Counterfeit

“I’ll admit that at first, I was dazzled by her wealth and beauty, her extreme confidence. I suppose a part of me was still stuck in freshman year, clinging to friends like life rafts. But there was a deeper reason, too. The truth is, no one else, besides my mother, could calm Henri, and I was desperate.”

The narrative Ava weaves for the detective suggests that Winnie preyed on her at a vulnerable moment. Ava’s reference to her difficulties as a parent and her grief for her mother also introduce a theme of family and motherhood that weaves throughout the novel; motherhood adds to the burdensome expectations Ava faces. She sets herself up as a foil and parallel to Winnie, suggesting to the detective that Ava feels inferior to her friend.

“Since my mom’s passing […] I’d grown increasingly certain I could never return to tax law and the tyranny of billable hours, a thought that so frightened me, I’d mentioned it to no one. You see, in my family there were only a few acceptable paths—law, medicine, engineering. Law was the one I’d disliked least. From the very beginning, I’d known my lot in life: to be good enough at my job, and to tolerate it until retirement.”

This pressure from parents to have a career that ensures financial stability and respect is common in immigrant families the world over, but Ava uses it to explain her dissatisfaction with her job and her need to hide that dissatisfaction from others. This shows that she is already engaged in deception. The hint at “tyranny” presents Ava as a victim; this is a ploy she is using to cultivate the detective—and the reader’s—sympathy.

“The point is they’re status symbols. A Harvard degree is not so different from a designer handbag. They both signal that you’re part of the club, they open doors.”

When Ava is incredulous that a designer handbag could be worth its price tag, Winnie uses the analogy of something she knows Ava values—her educational degrees—to suggest their worth is actually symbolic in what they signal about lifestyle, sophistication, and wealth. The image of the opening door hints that both women have aspirations for a life different from the one they lead. Appearances lead to opportunities or lack of opportunities.

“That’s the thing about Winnie: she didn’t buy into the hype. She couldn’t care less about fashion and status. When she got into the counterfeits game, she carried those absurdly expensive purses and donned those flashy jewels the way a flight attendant dutifully pulls on flesh-toned stockings. It was simply part of the uniform, and she’d do anything to maximize profits. This singular focus and pragmatism is what made her so successful.”

Ava’s note that Winnie conforms to what is expected of her to succeed at her job emphasizes Winnie’s pragmatic character and hints at the theme of presenting a persona to the world. Winnie parallels Ava in conforming to expectations in this respect. Ideas of images and expectations are further expounded.

“Maybe if I hadn’t been so anxious about my marriage, my child, my flailing career—or if she’d shown up at any other time—I would have acted differently.”

In her story for the detective, Ava portrays herself as vulnerable and preyed upon, emphasizing the various strains on her as a neglected wife, struggling mother, grieving daughter, and unemployed professional. While Ava will in other ways prove herself calculating and unsentimental, the novel leaves open the possibility that she did sincerely feel these emotional strains. The reader views her emotions ambivalently.

“All over Hong Kong I’d see people who looked like they could be my relatives—the same broad cheekbones, high foreheads, tanned skin. The first time I’d come here at age three, how stunned I’d been to see all the Chinese people milling about the airport. Everyone looks like us! I’d exclaimed to my mom and dad, who’d laughed loud enough to draw stares.”

This passage captures the novel’s technique of foregoing quotation marks for dialogue in the chapters Ava narrates in the first person. This embedded dialogue creates the effect of a secondhand narrative. The passage also hints at the sense of belonging and fitting in that Ava didn’t feel growing up in a minority culture within a white-majority town, where her difference was always readily apparent.

“A gargantuan chartreuse Birkin the size of a bassinet lured me into an immaculate store that sold only Hermès. With its opulent Instagram-ready windows, featuring random accessories for the haute-bourgeois life of leisure—a backgammon set crafted entirely from untreated cowhide, a glossy horse saddle and matching riding crop—this store would not have been out of place on Madison Avenue or Rue Saint-Honoré.”

Ava, at the replica mall in China, falls under the spell of the designer handbag, finally understanding the allure it signifies: the associations with luxury, wealth, ease, and leisure. Ava’s comparison places the Chinese replicas stories as capable of competing with expensive shopping areas—and cultural centers—in New York City and Paris. This is part of how the novel plays with questions of value, worth, and what it means if someone doesn’t notice a fake.

