Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers

In interviews regarding Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, Jesse Sutanto recounts female relatives’ ability to prescribe tea and food, as Vera does for her young friends. Likewise, Vera’s tea shop symbolizes her maternal desire to take care of people. Like her role as an amateur sleuth, she thinks herself a “tea doctor,” meeting others’ health-related and emotional needs with confidence. In the beginning of the novel, the shop is dark, with grimy windows, crumbling posters, old furniture, and stale ingredients. The state of the shop mirrors Vera’s sense of loneliness and uselessness, her only customer being her friend Alex. Ironically, this lull gives way to the discovery of Marshall in the shop—who died from one of her gifted teas. With her husband deceased and son distant, she has struggled to rediscover her passion for the shop. However, over the course of the novel, her new family combines their talents to rebuild the shop, making it brighter, cleaner, and beautiful, just as their friendship makes her life brighter. Through a highly ironic twist, Vera’s prescription of bird’s nest tea is exactly what Alex needed—a wake-up call regarding Marshall’s deception and his own failure as a parent.