Three days after her father’s arrest, Mandy Mak breaks her silence and gives a televised press conference. Winnie notes that she’s traded her high-fashion wardrobe for a muted dark blouse, a thin strand of pearls. When she reads her prepared statement, trembling hands belie her steady voice.
“My father has done nothing wrong. Not only have the Americans locked up an innocent man, but they have also deprived him of lifesaving medical care. In the days to come, I look forward to proving that he’s been framed by his former business associates, Ava Wong and”—here, she lowers the sheet of paper and seems to stare right through the screen into Winnie’s living room—“Fang Wenyi, who is still at large. People of China, I appeal to you for your help. If you have any information on Fang Wenyi and her whereabouts, please, I beg you, come forward and help this daughter clear her father’s name. Justice must be done.” Mandy dabs a handkerchief to her eyes and is escorted off the podium.
Winnie has to admit it’s not a bad strategy—training the spotlight on The Americans. Mandy knows the press will seize on Winnie’s change of citizenship to portray her as a defector, a turncoat, a traitor to China. Mandy’s already shut down the black factory, given up a few rogue employees who were ostensibly in cahoots with The Americans.
Now Winnie finds herself face-to-face with her own image, plastered across the TV screen. The headshot is from her old employee ID card at a German multinational company, her first job out of college. Some enterprising intern must have tracked it down. The photo was snapped before even her first double-eyelid procedure; she reminds herself that she looks nothing like that now.
Turning off the TV, she moves on to the microblogging platforms, where netizens are engaged in fierce debate.
Every time I see a picture of Boss Mak in that wheelchair I feel sad. He’s in his 70s. He deserves peace!
What are the international brands so angry about? If they want Western-style IP protections, then they should pay for Western labor!
That Ava Wong and Fang Wenyi are really ruthless, trading in an old grandpa for their own freedom. I stand with Mandy Mak!
Seeing her and Ava’s names right there, side by side, makes Winnie reel. She’s underestimated Mandy Mak’s social media prowess and reach. She longs to lower the blinds and barricade the door, to stay hidden in this apartment until Ava’s sentencing next week. At least then she’ll know whether she has a future in America, away from this hostile, unforgiving place.
But she’s not here in Beijing on an extended vacation. There’s work to be done—diamond labs to visit, scientists to consult, sales teams to convince. The few times she has to leave the house, she takes every precaution, using the pseudonym Zhou Feifei, wrapping a silk scarf around her head and donning her enormous sunglasses, even at twilight. (She stops going out at night.)
Returning home from another unsuccessful meeting, during which the diamond manufacturer’s sales manager informed her they simply couldn’t work with a business as small as hers, she spots a beat-up Nissan parked across the street from her apartment complex. A bald, hulking man sits in the driver’s seat. Thirty minutes later, when she slips out to the grocery store, car and driver remain in the same spot. He’s smoking a cigarette out the open window, and when she walks past, the cigarette butt dives at her foot, nearly singeing her toes.
She jumps back. “Watch it.”
“Excuse me,” he says. “I didn’t see you there.”
Later she tries to explain to Ava why his words seemed so menacing.
“Nobody but me has any idea where you are,” Ava says. “And you have to get off Weibo. Those people only know what state propaganda tells them, which is to say nothing at all.”
It’s the night before Ava’s sentencing hearing. She and Winnie have been on the phone for hours, replaying the entire confession from start to finish, trying to discern where they stand. As far as they can tell, Ava nailed the trickiest part of the confession—convincing Georgia Murphy that she couldn’t have offloaded those two hundred bags, not while she was at Aimee Cho’s reunion party, surrounded by classmates at all times, even when driving back and forth from the city.
Winnie says, “So no one noticed you went missing for almost an hour?”
“I told her I was locked in the bathroom arguing with you!” says Ava. “There were so many people around, Joanne and Carla weren’t really keeping track of me. Besides, the most convincing detail is the cell phone location data that shows I never left Woodside.”
“Or, rather, that your phone never left Woodside,” says Winnie. “How many problems do you think you’ve solved by simply leaving your cell phone behind?” She can see Ava laugh with her whole body.
It was a smart move on her friend’s part—planting her cell phone in the medicine cabinet of the guest bathroom while she took a Lyft to South San Francisco, did the deal, and then came right back. Her alibi was impenetrable; the detective lapped it all up.
Another point in their favor: Boss Mak has confessed to the charges. To clear his daughter’s name, he’s owned up to running a black factory in his own legitimate factory’s backyard, brazenly copying the blueprints entrusted to him by the world’s most exclusive brands. As promised, the detective has garnered Ava a good plea bargain from the prosecutor.
And yet, and yet, in this business there are no guarantees. The threat of an overzealous judge holding some unknown bias or grudge looms over them all.
Soon Ava starts to yawn, and Winnie says, “You should get some rest,” to which her friend replies, “If we win, the adrenaline will keep me going for another week. If we lose, I’ll have plenty of time to sleep in jail.”
