Counterfeit

In these chapters, Ava describes her increasing complicity in Winnie’s schemes. She continues to present herself as the victim manipulated by Winnie’s cunning and ambition, casting Winnie as a “common thug” (143). However, Ava sounds proud when she describes the scope of their operation, their income, and her own importance in their arrangement.

Ava’s physical illness when she visits the Chinese factory indicates her sense of discomfort at the theft of this intellectual property. Her description of herself in that moment—as someone “weak” and “vulnerable”—further paints her as someone “good” who feels remorse for her actions. This is her façade: In her conversation with the detective, Ava is not a manipulated party but a manipulator. These details set up the about-face in Part 2, which reveals that Ava is not Winnie’s victim but her willing partner. This mirrors the theme of Counterfeit, Disguise, and Deception. Ava describes growing distant from her husband as their marriage becomes contentious and feeling alienated by her best friends who gossip about the woman Ava works with. She already mentioned how she can’t confide in her father, brother, or Chinese relatives, who would feel nothing but shame about her actions. Ava depends on Maria, another woman of color earning a living in a white-majority world, and Ava’s tone sounds regretful when she describes Maria’s distance.

Ava casts Winnie as the con artist who has isolated Ava from the rest of her support system, leaving her dependent on Winnie and in a perfect position to be manipulated. This image plays on the reader’s sympathies but also comments on the many levels of Living Up to Expectations: the expectation to be a stellar parent with a well-adapted and attractive child and the expectations to be a wife who tends the child and house while still maintaining a career. Ava feels the demands from her family and culture to be high-performing and never complain and to conform to the majority culture as well.

Mandy, like Winnie, is sophisticated, elegant, wealthy, ambitious, and in charge of her own business—exactly what Ava wants to be. She feels this dissonance also with her friends, who seem to be more easily achieving what is expected of them, though their gossip makes Ava uncomfortable because she really wants to be more like Winnie. The amethyst Kelly bag signals that Ava is changing her identity, breaking free from expectation to contemplate her personal wants, though she describes this turn in her mindset as nothing less than revolutionary.

Ava’s description of Winnie’s history—which the reader and the detective have no reason to suspect is not sincere—reinforces this theme of social expectation versus the wish for autonomy. Winnie’s parents are heavily invested in her success at Stanford, and, ironically, it is cheating that compels Winnie to leave. While Carla and Joanne decry her choices to advance herself, Ava portrays Winnie as being manipulated by Boss Mak, by her aunt’s husband whom she married, and even by her parents, who pressure her to return to the US and Boss Mak’s business through their disappointment in her achievements. She engages in Counterfeit, Disguise, and Deception to Live Up to Expectations.

The fleeting moment when Ava sees Winnie as a common thug speaks to a motif throughout when a suppressed need or motivation shows through the surface. Ava, too, is longing to break free. Boss Mak’s liver serves as a symbol that his life of crime is shriveling him from the inside; he needs a transplant to be healthy and whole. Ava and Winnie are both also striving for ways to switch out the elements they don’t want in their lives for the ones that they do.

Ava’s visit to China, with its reference to traffic and smog, again references the economic development, but the exaggerated contrast between the legitimate and black factories making handbags exemplifies the contrast Ava sees between her life in California and the dark underbelly of her criminal activities. She too has certain Negative Beliefs About Asia and Asian Identities. The foreboding descriptions of her time in China suggest that something within Ava wants to break loose. This sets up a surprising twist for the reader when it turns out the Ava wishing to surface is not the law-abiding, meeting-expectations Ava but the con artist inside.