Every few weeks, I’ll be devoting All’s Well to conversations with creative women who inspire me. Next up, novelist Kirstin Chen. Subscribe to get upcoming interviews and roundups!
This summer, I read Kirstin Chen’s latest novel, Counterfeit, which follows strait-laced Ava as she gets sucked into the world of counterfeit handbags courtesy of her old college friend, Winnie. The book has something for everyone—fashion, crime, the American dream—which is probably why it’s been on everyone’s summer reading list, not least of all Reese Witherspoon’s. I reached out to Kirstin to hear more about her writing process and the makings of this story. It turns out we also have a shared love of handbags. As for her next project, Kirstin is eyeing the dirty cutthroat world of pediatric cancer research, looking at “the contours of extreme ambition, especially in a profession that is highly idealized in the minds of the public.” I quickly realized that when Kirstin takes on a project, she goes deep. Counterfeit, for example, took her to Guangzhou to the fake handbag markets and inside a Chinese handbag factory. Below is an edited and condensed version of our conversation.
How did you become a writer?
I was a comparative literature major, but it never occurred to me that one could be a professional writer. I feel like I might be the last generation of students that was told to just take classes you love, to take things that you’re interested in and, if you do well, you’ll find a practical job. I teach college now and the students who are in my intro class are very serious about creative writing. Some of them are working on novels.
When I came out of Stanford, I was a merchandise planner at Banana Republic. I thought I wanted to work in fashion, so that was my practical job. I ended up really hating it, so a couple of years in, I applied to MFA programs on a whim. It was a very naive, very privileged thought process. I applied to three programs, I got into one of them, and then very impulsively, I left my job, to everybody’s chagrin: my family, my boss…
Even when I got into my MFA program, I was much further behind. The best students there had been writing for years, came in with novel manuscripts, and had a very clear idea of what they were going to do in this program. I was brand new. I hadn’t written since undergrad, I had never submitted stories for publication. Even though I was not the best writer by any means in any of my classes, I felt like I was the best learner. I took feedback well. I was gonna have to hustle a bit because I was behind in many ways, but I also felt like I was ahead in other ways. I could trust my work ethic.
What has your process become over the course of writing your three novels?
I am very into my process. I treat it like a nine-to-five job almost. I write at the same time every day and I always write in my study because I can’t have any ambient noise. When I’m drafting, I draft a thousand words a day. That’s how rigid I am. Monday through Friday, a thousand words a day. I send my thousand words to my trusted first reader, my best friend from graduate school, a writer named Matthew Salesses. And he sends me his thousand words and we give each other a thumbs up or a thumbs down, no comments.
The idea was to remove any barriers. If you had to give each other feedback, it would take a lot of time. We wanted something quick and easy. And when you’re in the first draft, you don’t need that much feedback. You just need enough to keep going.
What does your day look like?
I live quite a monastic life during the week. I wake up at six in the morning. I meditate, I do yoga. I consider it part of my writing process. I think so much of writing is muscle memory, just like lifting weights, just like playing scale. Meditation gets me in the right state of mind. Yoga’s maybe the thing outside of writing that has taught me the most about writing.
The kind of yoga I do is called Ashtanga yoga and it has a kind of cult-like reputation—for a good reason because it’s supposed to be done five to six days a week. The interesting thing about it is it’s self-guided. So, you have a teacher in the room, but everybody practices at their own pace. You memorize this series of poses and you come in and you do that series every day. Everybody asks me, “Don’t you get bored?” I’m not an easily bored person. That’s just part of my personality. But the idea is that, regardless of where your body is at, you do this practice and you do what you can. That’s kind of how I approach my thousand words.
Let’s talk about Counterfeit. Why handbags?
I am a lifelong handbag aficionado, an armchair expert. I have always loved fashion. When I went back to school, I put that all aside because, in academia, I think it’s kind of looked down upon, especially as a young woman teaching at the college level for the first time. I was very, very conscious of how people perceived me. When it came to this book, it really was the first time I combined the two deep passions that I’ve always had. To be able to put all of those years of accumulated knowledge into this book was a real pleasure.
