This week on the podcast, we featured a conversation between Jessica Williams, Executive Editor at William Morrow, and author Kirstin Chen. They discuss Kirstin's upcoming novel Counterfeit—the story of two Asian American women who band together to grow a counterfeit handbag scheme into a global enterprise—an incisive and glittering blend of fashion, crime, and friendship from the author of Bury What We Cannot Take and Soy Sauce for Beginners. It is perfect for fans of Hustlers and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.
Listen to the episode below:
Kirstin also wrote a few words about her research trip and provided photos!
"As I mentioned in the podcast episode, early in the process of writing Counterfeit, I was lucky enough to obtain a research grant to travel to the city of Guangzhou, the leather goods capital of China. My first stop was the Baiyun World Leather Trading Center, one of the country’s five largest wholesale markets, all two-hundred-square-feet of which is devoted to replica designer handbags. Nearly 1,200 tiny, fluorescent-lit shops pack this hulking shopping mall. I peered into one after another at the handbags crammed onto shelves like grocery cans, a compilation of the luxury industry’s greatest hits: the Gucci Dionysus next to the Fendi Baguette next to the Louis Vuitton Speedy.
It was in one of these stores that I first held a coral Hermès Kelly “superfake”— purported to be at least 98% identical to the real thing. The price tag? $1,200, which is about a tenth of what someone would be charged at an Hermès boutique. As far as I could tell, the only thing missing from the replica was the Hermès stamp, which the sales associate told me could only be added after I’d paid for it—some sort of insurance policy against police raids.
In the neighboring city of Dongguan, I toured a luxury handbag factory that made bags for several well-known American and European designers. Across the border in Hong Kong, I consulted with an IP lawyer who specialized in copyright infringement in China, and who informed me, pointedly, that if the international brands didn’t try to cut costs by dividing their manufacturing among the very cheapest factories, they might maintain better control of their blueprints.
Many of these details made it into the novel in some form. Further, my research gave me the confidence to invent and imagine the rest of the story."
-Kirstin
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Counterfeit is on sale June 7, 2022.
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-Lainey
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