Winnie’s skull seems to contract as though caught in a vise. “Don’t even joke about that.”
“Relax,” Ava says. “It’s all we have right now.”
Throughout the morning Winnie paces the length of her living room, too antsy to consume anything, not even her customary double espresso. Every few minutes she checks the time. Ava should be in court, maybe rising to her feet at this very moment to receive her sentence.
In search of distractions, Winnie turns on the television, landing on a game show involving an eligible young bachelor, charged to choose a date from a group of attractive women (hidden behind a curtain) by interviewing only their mothers. The moms are touchingly cutthroat as they disparage the other daughters to spotlight their own, but the host’s braying voice grates on Winnie, and she turns the TV off.
She paces the living room until her legs grow sore. What is taking Ava so long to call? The hearing is supposed to be straightforward, in and out.
Her phone emits a piercing ring. She flies at it. “Well?”
Ava’s voice pours into her ear. She talks so fast and so loud that Winnie has to tell her to slow down and enunciate.
“Back up,” Winnie says. “I want all the details.”
Ava starts over. Picture her in a new dress purchased for the occasion: somber, black, elbow-length sleeves, a skirt that ends midcalf. She even changed her hair for the first time in twenty years.
“It’s so short it barely grazes my earlobes. No greater symbol of remorse than a woman shorn, right?”
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.
For the first time in weeks, she checks Mandy’s social media accounts. The last post is a photo snapped at the previous month’s press conference captioned, Thank you all for the support. I won’t rest until my dad is free. Mandy Mak has gone dark.
Has she left social media to focus on saving her father, or has she been detained at a resort hotel in some remote locale with no access to the outside world? Either way, all signs point to a colossal public reckoning, to the kind of scapegoating that will destroy the Maks and their associates forever—Winnie included, if her whereabouts are discovered by the government or the Maks’ henchmen, or both.
She sends a text message to her graphic design contact, telling him there’s been a change of plans, she needs that passport ASAP. She ties her scarf around her head, puts on her coat and sunglasses, and leaves the apartment. Outside, at the end of the block, she bursts through the door of a small hair salon she’s passed many times before. It’s a dingy, spartan place, the sole employee a middle-aged woman with a halo of permed curls, lounging in one of the vinyl chairs.
“Miss, are you sure?” she asks after hearing Winnie’s instructions.
“Very,” Winnie says. “I’ve been planning this for months.”
“All right then,” the stylist says doubtfully, fingering a thick lock of Winnie’s nipple-length mane. “It’s just hair, right? It’ll grow back.”
Winnie leaves the salon half an hour later, newly unrecognizable with her fresh cut. Despite the woman’s own questionable sense of style, she’s given Winnie exactly what she asked for—a tousled pixie with wispy baby bangs.
At the end of the week, Winnie boards a 787 Dreamliner bound for Newark. Walking down the aisle, she scans the business-class cabin, half expecting to see the hulking man. Once she’s stowed away her hand luggage and taken her seat, she declines the flight attendant’s offer of a pre-takeoff beverage, keeping her eyes trained on the passenger door.
“Don’t be nervous. Flying is safer than driving,” the man seated across the aisle says.
He’s an American, probably in Beijing on business, probably something tech related, judging from his flawless white Nikes and expensive sweats.
“Who said I was afraid of flying?” Winnie says.
He’s the loud, friendly type who loves the sound of his own voice. He lets out a guffaw, but falls silent when she doesn’t even crack a smile. She turns to the window to discourage him from continuing the conversation and is heartened when he starts in with the passenger on his other side.
Every time the flight attendants confer with one another, or with a pilot, or with a gate agent, Winnie shrinks into her seat, even as Ava’s voice replays in her head. Nobody but me has any idea where you are. Nobody but me. Nobody. Nobody. Nobody. Me.
“Will you be joining us for dinner this evening?” the flight attendant asks.
Although Winnie can’t imagine ingesting a single bite right now, she nods her head yes.
“And did you have a chance to peruse the menu?”
Winnie shakes her head no. Her tongue is a slab of raw meat; it seems to fill her entire mouth. Making an effort to enunciate, she says, “Whatever the vegetarian option is—I’ll have that.”
Eventually, the passengers fasten their seat belts, and the doors close, and the cabin crew takes their seats. An eternity later, the plane ambles down the runway, gaining speed before, at last, lifting into the sky.
Winnie exhales. It’s mid-December and the city below is gray and bleak. Within the month the residents of Beijing will wake to a rare blanketing of snow, and children will swarm these streets to play. Within the month Mandy Mak will be photographed returning to her Dongguan town house, and Kaiser Shih, the alleged mastermind behind it all, will be taken into police custody.
At this moment, however, Winnie thinks only of her new garden, napping beneath the frost, awaiting the first murmurs of spring. Before turning off her phone, she types a short message to Ava: I’m coming home.