Christina Li digs into the complexities of con artists
The YA author discusses female con artists, complicated friendship, and why "The Hardest Ones to Fool" is ultimately a story about reinvention
Christina Li's "The Hardest Ones to Fool" follows Amelia Wu, a teenager juggling three different identities.
Author photo by Therese Santiago
Words by Sara Conway
Christina Li’s young adult thriller, The Hardest Ones to Fool, opens with, “My mom thinks I’m tutoring right now.”
Amelia Wu is a liar—and a very good one at that. She’s also Eleanor (Ellie) Tsai, Amy Fang, and Mia Leung. Each persona has been crafted to make a specific (rich) boy fall in love with her. There’s Max, the charming indie filmmaker; Dalton, the sharp debate team captain; and Aditya, the sweet yet focused tennis star.
But then Amelia’s—yes, actually Amelia’s—best friend Ingrid dies. While it’s waved off by police as a drunken accident, Amelia is not so sure. The two of them did concoct the elaborate boyfriend scam to siphon money from the boys’ pockets together, and maybe someone has found out.
“What motivates (scammers and con artists) to tell these lies and what motivates them to con people? What are the consequences?” Li explains to JoySauce about the inspiration for her new book.
Li and I chatted about young Asian women morphing into someone else for another’s ambitions, writing complex grief, and building the complicated friendships in The Hardest Ones to Fool.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Sara Conway: What sparked the idea that would become The Hardest Ones to Fool?
Christina Li: I was always really fascinated by stories of female scammers or con artists like Elizabeth Holmes (and) Anna Delvey from Inventing Anna. There is a magnitude of deception, lying, tricking people, and ruining their lives. But I’m also fascinated by what motivates them to tell these lies.
SC: Were there any genre/age group-specific challenges you encountered while writing your YA thriller debut?
CL: This is my first book in a proper thriller category, so I definitely had to be very intentional about where I was breadcrumbing reveals. There is so much careful plotting that needs to be done. I also love thrillers where there's a twist but also you can see things that were leading up to that twist if you read that book over again.
SC: What was the most fun part to write?
CL: That section that's written in second person was the very first thing that I wrote in this book. I did not write linearly for this.
I was on a writing retreat with my friends. I just remember something taking over me and writing this out in second person. I have never written in second person ever and (it’s) never happened since. That was my favorite, where I felt so unhinged writing it. It truly felt like a moment where I was being experimental and I was being fun as a writer.
Christina Li
Therese Santiago
SC: Why was a thriller focused on friendship, faking who you are, and the wealth gap something you wanted to address in your YA thriller?
CL: I'm really fascinated by stories of friendship dynamics and especially (by) people who are really close friends but (their) dynamic is a little bit strange at times. I think the deeper layer (in the book) is this girl who gets to be the people she isn't able to be in real life. There are a lot of things that she envies about the people around her, whether it is the boys that she’s conning or sometimes there is an element of jealousy in the friendship (with Ingrid), too. It feels like her best friends had everything and got everything so easily and in a way that Amelia wasn’t able to. I find a lot of richness in those conflicted relationships.
SC: How did education—and how it often opens up more doors, in many immigrant families’ eyes—end up playing such a key role?
CL: They’re seniors in (high school), and they know where they're going to for college. That's the next phase of your life. There is that opportunity for Amelia to go to college and to eventually study what she wants to become. But with her mom, as an immigrant, she just had to start over. Her degree (from China) did not matter when she came over to the U.S.
The character of Amelia’s mom is really important to me because she had her own dreams, too. She wanted things and can't have them because of the choices she made in her life but also because of the limitations that were put on her.
SC: There are a lot of relatable grief moments in this story. What did digging into these emotions look like for you as the writer?
CL: Grief is always something that’s really interesting to me. I think it's a question I’ve explored in each of my novels. With this one, it's a complex grief. It’s a grief in which Amelia feels like she needs to avenge her friend or she feels like she’s kind of responsible.
(In) the case of Amelia and Ingrid, they grew up together and the fact that (Ingrid is) no longer here is incomprehensible to (Amelia).
