Loneliness Served With a Side of Murder
On power, influence, tea, and Chinese grandmothers
Hi, it’s Hoang 👋 Welcome to my little corner of the internet, where the only constant is curiosity. I’m known to change my mind a lot — it’s a terrible curse of being a millennial that I'm still working on — but in the meantime, this is the place where I write about whatever’s on my mind. Usually, it involves books and food. Usually in the same order.
This week: an incredible journey involving online personas, influencers, secret lives and a very harrowing (but real) truth about human existence. All with murder at the center. Enjoy!
The same day I finished Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping on a Dead Man, the sequel to Jesse Q. Sutanto’s Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, I went on the author’s website to let her know how much I loved the book. Surprisingly, she did not have a contact form, just the usual PR contacts. “Apologies for the lack of a contact form, but when I had one I was inundated by spam and I have no idea how to filter them, lol,” she wrote.
Sutanto’s sense of humor is as evident in real life as it is on the page. Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, a book she conceived randomly in the middle of the night, quickly took off in popularity. It has won more prizes than you can count, including the Edgar Award for Best Original Paperback, Audie Award for Mystery, and the Libby Award for Best Mystery. Oh, and it was a USA Today bestseller. These awards were certainly well-deserved.
“The whole time I read the book, I thought ‘Wow, she is so talented. How can I write like her?” I wrote in a DM to the author on Instagram. (Yes, she prefers that you contact her on Instagram). It’s 100% true. The whole time I read the books, I was amazed by how a random idea turned into such an incredible book. Sutanto really knows how to tug at your emotions, especially the uncomfortable ones.
In the first book, Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, we meet Vera Wong, who owns Vera Wang’s World Famous Tea Shop located in the heart of San Francisco’s Chinatown. (There’s a reason why it’s named like that; you’ll have to read it to find out). Vera thrives on strict daily routines and some witty banter with her much-hated bakery owner neighbor, Winifred. These routines prevent her from facing some very uncomfortable truths, which is that Vera is very, very lonely. And aside from one customer, an old man named Alex, she has no other customers. Not to mention, her son refuses to talk to her.
Everything changes when one morning, Vera wakes up and finds a dead man in her tea shop. His name is Marshall Chen, and he was a very bad man. An abusive husband, brother, and a neglectful father. So Vera, convinced that this was a murder, takes it upon herself to investigate. The problem is, she’s annoying the police and so she has to tread carefully.
This story is told from multiple POVs—all tied together by Vera. As the story goes on, we see Vera changing into more of a social butterfly as she befriends several young people: Marshall’s wife Julia and his daughter Emma, a lonesome computer programmer named Riki and a painter unable to paint named Sana. Every single one of them, including Vera, has secrets to hide.
Like a lot of good mysteries, I was shocked when the truth was revealed. It wasn’t who I thought it was, but it made perfect sense.
Watch this author interview to learn more!
In the sequel, Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping on a Dead Man, Vera returns with another murder case. This time, a young man was found dead in the cold, dark depths of a nearby river. The police thinks it’s a suicide, but not Vera. Once again, she is determined to prove that the man’s death is a murder, for her ‘Chinese mother tendencies’ told her that there was a reason she found a young woman named Millie right outside the police station that day, trying to report her missing friend, who happens to be the same young man found dead in the river.
If you skip to the acknowledgements section, you’ll learn how Sutanto was inspired to write the book after learning about the horrors of human trafficking and scams perpetrated by the victims of such human trafficking. It’s horrible, to say the least, so I’ll stop there.
What makes this Vera novel such an engrossing one is the fact that Vera has more of a sense of humor than I thought. There were scenes in the book that made me laugh out loud, such as how Vera storms into the principal’s office at a middle school to defend one of the characters, a thirteen-year-old named Robin, who was suspended for not wearing a bra. There are also other scenes of similar raunchy-but-funny nature and you can’t help but laugh at Vera’s audacity. Her tenacity at finding the truth is so, so inspiring.
One of the most common phrases in the book was uttered by Vera herself, and that is: “fake it till you make it,” and Vera seems to do just that. She has no idea how to solve murders; she only has a hunch. “I am a Chinese mother. I know everything” is her mantra. She chases her hunches, hunting down people and doing things that are outside of her comfort zone, such as shooting videos to post online on social media in order to find out who killed the young man.
After reading both Vera books, I realized that in its true essence, they are stories about chosen families. These days, with loneliness deemed as an epidemic, it’s more important than ever to find family wherever you can.
If you’re in the mood for some humor mixed with murder, then this is the book for you. It’s so easy to get lost in Vera Wong’s world. She is the type of grandmother I wished I had — caring and firm but adaptable with a sharp mind and strong intuition. By the end of the book, I bet you’ll wish for the same as well.
P.S. Last time, I wrote about how algorithms no longer serve me and I thought nobody would really read it. Well, if you haven’t, let me help you out.
Afterwards, I went on Instagram and unfollowed pretty much everyone I didn’t know or hadn’t met in real life. All that’s left are people who are former colleagues, friends, and family members, with the exception of a very few selected content creators, and I only chose to keep following those whose content still gives me inspiration and does not post very much. Two very important criteria indeed. I encourage you to do the same. You might end up feeling relieved as I did. Now all that’s left is for Instagram to show me people that I actually want to see.
Thanks for the review of what sounds like a good escapist read, something I could use right now! Keep writing about whatever’s on your mind, Hoang!