We made a deal, you and I, and rest assured, Detective, I will tell you everything I know. But no matter how many times you rephrase the question, my answer is never going to change. I have no idea where she is. Her WhatsApp and email accounts have gone dark. Her phone number’s been disconnected. And like I’ve already said, you can forget about social media—she guarded her privacy like the Sphinx. I imagine she’s landed in one of those countries that doesn’t extradite to the US—Morocco, or Indonesia, or Qatar. Isn’t that what you’d do in her place?
Winnie didn’t have many friends, here or back home in China. She had plenty of business associates and a few former lovers, and, of course, she had Mak Yiu Fai—Boss Mak—who had belonged to all three of those categories at various points in time. As you no doubt know, Boss Mak owns one of the most highly regarded handbag manufacturing operations in all of Guangdong. His factories’ quality workmanship has earned him contracts with all the big designer brands that go to extreme lengths to hide the fact they manufacture in China: your Pradas and Guccis and Louis Vuittons. (An increasingly meaningless deception, by the way—there are as many sweatshops in Italy as there are state-of-the-art facilities in China.)
Winnie told me that she’d met Boss Mak in Shenzhen, completely by chance, when she was vacationing with her cousin and a few of her cousin’s friends. This was three years ago, right after the 2016 election, which pushed her to contemplate moving back to China. By then she’d married, earned her green card, and divorced, and said that if she was going to live under an autocrat, it might as well be her own.
After a long day of shopping, Winnie and the group splurged on a meal at a restaurant in one of the big international hotels. That’s when Boss Mak walked in alone. Tall and trim, with a full head of silver hair and a well-groomed mustache, clad in a slim-cut linen suit, he struck Winnie as the height of sophistication. He was sixty-seven—the same age as my mother, two years older than hers.
The hostess seated Boss Mak at the neighboring table, and he didn’t balk, even though it was clear that the women were in a rowdy, celebratory mood. They’d spread out their purchases among the used plates: Louis Vuitton Neverfulls and Goyard PMs and Chanel flap bags—all fake, of course. That had been the whole purpose of the getaway. Winnie was the only one who hadn’t bought anything. In fact, she told me she’d come along simply to escape her parents’ claustrophobic apartment.
She happened to be seated nearest to Boss Mak, close enough to observe his skillful wielding of knife and fork as he cut his pork chop, the genteel way he chewed with his mouth closed between sips of Japanese whiskey.
When Boss Mak noticed her watching him, he asked what she’d scored at the shops that day.
Nothing, she said. She held up the tote she always carried, made from sturdy black nylon, purchased on sale at Macy’s, and added, A bag is a bag is a bag.
That’s the thing about Winnie: she didn’t buy into the hype. She couldn’t care less about fashion and status. When she got into the counterfeits game, she carried those absurdly expensive purses and donned those flashy jewels the way a flight attendant dutifully pulls on flesh-toned stockings. It was simply part of the uniform, and she’d do anything to maximize profits. This singular focus and pragmatism is what made her so successful.
That evening at the restaurant, Boss Mak picked up the tab for Winnie’s whole table. One of the women announced they were going to a nearby KTV lounge and invited him along. He declined, and Winnie did, too, and the cousin and her friends, all of them married or at least engaged, traded knowing smiles and set off without them. Boss Mak and Winnie retired to the hotel bar and then to his suite.
Three days later, when she was back in Xiamen, a courier arrived at her parents’ apartment with a stiff orange shopping bag, large enough to hide a puppy. Inside was a one-to-one replica Birkin 25 in cherry-blossom pink, along with a handwritten card:
A bag is a bag is a bag, but only a Birkin is a Birkin.
(Don’t worry, this is a replica. I’m not that senseless.)
The note was clever, but the gift, in its excessive femininity and sheer frivolousness, made Winnie recoil. Later, she would tell me that trip to Shenzhen had given her a window into her future back home, and she’d abhorred what she’d seen. When I pushed her to elaborate, she explained that she had nothing in common with her cousin and those women. Oh, they were perfectly pleasant, but all they really cared about was making enough money to buy designer clothes and eventually send their kids to top universities. And the men were even worse.
But you and Boss Mak had a real connection, I said.
Precisely! she replied. That’s all I had to look forward to—becoming the mistress of an old married man. Plus, I could tell right away he was a drunk.
(Over the course of their night together, he’d methodically emptied the minibar.)
Setting aside the fake Birkin, Winnie made up her mind right then and there to remain in the US. She bought a one-way ticket to LAX, determined to build a new life far away from Charlottesville, Virginia, and her ex-husband Bertrand Lewis. (Yes, the very same man who’d been married to her late aunt, but that’s a whole other story, Detective. I’ll get to that.)
