Review of Counterfeit by Kirsten Chen

*Counterfeit* by Kirsten Chen (2022). Published by William Morrow.

Although the tail end of my internship at the Smithsonian is coming to an end, the way I’ve kept my sanity alive during these periods of working at home remotely has been to play audiobooks while I’m trying to go and get myself occupied when I need to be. This is a habit I think I am going to be returning to throughout the rest of my career, as I just love listening to audiobooks in the car and whenever I need to do something, like cooking or laundry, now.

It’s become a love. It also forces me to go outside my comfort zone sometimes, as I need to have easier books when it comes to audio. There’s no way I could be listening to a more complicated book without losing focus on both tasks at the same time.

Anyways, one of the books that I checked out in the middle of my internship was Kirsten Chen’s Counterfeit. I went to fashion school and both of my degrees are fashion focused, so when I read this was about a counterfeit empire trying to be created by Asian American women, I knew I was on board with it.

I was able to check it out immediately for my drive home one day, and probably finished the audiobook within two or three days.

Here are my thoughts and review!

Two Asian American women start a counterfeit handbag business.

Our main character and narrator in Counterfeit is Ava Wong, who’s a Chinese American lawyer with quite the career and family to show off her success in the stereotypical immigrant way. Despite having a thriving law career though, and a surgeon for a husband, everything is actually crumbling beneath her feet and quite dramatically.

It’s when her old roommate from China returns into her life that she starts to come across an entirely new world that she simply wasn’t apart of.

Winnie, her old roommate, isn’t the same person at all that left behind Ava. She used to be shy and quiet, but now she’s covered in luxury goods and happens to have quite the attitude to match them. Although these two haven’t spoke in twenty years, Winnie now wants a favor from Ava.

She needs someone who is an American citizen to be involved with the business she’s running, and she needs someone who appears like they’ve got their life together. So Ava it is.

As it turns out, Winnie is running an extensive counterfeit empire. She wants to use Ava as a cover because of the fact her business practices are so shady. She’s using the company’s designs that were in the factories in China to produce knock-offs of their goods.

Thus they’re able to get high quality knock offs—they can’t use the same materials, the novel explains, as the companies put in precise orders of what fabrics and materials are being used. So if there were any extras, they would know of it—on the market because they had insider information.

Winnie kind of exploits all of the obvious insecurities that Ava has throughout the novel, getting her to agree to this even though she could really lose everything if they were found out. The novel is told through Ava’s perspective, and when things do get bad and Winnie disappears, she’s going to have to navigate the fallout of their very illegal actions despite the fact she, too, was exploited and roped into this world and everything involved.

One of the parts that threw me off was how the novel is written in Ava’s perspective, but it’s also written as a testimony of sorts.

I didn’t have the novel sitting in front me as it was an audiobook, but there were certain section where she was referring to the detective directly while recalling the events, implying that all of this was being recorded as her account.

While the connection between the two women shine on the page, I thought that it wasn’t compelling enough to keep me going at times because of that.

Overall Thoughts

This was a difficult novel to get through. I think there is a target audience for this kind of work, and it simply was not me. It was good to examine how the wealthy elites take advantage of factory workers in China, but because we spend so much time with the main two characters, all of the other themes and characters are neglected.

We learn a lot about how this is basically a family business and that the rich try to do whatever they want around international law, but the book simply needed something more for me to think it worked. There is someone out there who probably likes it though!

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