That June, six months after Winnie had first reached out to me, Boss Mak arrived in Palo Alto for a few days of consultations and tests with Oli and the rest of the Stanford transplant team. Winnie went along to translate as well as to provide moral support.
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.
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.