Winnie knew she’d have to be careful with money in an expensive city like L.A. She moved into a studio apartment in a weathered building filled with college kids and bought a used Kia Sportage that rattled like a tin can on the freeway. Armed with a falsified résumé claiming she’d graduated from Stanford in 2004, along with the rest of us, she assumed finding an entry-level job in marketing or communications or sales would be straightforward. She sent her résumé to twenty-two companies and didn’t land a single interview, so she widened her net, applying for Chinese-language teaching positions. She even attempted to get hired as a nanny after a Shanghainese girl pushing a double stroller revealed how much she was paid. When nothing panned out, Winnie started to panic.
One day, several months after her arrival, she happened to drive by a pawnshop, incongruously located a few blocks from Rodeo Drive. beverly loan company read the sign above the dark-green awning, as intimidatingly elegant as that of any designer boutique. Her gaze fell on Boss Mak’s rose-sakura replica Birkin in the passenger seat. Even without the original box and dust bag, she left with a check that would easily cover that month’s rent, and, more importantly, the seeds of a new venture. Back at her apartment, she called Boss Mak for advice. He loved the idea so much he offered to cover her start-up costs. That’s how he became the first investor in her business.
The very next day, an exclusive Chinese immersion school in Culver City called to offer her a job as a kindergarten teacher. Figuring she should hedge her bets, Winnie accepted at once.
In the beginning, hers was a one-woman operation. She opened a slew of credit cards under slightly different names to spread out her purchases and subsequent returns: Winnie Fang Lewis, Winnie Wenyi Fang, Winnie WY Lewis. And then she went shopping. At Neiman’s, Saks, Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s, she started with a classic workhorse bag, the Longchamp Le Pliage. You know the one I’m talking about? I’m certain you’d recognize it. It’s that rather flimsy nylon tote that folds up into a little square. Comes in just about every color you can think of, from violet to avocado to peach, and scarily trivial to copy. In fact, if you stand outside on the street for about an hour, I bet a half dozen of them, real and fake, would pass you by. Those early days, Winnie moved through so many of those bags she set up monthly shipments from China, certain she’d put them all to use.
From Longchamp she moved on to the long-standing Louis Vuitton monogram canvas styles, your Speedys and Noés and Almas. And then on to Prada, Gucci, Chanel, Dior. Within a year she’d amassed a small army of shoppers who surged across the country, snapping up luxury handbags as though they were socks.
You already know where she found these young Asian women—online, in those forums for bag fanatics, and then through personal referrals, always careful to hide her identity.
The work was more grueling than it sounds. She flew back and forth between Guangzhou and Los Angeles, personally vetting every unit, haggling for every cent. After she’d conquered the classic styles, she branched into the more exclusive, and therefore more lucrative, seasonal, and even limited-edition purses, which required a whole different tier of supplier.
And then, a year and a half into her life as an international businesswoman, with monthly revenue clearing a hundred grand, her application for American citizenship was accepted, grounding her in the US until the requisite interviews and appointments were completed. Again, she leaned on Boss Mak. With his extensive network of contacts, he could easily seek out quality counterfeits manufacturers and cement new relationships, and he likely would have done it for free if Winnie hadn’t insisted on paying him a small commission.
This arrangement worked well until the day he showed up to a meeting slurring his speech and thoroughly confused about where he was. He was taken to the hospital, where his wife would tell the doctor that in hindsight, the whites of her husband’s eyes had been yellowish for weeks.
For ten days, Winnie could not get a hold of Boss Mak. Her shipment was delayed, causing her to miss return deadlines for several high-priced handbags, slashing her profits. All would be forgiven when she learned Boss Mak had been hospitalized for liver failure, but that didn’t make her troubles disappear. Without a trustworthy local contact, she had to do everything remote, studying high-resolution photographs from all angles, taking phone calls late into the night. But no matter how tirelessly she worked, the quality of the bags that arrived deteriorated, even from formerly dependable suppliers, and the prices continued to inch up. It was clear that if she didn’t find an emissary to send to Guangzhou on her behalf, she would have to shut the whole thing down, perhaps even return to teaching those bilingual brats. (Her words, not mine.)
By the time she showed up at my neighborhood coffee shop, her desperation had reached Burj Khalifa heights. So imagine her amazement and delight upon discovering that I might in fact be the solution to both her problems.
