Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-8

Chapters 9-16

Chapters 17-24

Chapters 25-32

Chapter 33-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Book Club Questions

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

The Tea Shop

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.

Cooking and Food

In addition to preparing tea, Vera cooks for her young friends. This food also symbolizes her maternal desire to take care of people, a need long unmet by her distant son. Upon gathering her suspects for the first time, she uses food to heal their perceived ailments (i.e., constipation, anemia, “chills,” and the need for comfort food) and later disarm them with questions regarding Marshall’s murder; she does the same at a later picnic, using the opportunity to nourish her friends with food and nurture Sana’s and Riki’s minds in particular. Vera also uses cooking as a teaching tool for Emma: By making Emma her assistant in the kitchen, she helps the shy girl regain confidence lost to her father’s hostility. She coaxes the girl out of her shell and equips her stronger, true self with skills appropriate for her age, as she does for her adult friends. Speaking of truth, Alex inadvertently discovers it through food: On the night of Marshall’s murder, he met his son at a restaurant for dinner and finally realized the extent of his deception. When he is arrested for the murder, Vera visits the jail with food to “bribe” the guards—remaining a friend to the end.

The Murder

Marshall’s murder is the inciting event of the novel, his face and body recording his crimes against others. Thus, the corpse and its discovery symbolize moral failings and, later, redemption and rebirth. Several characters, including Vera, confront issues of morality. Vera complicates the police investigation of Marshall’s death by taking evidence from the crime scene (the flash drive) and vandalizing her shop to “legitimize” the murder. Riki’s creation of a bot app for Marshall’s scalping scheme makes him an accessory to fraud (which he answers with a punch to Marshall’s face, leaving a bruise) and Sana’s loss of confidence (which she answers with scratches on Marshall’s face). Marshall’s decisions to take credit for Oliver’s good deeds, cheat Riki, and trick Sana led to his death at his father’s hands, both men exhibiting lack of morality regardless of their motives (marked by Marshall’s swollen body, caused by Alex). The discovery of Marshall’s corpse in Vera’s shop symbolizes the state of her life, which she has to resolve before she can be reborn in a new life with her new family. Even when Marshall is removed from the shop, the murder remains in the form of her drawn outline around his corpse. Like Marshall’s face and body—marked by anger and allergy—the outline symbolizes the infectious nature of immorality. It isn’t until Vera admits to interfering with the crime scene and solves the murder that her shop (life) is reborn.