Jesse Q. Sutanto •
Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers •

At 60, Vera Wong is proud of staying up-to-date. She posts on “the Tiktok and the Twitter,” subscribes to online newsfeeds, and nags her Gen Z son via text message (“you should slip and slide into her DM”). She’s resourceful, independent, and nearly fearless.

But her tea shop in San Francisco’s Chinatown has fallen on hard times. With only one customer left, Vera Wang’s World-Famous Teahouse (later Teahorse, further compounding the misnomer) is not just financially disastrous, but downright lonely.

So finding a murdered man on the floor one morning is more exciting than scary for Vera. Ever helpful, she brews brain-enhancing tea to serve the forensic team and draws an outline around the body with her Sharpie while waiting for them to arrive. “I save you some work,” she tells the police with satisfaction. What she fails to mention is that she has removed a crucial piece of evidence from the crime scene: a flash drive that was clutched in the victim’s hand.

Sutanto, half Chinese and half Indonesian, perfectly captures the staccato speech patterns of many older Asians (“Then I go downstair, and that is when I see dead body”) as well as Vera’s idiosyncratic reasoning. Having watched CSI for years, she feels entirely capable of conducting her own investigation, jotting down her observations and theories in a notebook marked VERA WONG’S MURDER CASE. “Nobody sniffs out wrongdoing quite like a suspicious Chinese mother with time on her hands.”

Why, you may wonder, is the teahouse called Vera Wang’s, when its proprietor is Vera Wong? Simple: Everybody, Chinese and white, has heard of the trendy fashion designer. So why not trade on her celebrity status to lend cachet to the business enterprise of another Vera?

Satisfying to the last drop.