When Judge Lincoln Kramer began his sentencing statement, Ava was so nervous she thought she might faint right there on the courtroom floor. It didn’t help that the judge possessed a particularly booming, gravelly voice, as though the Judeo-Christian God himself were sitting up there on the bench, ready to mete out judgment.
Ava’s hopes fell when the judge described how she and the despicable Winnie Fang—his exact words—had duped scores of innocent people out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Her hopes rose when the judge cited her willingness to give up the counterfeits kingpin, Mak Yiu Fai. They rose higher still when he pointed to her pristine background—her lack of a prior record, her stellar education and employment history, her stable family situation. And when he concluded that it was clear from the way she readily and voluntarily acknowledged her guilt that she had no apparent predisposition to behave criminally, but had been induced by Winnie Fang to participate in this particular crime under circumstances of coercion, her hopes soared to stratospheric heights.
“At this time, Ms. Wong,” he boomed, “after looking at the evidence and weighing the allegations, I believe I can see who you really are.”
Ava kept her eyes downcast, her expression solemn, her entire posture contrite.
“As such, I am giving you two years’ probation, plus restitutions of five hundred thousand dollars.”
At this, she lost control and lifted her gaze to meet the judge’s. Tears cascaded down her cheeks like so many loose gemstones. It was the absolute lightest sentence they could have wished for.
“I’m confident you won’t make the same mistakes again and commit another crime. Don’t prove me wrong, young lady.”
Through her tears, she said, “I won’t, sir, you have my word, sir.”
“Winnie?” Ava yells into the phone now. “Did I lose you?”
“I’m right here,” Winnie says. What else is there to add? Ava’s proven to be a straight-A student through and through.
To celebrate, Winnie allows herself a nonessential errand, walking a little farther to the high-end wineshop to buy a nice bottle of champagne. On her way back, she spots a familiar hulking figure, talking to the apartment complex’s security guard. She ducks into a bus stop and pretends to study the schedule. The big man is wearing a baseball cap. She can’t say for certain it’s the same guy. She waits in the bus stop until the man ambles off and then she approaches the guardhouse.
“Good afternoon, Miss Zhou,” the guard says. “Have you eaten yet?”
“Yes, and you?” she replies. “By the way, who was that man you were talking to earlier? He looks familiar, like someone I knew in my hometown.”
“Where are you from?” he asks.
“Xiamen.” She shifts the bag with the champagne from one hand to the other.
“Ah, I don’t think it’s him, then. His accent sounded Cantonese.”
The skin on her forearms prickles. “I see. And what did he want?”
“He runs a landscaping business and wanted to know if we were looking for gardeners. I told him to contact the owners. What do I know? I’m just the guard.”
“True,” she says, “true.”
In the following weeks, the Chinese press maintains that Boss Mak’s confession was coerced. This, Winnie knows, is a good sign; he has the government’s support. She anticipates that Mak International will be slapped with a sizable fine and subjected to a few years of heightened inspections to appease the international brands, nothing too serious. Sure, they’ll lose clients in the short term, but, with time, the brands will be back, unable to resist the cost savings.
Resolving to listen to Ava, Winnie stays off social media and focuses on their new venture. After several more fruitless meetings, including one in which a greasy sales manager implies that if he and Winnie were to become good friends, he’d make an exception and work with her, she finally signs a contract with a small but growing diamond manufacturer that she hopes could be their partner for years to come. Her decision was made the moment the head of sales, a woman around Winnie’s age, pressed a business card with her personal cell number into Winnie’s palm, saying, “Don’t hesitate to call or text if you need anything at all,” and she knew for certain that there was nothing untoward about it.
With that settled, she prepares to return to America.
Winnie wouldn’t have based her fictional jewelry business in Hopkinton, New Hampshire, if she hadn’t thought she’d like to live there. She makes an offer on a house, a classic Cape Cod–style brick cottage. It’s simple and symmetrical—basically what Henri would produce if told to draw a house—and a world away from the steel and glass of her old L.A. condo. The cottage stands on the quaint-sounding Spruce Lane. She imagines unhurried evening walks down her street, waving at neighbors, who’ll probably take her for one of those FIRE millennials—Financial Independence, Retire Early. Why not encourage that misconception? She can tell them she made a bunch of money in tech and then moved here to reconnect with the land: to grow her own vegetables, learn to butcher, write a blog on zero waste.
So what if she’s never been to New Hampshire and can see neither the town nor the house in person? The brisk, perky real estate agent has assured her that both are move-in ready, and not to worry about the flagpole by the door, she can have that taken down before Winnie arrives.
In truth, though Winnie would never admit it to the agent, she loves the American flag planted out front, along with the Shaker-style cabinetry and wood-plank walls. She’s even asked to keep the previous owners’ floor-length chintz drapes. The agent has said that the sellers are a pair of retired schoolteachers who taught for years at a ritzy boarding school in the neighboring town. Winnie imagines them to be white haired and ruddy cheeked, hale and outdoorsy in plaid work shirts and khakis. The couple has cultivated a lovely rustic garden, with lush azalea and dogwood trees, which Winnie will learn to maintain. In all her life, she’s never had a garden of her own, and three hundred and sixty thousand dollars in cash seems a more than fair price to pay for that privilege.
Through this time, she continues to leave the apartment complex only when necessary, always looking out for the beat-up Nissan and the hulking man, but she doesn’t see them again.
One morning, a headline on the New York Times website grabs her attention: lvmh to pull out of china. From the subsequent article she learns that recent revelations at Mak International have prompted LVMH to threaten to cease doing business with Chinese factories, and the other luxury conglomerates indicate they’ll follow suit.
All at once, the narrative in the Chinese media shifts. When Winnie turns on CCTV, she finds an exposé on Mandy Mak’s lavish lifestyle. The first-class trips to Paris and Milan, the collection of Manolo Blahniks, the new lipstick-red Tesla—it’s all right there for everyone to gawk at. The one photo that the news channels keep trotting out has been lifted straight from her Instagram account: Mandy in an orange bikini, lounging on the deck of a gleaming yacht, surrounded by the iconic white cliffside houses of Santorini.
The outrage on Weibo is instantaneous.
The Maks and the rest of those corrupt tycoons are a stain on our nation.
The international brands will never trust us again, all because of those greedy bloodsuckers.
The rich think they can get away with everything. Lock them up!
From Liberation Daily Winnie learns that the vice mayor of Guangzhou has been demoted to director of sanitation, that the former police chief is under investigation for graft.