Counterfeit

The chapter is narrated from Ava’s first-person perspective as she tells her story to a detective. She describes meeting the college roommate she hasn’t seen in 20 years. She begins her story: Winnie Fang now has large eyes, sleek long hair, sumptuous clothes, and a Birkin 40 handbag in classic orange—a bag Ava knows is “absurdly expensive and impossible to obtain” (3). Ava thinks that her friend looks wealthy “Asian-tourist rich. Mainland-Chinese rich. Rich-rich” (3). Winnie was Ava’s roommate for a few months their freshman year at Stanford, but Ava always felt superior to the more naïve Winnie. Now Winnie is fashionable and glamorous, and Ava feels plain and underdressed.

Winnie tracked Ava down because Winnie has a friend in China who needs a liver transplant and Ava’s husband is a successful transplant surgeon. As Ava fills Winnie in on her life—married four years to Olivier, who is half-French and half-American, with a two-year-old son, Henri, and currently on hiatus from her law firm—she considers how Winnie has changed. In college, Winnie was “fobby […] fresh off the boat” (6), and Ava wanted to fit in at Stanford. She felt invisible back home in Boston, where her teachers confused her with Rosa Chee.