SC: What was the breadcrumbing process like? How did you determine when to drop certain information or when to withhold it?
CL: That was one of the things where I went to my editors and was like, help me with this. [Laughs] I didn’t know if I was giving away too much or if I was giving away too little. Especially (with) that first layer of twists: why was (Amelia) scamming these boys? What was her motive there? That's something that I withheld at the beginning, really trusting that the reader would understand.
I also wanted her to be a sympathetic character, which was kind of hard. [Laughs] I was writing a psychopath, basically. So (it was) making sure she is someone you can root for, at the very least, and making her a compelling character (paired with) making sure the twists were in the proper places.
SC: Amelia and Jackie are so interesting as a liar and an investigative journalist, respectively. What was your experience playing with this tension within their relationship? Was Jackie always a character that was a foil to Amelia?
CL: Yes, absolutely. I wanted it to be a rivals-to-friends-to-lovers dynamic. One of my (competitive titles) for this book was John Tucker Must Die, the movie where the girl finds out the guy is dating three other girls with different identities. Then she pairs up with the girlfriends to avenge each other. I think one of them was a journalist, and I was really interested in that.
I wasn’t a part of the journalism circles in high school or college, but I was friends with a lot of them. So I knew that it was a very intense lifestyle, and the people who pursued journalism are very detail oriented. You’re always on top of the scoop; you’re always too smart for your own good, really.
On the surface level, it makes sense for Amelia to feel like (Jackie) clearly is the smartest person in the room. I should clearly pair up with her to try and get to the bottom of this.
SC: Why was it important to you to have queer (specifically lesbian) Asian character starring in your YA thriller debut?
CL: I guess it’s just simply my brand. You don't often see someone who is a compelling but morally gray character having a romance. It's really important to me, because I want to see the full spectrum of queer stories in YA and that does involve unhinged relationships like (what) Amelia and Jackie have.
Having it be two queer Asian girls who don't find each other until the last year of high school is so emblematic of (how) you grow up in an environment that’s fairly homogenous. You don't really see a lot of yourself around and then you find someone and that's the person that you start to like and you’re attracted to.
My first YA, True Love and Other Impossible Odds, is a book about a queer Asian girl who comes out. I specifically wanted (The Hardest Ones to Fool) to be a book where coming out was never addressed. They know who they are, and the people who know them most in their lives know who they are—or they don’t, but it doesn’t really matter. I wanted it to feel like the romance was the central storyline at the end and not who they are. I think they had figured out who they were by that point.
SC: Can you talk more about the idea of “reinvention” and morphing into someone you’re not, especially as Asian women like us are often expected to make themselves smaller for others’ ambition and desires?
CL: That is the deeper layer to this. It's a scam story where (Amelia) is making up all these different personas, but at its core, it’s really about reinvention. As a high school senior, you're trying to figure out who you want to be and you have certain limitations in your life that have kept you from what you want to be. Amelia just takes a very unconventional way of going about it.
But it is about (how) in her life and in her mom’s, too, they've both been people who have had to limit or compromise themselves because of the decisions other people have made or the assumptions other people have put on them.
I rebuke that assumption, but I also try to do it through them just living their lives. I do think (The Hardest Ones to Fool) is about the person that other people think you are and the person that you want to be—and what would you do to close that gap.
SC: What other books or media do you see The Hardest Ones to Fool in conversation with?
CL: I very much see it in conversation with John Tucker Must Die. We Were Liars because I wanted to write a twist that knocked me over as much as the We Were Liars twist did. I think it interacts with the old-school con artist movies like The Talented Mr. Ripley (and) Catch Me If You Can. Inventing Anna is a newer one. Also every single Netflix documentary or The Cut article that I’ve been so obsessed with.
Published on August 10, 2026
Words by Sara Conway
Sara Conway is a Chinese American writer based in New York and Taiwan. A lover of a good story and a good song, Sara is the creator behind the bookstagram Lyrical Reads and the digital editor at EnVi Media. She also has published her writing in places like Timid Magazine, GRAMMY.com, and Clash Music. Although books are her number one love, you can always find her learning Mandarin, listening to K-pop, heading to another concert, or petting all the cats she sees.