charlottesville if not for the election? On top of her disappointment with the president-elect, she said she’d grown bored of teaching basic Chinese-language classes and had begun to resent what she described as the menacingly friendly ways of the South. As such, she planned a long vacation to China to visit her parents, whom she hadn’t seen in eight years, and to explore the idea of moving home for good.
Stepping into the entryway of her childhood apartment, though, with its flickering ceiling light and peeling paint, Winnie said she knew she’d made a terrible mistake. Five consecutive weeks she spent in that cramped space, sharing a single bathroom with her mother and father, plus the occasional silent meal. By the time she met Boss Mak, on that trip to Guangzhou with her cousin and her cousin’s friends, she’d sunk into a deep malaise. She dreaded opening her eyes each morning; she’d forgotten what it was like to actually be interested in what someone had to say.
Lying in Boss Mak’s arms in that hotel room, she clung to his words, asking questions late into the night, about growth opportunities for his factories and the demands of working with international brands.
He said, You’re too smart to be stuck in Xiamen. Go to Beijing or Shanghai. I can make some introductions.
The truth was Winnie couldn’t stand those cities: smog so thick you went weeks without seeing the sun, crowds so dense you lost entire days waiting in queues.
Boss Mak laughed, his chest gently jostling her head, and said, I see you’re American now. In that case, why waste your time in China?
This, she later told me, was exactly what she’d needed to hear. Within weeks, she’d purchased her plane ticket to Los Angeles and told her parents she’d made up her mind to remain in America.
At last her father raised his eyes from his rice bowl and looked her full in the face. It’s for the best, he said, and then retired to his room, leaving Winnie and her mother to clear the dirty dishes.
She boarded that plane knowing she would never again have a home to return to in China. She was free. Free to make a life for herself, to do as she saw fit. And, Detective, I cannot overstate how rare that was for someone like Winnie, the only child of Chinese parents. So, you asked if the estrangement had anything to do with her eventual career path? Yes, it’s quite clear it did.
Still, no one following the events leading up to Winnie’s departure would have guessed that within months, she’d be back in her homeland buying up counterfeit handbags. That the Sheraton Dongguan and the Shangri-La Shenzhen, and the Marriott Guangzhou would become, in a sense, her second homes.
She told me that the last time she saw Boss Mak healthy was right after she submitted her application for American citizenship. They were in the clubhouse of his country club in Dongguan, sipping cool drinks after a round of golf. By then they were business partners and appeared freely together in public. His disease had not yet progressed, and he looked tanned and strong, so she held her tongue when he downed his beer and ordered another. She had other things on her mind. If her citizenship application was accepted, she’d be stuck in the US until her new passport came through, and she was pondering a quick visit to Xiamen to see her parents. Did Boss Mak think she should go?
Ever measured, he replied, It depends on your motivations.
What Winnie wanted more than anything was to rub her success in her parents’ faces. Maybe the soft chairs and the starched tablecloths and the cold, tart lemonade in that over-air-conditioned clubhouse had something to do with this, but all at once she was furious that they’d believed her when she’d told them she’d flunked out of Stanford. Didn’t they know their own daughter? Didn’t they know her capabilities? Why hadn’t they pushed to find out what was truly going on?
And then she tried to imagine how they would have responded if she’d told them what she’d done. Their reaction would have been the same—anger, disgust, and above all, shame. She couldn’t have trusted them to protect her if it had come down to that. Because after all the hoopla—the fancy awards ceremony, the write-up in the Xiamen Daily, the glorious send-off organized by her high school—she’d humiliated them by dropping out, and that was unforgivable.
That’s when she revealed to Boss Mak that as a high school senior she’d won a national scholarship and been accepted to Stanford. Until then, all he’d known was that she’d graduated top of her class at Xiamen University.
He set down his empty glass. Why didn’t you go?
I did, she said, for one quarter. Less than three months. She let slip a bitter laugh.
When she’d recounted the whole saga, he pulled out his handkerchief and dabbed his face, overcome. He said, I wish I’d known you back then. I think I could have convinced them to let you stay.
She didn’t point out that all this had happened years ago, in a different era, when there was zero sympathy for the students involved. Even the son of the Party secretary of Tianjin had been expelled from Harvard.
What he said next would stay with her.
You were a child who was desperate. And you were clearly as smart as everyone else there. That has to count for something.
In the end, she told me, she didn’t go home to Xiamen. Instead, she wired an obscene amount of money into her mother’s bank account. Her mother accepted the transfer but didn’t otherwise acknowledge the gift.
So, no, Detective, I can’t say that Winnie’s determination to help Boss Mak get his transplant and save his life surprised me, but then again, neither did her reversal.
11
While Boss Mak languished in bed in Dongguan, awaiting Oli and the committee’s decision, his daughter, the former senior VP of Mak International, settled into her new role as its acting president. Armed with a Wharton MBA, a wardrobe of smartly off-kilter Vivienne Westwood suits, and her father’s unwavering support, Mandy Mak introduced a steady stream of initiatives, from restructuring assembly lines into small teams of workers for maximum flexibility to issuing sharp new uniforms to boost morale. But her biggest innovation was implemented not in the Maks’ legitimate factories, but in our counterfeits business.
In Winnie’s original scheme, we were constantly on the defense, playing catch-up with the brands. Once a new style hit a boutique, we raced to track down a black factory in Guangzhou that could get a hold of that handbag, take it apart, source the necessary materials, and train their workers to perfectly re-create each component. Naturally, this took time. And because counterfeits factories were routinely raided and shut down, we constantly had to seek out new partners.
The solution that Mandy Mak laid out to Winnie over the phone was as simple as it was risky. The Maks’ legitimate factories already produced handbags for all the biggest brands, so instead of running two separate businesses, one legitimate and one less so, she proposed they counterfeit their own brands, right there on the premises. Why not build their own black factory nearby? Genuine samples and blueprints could pass through the back door into the hands of our associates, enabling replicas to be released at the same time as their real counterparts, a veritable coup.