Counterfeit

by Kirstin Chen – 288 pages – Book Club Moderator: Scarlet Alvarado

Money can’t buy happiness… but it can buy a decent fake.

Ava Wong has always played it safe. As a strait-laced, rule-abiding Chinese American lawyer with a successful surgeon as a husband, a young son, and a beautiful home–she’s built the perfect life. But beneath this façade, Ava’s world is crumbling: her marriage is falling apart, her expensive law degree hasn’t been used in years, and her toddler’s tantrums are pushing her to the breaking point.

Enter Winnie Fang, Ava’s enigmatic college roommate from Mainland China, who abruptly dropped out under mysterious circumstances. Now, twenty years later, Winnie is looking to reconnect with her old friend. But the shy, awkward girl Ava once knew has been replaced with a confident woman of the world, dripping in luxury goods, including a coveted Birkin in classic orange. The secret to her success? Winnie has developed an ingenious counterfeit scheme that involves importing near-exact replicas of luxury handbags and now she needs someone with a U.S. passport to help manage her business–someone who’d never be suspected of wrongdoing, someone like Ava. But when their spectacular success is threatened and Winnie vanishes once again, Ava is left to face the consequences.

Swift, surprising, and sharply comic, Counterfeit is a stylish and feminist caper with a strong point of view and an axe to grind. Peering behind the curtain of the upscale designer storefronts and the Chinese factories where luxury goods are produced, Kirstin Chen interrogates the myth of the model minority through two unforgettable women determined to demand more from life.

About the author

K I R S T I N C H E N is the New York Times best-selling author of three novels. Her latest, Counterfeit, out now from William Morrow/HarperCollins (US) and The Borough Press (UK), is the June ’22 Reese’s Book Club pick. It has also been recommended by The New York Times, The Washington Post, People Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue, Time, Oprah Daily, Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Parade, and more. Television rights have been optioned by Sony Pictures. Her previous two novels are Bury What We Cannot Take and Soy Sauce for Beginners.

She has received fellowships and awards from the Steinbeck Fellows Program, Sewanee, Hedgebrook, Djerassi, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the Toji Cultural Foundation, and the National Arts Council of Singapore. Her writing has appeared in The Cut, Real Simple, Literary Hub, Writer’s Digest, Zyzzyva, and the Best New Singaporean Short Stories. She holds an MFA from Emerson College and a BA from Stanford University. Born and raised in Singapore, she lives in San Francisco. She teaches creative writing at the University of San Francisco and in Ashland University’s Low-Residency MFA Program.

Other books about this author.

The day nine-year-old San San and her twelve-year-old brother, Ah Liam, discover their grandmother taking a hammer to a framed portrait of Chairman Mao is the day that forever changes their lives. To prove his loyalty to the Party, Ah Liam reports his grandmother to the authorities. But his belief in doing the right thing sets in motion a terrible chain of events.

Gretchen Lin leaves her heart (or at least her floundering marriage) in San Francisco, moves back to her childhood home in Singapore and finds herself face-to-face with the twin headaches she’s avoided her entire adult life: her mother’s drinking problem and the machinations of her father’s artisanal soy sauce business. Surrounded by family, Gretchen struggles with the tension between personal ambition and filial duty, but still finds time to explore a new romance with the son of a client, an attractive man of few words. When an old American friend comes to town, the two of them are pulled into the controversy surrounding Gretchen’s cousin, the only male grandchild and the heir apparent to Lin’s Soy Sauce. In the midst of increasing pressure from her father to remain permanently in Singapore—and pressure from her mother to do just the opposite—Gretchen must decide whether she will return to her marriage and her graduate studies at the San Francisco Conservatory, or sacrifice everything and join her family’s crusade to spread artisanal soy sauce to the world.

Buy the book here: Counterfeit

Book club Questions:

1. How would you describe Winnie and Ava’s personality?
2. What do you think of the relationship that Ava has with her husband?
3. Do you think Ava’s son really has a condition?
4. What do you think about how Ava perceives her maternity?
5. Do you believe that Ava is really innocent?
6. What do you think about the turn that the book took from part II, regarding the truth of how everything happened, is it credible?
7. What would they have added to the story?
8. What do you think of the development of the characters.
9. Favorite phrase, quote.
10. Favorite moment

Hope you enjoy