“I marveled at how I didn’t have to strain to reach the subway handles, at how the jeans I tried on fell to right above my anklebone, no hemming required, at how every pair of shoes that caught my eye accommodated by wide yet bony feet. For once in my life, my body wasn’t a problem to be solved. How different a person would I be, I wondered, if I’d grown up in a place like this? Like my aunt and my mom. Like Winnie.”

This passage speaks further to the constant awareness Ava feels in the US of her physical if not cultural differences. Her sense of not fitting in in California is exacerbated by the way she feels comfortable as the ethnic majority in Hong Kong and China. She reflects, briefly, on how experience shapes us, and how she might be at a different point in her life if she grew up in a place where she feels she fits.

“So this was why people spent money on gigantic diamond rings, flashy sports cars; this was the allure of ostentatiousness. To think I’d spent my entire adult life—perhaps my whole life—trying to disappear in dark, understated clothing, sensible low-block heels.”

When Ava buys the amethyst Kelly bag at the Hermès replica store, it represents her commitment to joining this enterprise with Winnie and enjoying the results. The purchase signals that she is ready to change her image of herself. As much as she wishes to stop conforming, Ava longs for a sense of luxury and pleasure—a hint of glamour that the bag conveys, even if it is a deception.

“Here’s the thing, Detective. All through my teenage years, I’d never once snuck out of the house, or missed curfew, or owned a fake ID. Why? Fear, I guess. Guilt. […] I told myself I’d have fun once I went to college, or once I lived on my own […] And so here I was, thirty-seven years old and feeling cheated.”

Ava provides the detective, and the reader, with a sympathetic motive for participating in Winnie’s fraud. This reference to following the rules hints not just at the familial expectations placed upon her—which she adopted for herself—but also at the perceptions on Asian Americans within which she implicitly moves. Feeling cheated is her reason for cheating—a relatable motive.

“This was what Winnie had always known: as long as she could convince me to work for her, everything else would fall into place. The secrets I’d be forced to keep would alienate me from my loved ones, so that one day soon, I’d look around and find that the only one left to turn to was her.”

This is part of the tale Ava spins for the detective describing her vulnerability as the reason she fell prey to Winnie’s schemes. But the passage also speaks to the destructive nature of secrets. Ava’s loneliness and sense of isolation as a young mother in an increasingly distant marriage ring as sincere.

“She boarded that plane knowing she would never again have a home to return to in China. She was free. Free to make a life for herself, to do as she saw fit. And, Detective, I cannot overstate how rare that was for someone like Winnie, the only child of Chinese parents.”

Ava portrays Winnie as breaking free from the familial and cultural expectations placed upon her, which is something Ava longs to do. This is also one of many places in the novel that set up oppositions or contrasts between China and the US in values, practices, and culture. These opposing environments and cultural perceptions are pitted against one another throughout.

“In that moment I saw Winnie for who she truly was: not an awkward bookworm, nor a brilliant iconoclast, but a common thug.”

Ava’s narrative for the detective—and her hope for a light sentence—rest on her downplaying her own involvement in Winnie’s fraud, which requires painting Winnie as the villain. This is exactly what Ava told Winnie she would do back in college if they got caught passing Ava’s essay for Winnie’s own. But Ava suggests that Winnie, too, has been presenting a disguise all this time, wearing a face to please others—another way the two characters are alike.

“The room that opened up before me was blisteringly hot, though the women at the sewing machines, many inexplicably clad in long sleeves, appeared oblivious to the temperature. […] My struggle to breathe in the thick swampy air was exacerbated by the fleece blankets tacked over each window. I’d naively mistaken them for curtains from down below.”

Ava describes the sweatshop conditions of the black factory she visits in Dongguan in a way that plays on beliefs of her audience (the detective, and possibly the reader): that illicit factories would be oppressive and tortuous places to work. The sense of suffocation in the imagery represents the sickness Ava describes feeling about her own deception.

“When did she first see beyond Ava’s perfect, unblemished shell to the darkness smoldering within?”