Several days after the Neiman’s fiasco, Winnie called me to apologize. She said she hadn’t been thinking straight. Dealing with Guangzhou remotely was such a colossal headache that the stress had gotten to her. She was about to pay top dollar for a shipment practically sight unseen—she cut herself off then. You’ve made your views clear, she said, so that’s the last thing I’ll say about work. But, Ava, I want you to know that I’ve loved spending time with you and Henri. I hope we can remain friends.
I was still mad, and I told her so. She said she understood and wouldn’t bother me again.
How I wish this were the end of the story. How I wish I’d ended that conversation and let her vanish from my life. Maybe if I hadn’t been so anxious about my marriage, my child, my flailing career—or if she’d showed up at any other time—I would have acted differently.
Imagine me standing there, phone in hand, taut with anger. Imagine my husband walking into the room. Imagine me throwing my arms around him, pressing my forehead to his.
You’ll never guess what happened, I’d say. Can you believe she thought I’d be okay with what she did for work?
But these were not normal times. Oli didn’t come home that night or the next. His text messages, when he sent them, were brief, and when I tried to video call him with Henri, right before bedtime, he was still at the hospital and answered only to say, Can’t talk now. Love you, Son. Don’t cry, I’m sorry, I have to go.
As my child worked his way into the fourth tantrum of the day, I fell back onto his bed, so broken I swear I managed to doze off amid his earsplitting screams. For an instant his cries faded into a roar of white noise, and then he hiccupped loudly. My eyes popped open. I cuddled and rocked him, and reasoned and pleaded with him, until he cried himself to the point of exhaustion and dropped into a deep slumber.
I dragged my aching body to my room, hot with fury. I hated Oli for having places to go, issues to contemplate, tasks to complete. He’d entrapped me in this house with a demon child. At that moment, the only thing that mattered to me was getting back at my husband. I wanted to make him feel as abandoned and powerless as I felt, to show him what it was like to be the one left behind.
I opened my laptop and searched flights to Boston to see my dad, Chicago to see Gabe. Without my mom around to corral us, seven months had passed since we’d all been together the week of her funeral.
But when I imagined confiding in my dad about my marriage, I saw the panic ripple across his face. If you’re dissatisfied, tell him, he’d say, eyes shifting behind his glasses. Maybe he just doesn’t know. And if I pushed him—Oh, I’m pretty sure Oli knows—he’d continue to retreat, waving platitudes like a white flag: I’m sure you can work things out. When there’s a will, there’s a way. Everything will turn out fine.
And if you can believe it, telling my brother would have been worse. Laid-back, always in a good mood, Gabe would shrug as though I were the one overreacting and say, All you have to do is decide whether you want to move to Palo Alto, right? No need to make the problem any bigger than it is. I’d reply, Oh, is that it? Thank you for enlightening me, o wise one. To which he’d hold up his hands and tell me to simmer down, which would only rile me up more, and the cycle would repeat until I finally huffed away, enraged.
You wonder what my mother would have said? To be honest, I don’t think I’d have dared tell her. Or rather, I would have downplayed our issues, pretended to support my husband’s plan. Why? Because while she was never outwardly mean to Oli—she was too kind, too polite for that—she’d always held him at arm’s length, wary of his charisma. She’s the only person I know who didn’t instantly succumb to my husband’s charms. Perhaps that’s why I got along with her best. The boundaries between us were finite and clear, and we couldn’t argue about the things I didn’t tell her.
At the top of my screen a banner flashed, advertising discounted tickets to Hong Kong. Aunt Lydia, Mom’s older sister, had flown across the Atlantic for the funeral and planted herself by my side, her firm, cool hand on my back, steering me this way and that. Whenever I was cornered by one of Mom’s colleagues or neighbors, my aunt fielded their questions, accepted their condolences on my behalf, and sometimes simply led me away. Before she left, she’d made me promise to bring Henri to Hong Kong to see my grandmother while she was still lucid, and I’d nodded dumbly, unable to conceive of how it was that I still had my grandmother while my baby no longer had his.
In my darkened bedroom, lit only by the glow of my laptop, I convinced myself this was the perfect time to take Henri to visit my extended family. After all, in a couple of months he’d start preschool and I’d find my way back to work in some capacity. The thirteen-hour flight would be challenging, of course, and I seriously considered asking Maria to come along. Only the thought of having to explain to my aunt and uncle that I couldn’t manage my son on my own swayed me otherwise.
Before I could talk myself out of it, I entered my credit card information and hit purchase. I can honestly say it didn’t cross my mind—that Guangzhou’s right over the border from Hong Kong. You need to remember, back then I only possessed the sketchiest outline of what it was Winnie actually did.