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.