The chapters closer to Winnie’s point of view offer a very different picture of Ava than the portrait Ava has painted for the detective. In seeing a rebellious core in her friend, Winnie exposes Ava’s persona as a counterfeit. This counterfeiting mirrors their handbag operation.

“This, Winnie thought, was the wondrous paradox of America: they all saw themselves as scrappy outsiders, when in reality they formed one giant country club.”

As a recent immigrant but one who is pursuing citizenship, Winnie has an outsider’s perspective on US culture and values such as individuality. This wry reflection on her activities in trying to become part of the American “club” hints at Winnie’s deeper wishes to truly belong somewhere. This is one of the motivations driving her character.

“Ava had done all those things. She’d gone to the right schools, chosen the right career, married the right partner, formed the right family—and made enormous sacrifices in the process, and yet here she was, thoroughly miserable, horrified by the prospect that her entire existence had been built on lies.”

Winnie, too, identifies the vulnerabilities that Ava names, but she offers a different perspective on them. Winnie believes Ava feels cheated because she did not reach the personal satisfaction she feels she is owed because she does what others ask. Winnie provides the “true” view on Ava’s character that balances the counterfeit Ava is passing off to the detective.

“What had once been their greatest strength—their perceived docility and obedience, their relative invisibility—had become their weakness. The narrative flipped. Now their Asian features read as scheming, perfidious, sly.”

Part of Winnie’s business model, and Ava’s, rested on employing Asian American shoppers and exploiting perceptions of the docile, obedient “model minority.” After their scam is exposed, the shoppers they employ feel profiled because of their appearance. The passage hints at how quickly of-color ethnicities can fall under suspicion of misdeeds.

“I know this is hard for you to believe, but Asian families are different from white families. We don’t talk the way you all do. I mean, we talk, of course we talk, but not about our fears, our pain, our deepest, darkest secrets.”

Ava’s confessional to the detective is, she suggests, a personal relief because she was not able to confide in her family or friends. Throughout, the novel illustrates differences between the mainstream of white-majority thinking in the US and Ava’s experience being raised by parents of Asian descent who hold the cultural values of their homeland. These cultures are often juxtaposed in the novel.

“I’d gained a window into China and the way the whole country barreled ahead at breakneck pace, ignoring the cracks, and something about that ethos told me this plane had not crashed by chance.”

Ava’s experiences offer another window into contemporary China. Her surprise at certain features hints at how often China is mystified or considered “foreign” by residents in the US—some of whom, like the diner at Neiman Marcus, still think of that part of the world as the “Orient.” China is framed in relation to Western civilizations rather than as a thriving region all of its own.

“Here in China, no task is ever deemed impossible, no demand too extreme, no deadline too tight. There’s always someone younger, scrappier, hungrier, willing to work harder, faster, longer.”

Ava contemplates how an unreliable part found its way into the Chinese aircraft that exploded and deduces that cut-rate business practices are at fault. This speaks to the theme of counterfeiting that runs throughout the book, but it also parallels other important themes, including Ava’s own ambitions to succeed and do well. It also shows the enterprising, entrepreneurial spirit the narrator of the Epilogue thinks of as the American dream.

“Let me be clear, Detective. It’s no exaggeration to say that at this moment in time I was failing on all fronts: as an employee, a wife, a mother, a friend—hell, as a flipping Stanford grad. What I wanted more than anything was to crawl into a cave and hide from my shortcomings.”

When she recounts the circumstances that led her to turn herself in, Ava suggests remorse at her own failures was the driving motivation. She was raised with strict familiar expectations she pushed herself to meet, and she feels her sense of failure keenly. The reader senses that this emotional vulnerability is part of her character and not part of her façade.

“She imagines unhurried evening walks down her street, waving at neighbors, who’ll probably take her for one of those FIRE millennials—Financial Independence, Retire Early. Why not encourage that misconception? She can tell them she made a bunch of money in tech and then moved here to reconnect with the land: to grow her own vegetables, learn to butcher, write a blog on zero waste.”

This image that Winnie cherishes of finally finding a home in the US touches again on the theme of counterfeits, as Winnie imagines the misconception her neighbors will form about her. The images also suggest Winnie longs for something solid and real. The image of farming further offers a sharp contrast in setting between rural America, where Winnie buys a home, and the urban areas Ava visits in China and Hong Kong.