Along with its themes of deception, Counterfeit plays on assumptions about Asian people and Asian countries that are prevalent in the US, showing many of these presumptions to be erroneous if not outright offensive. As an Asian American, Ava hints at the many ways she encounters assumptions made based on her ethnic heritage that don’t reflect her personality or beliefs. Winnie, who was born and raised in China and became a US citizen as an adult, reports more frank encounters with prejudices about China and immigrants. Such assumptions, like the aura of glamor associated with the luxury designer handbag, often turn out to be illusions as well.

Ava is the daughter of parents who emigrated to the US from Hong Kong; her stories about her youth reflect her identifying with the ambitions held by her parents for her to pursue a successful career. In addition, Ava’s hint that her teachers often confused her with an Asian classmate suggests the invisibility that Asians, as a “model minority,” can face. Bias can work on several levels, however, as Ava’s own beliefs illustrate. She, a second-generation Asian American, calls Winnie “fresh off the boat” (6), expressing embarrassment at Winnie’s constant questions and accent. Yet this kind of snobbery seems lesser in impact than prejudices held by white people. Ava notes that when the scandal of falsified SAT scores involved Chinese students, those students were punished with expulsion. When the wealthy parents of white children cheated, they were only slapped with a fine. The author is likely referencing two real-world admissions scandals. In 2015, when Chinese nationals took SATs for other Chinese nationals so the latter could enter universities and secure visas on high test scores, they were punished harshly. In 2019, when rich, famous, white celebrities hired people to falsity test sources or bribe admissions officials to ensure entrance into prestigious universities, they received lax punishments. This disparity echoes the injustice that Ava observes and criticizes in the novel: The powerful and privileged have the cachet to avoid harsh penalties, while the underprivileged and disadvantaged are punished with the full weight of the law.

Ava likewise participates in a perception of Chinese women flaunting their money when she thinks Winnie looks “Mainland-Chinese rich” (3). Winnie despises the ambitions of her Chinese women friends to buy from internationally known designers and send their children to college in the US. Winnie points out the perception that newly acquired wealth is looked down upon as being “nouveau riche,” tainted with ambition and hard work. Winnie notes how tenuous this assumption is by saying it only takes a generation for nouveau riche to become old rich.

The dinner at Neiman Marcus depicts a racist woman using the word “Oriental,” which alludes to a distinction between Western countries and the exotic, Othered Orient. Ava notes that this term objectifies people; “we’re not rugs,” she replies (32). Winnie notes the woman’s deeper fear that spendy Asians are everywhere and answers it with a fact: “There are over a billion of us” (32), she responds, reminding the white woman that she shares the planet with them. Winnie herself notes that there seem to be more Mainland Chinese students at Stanford now but takes this as a sign of China’s increasing economic prosperity, not as an invasion of a foreign culture. Ava witnesses this prosperity when she visits Guangzhou and is amazed at the size and sophistication of the replica shopping mall, which rivals shopping districts in New York City or Paris. To her Westernized perspective, prosperous China is still a novel idea. But Ava also understands that Western capitalists can as easily run sweatshops. And while she laments the corruption she sees in China among the higher-placed officials she meets in Dongguan, and she fears that such corruption led to the explosion of the aircraft, she knows she’s guilty of the same kind of bribery in trying to get her son into a desirable preschool. Counterfeit doesn’t exalt one country over the other or pretend that the West is more virtuous, but the novel does present a variety of misconceptions about the Chinese nation and Chinese people and shows a complex and human reality as well as the more unfortunate effects of bias.