I think one of the reasons that it was so fun to write is that I knew I was an expert versus my previous book, where everything was deeply researched. It was set in 1950 Southern China, and I did months and months of research and always felt insecure about my knowledge. I would never know enough to be an expert in the topic. I think writing a novel is one long exercise in overcoming doubt and imposter syndrome. That’s how you get to the end. You have to keep saying, “Yes, I am the person to write this book.” With Counterfeit, I can tap into my expertise in fashion. I don’t really know how to handle this point-of-view shift, I don’t really know how this narrative is going to unfold, but I know I can write fashion.
Are there any handbags or articles of clothing that have deep significance to you?
Oh yeah. So many. There’s a bag that appears in the novel, it’s an Hermès Evelyne bag, that Ava carries when she goes to the Chanel boutique and Winnie says, “Put this bag on. It’s part of the costume. It signals that you’re rich.” And Ava thinks to herself, “Oh, this is a very ugly bag. Why does it cost so much?” That bag I actually own, and it’s a bag that I deeply love. I bought it to celebrate selling my first novel.
Did you have knowledge of the counterfeit bag industry before embarking on this book?
Not very much at all. That was something that required a lot of research. I actually traveled to Guangzhou, in Southern China, to see the fake handbag markets. With a family connection, I visited a legitimate factory that does a lot of manufacturing for famous, higher-end brands. It was a very impressive factory. We paint with a very broad brush when we say Made in China. We use Made in China to kind of signal inferior, but there are state-of-the-art factories in China and there are sweatshops in Italy. It’s a lot more complicated.
How’d you develop these complex characters?
I knew from the start that this book was about two women subverting the model minority myth. I knew that Ava was going be this exemplary Asian-American woman who had done all the right things and married the right person and came from the right family and had the right job.
The other thing I wanted to do was to look at the ways that Asian-Americans stereotype each other and the ways that, even within the community—we look very homogenous, but there are so many different experiences within. Winnie is an example of that. She is also Asian-American, but she’s from mainland China. She has an extremely different worldview. She has a confidence and a brashness that comes from being from the biggest country in the world where everybody looks and talks like you. So I wanted somebody who would contrast with Ava. There’s a real sense of security that Winnie has, that Ava doesn’t. She’s wracked by insecurity because she has tried to assimilate her entire life. That’s always a precarious position.
Why do you think the book has resonated with so many people?
I’ve done this three times and it is the book that has reached the widest audience by far. Early on, one of the editors described the book as a Trojan horse where there’s all this shiny stuff to look at—there are handbags, there’s fashion, there’s crime, there’s a twist—and then inside, it’s a book about being a person of color in America. It’s a deeply political book about minority identity and what it means to pursue the American dream.
So I think readers can engage with the book on many levels. Some people only want the fashion and that’s fine. Some people only want the crime. Other people read it and immediately get that it’s a book about race. When the book first went on submission, I was a little taken aback by all the interest, first from editors at publishing houses and then, we had a lot of TV interest right after the book sold. That really surprised me because this is a book with two Asian-American leads. When I went into my first meeting with one of the studios, I was prepared for them to say, “You have to change the race of at least one. Maybe one should be African-American or Latinx, that would give us more range.” None of them did. All of them said, “We're committed to your vision.” We will find you Chinese-American actors. We will find you a showrunner who is preferably Asian-American female. Everybody understood that the race of the characters was inextricable from the story.
Years from now, when you look back on your career, what do you think will be the common thread? What’s the mission?
With each of my books, I’m trying to stretch myself as a writer. Every time I write something, I want it to be doing something completely different. I want to be exploring a craft problem that I haven’t been able to solve before. I think a lot of writers would look at that and say that is a poor career choice. If you wrote another Counterfeit, it would be, firstly, easier, and secondly, I would have a built-in audience. People have already asked when the sequel is coming, but, in my mind, I would never want to do that—to my detriment, probably. The whole pleasure of the job is problem-solving, discovery. I want to be able to look back and think, “Oh, I got better and better.”
Well said, Kirstin!