Lily Cho

Fake Anxiety and Kristen Chen’s Counterfeit  

Although finance itself seems global, the platforms and instruments upon which it depends occlude the colonial and racialized histories embedded in them. This paper turns to Singaporean fiction to uncover these specificities and histories. The paper offers a way to understand how postcolonial Asian fiction offers a way to see not only these cultural histories of financial instruments, but also how this fiction makes visible decolonial Asian approaches to finance and global capital. In the Singaporean writer Kristen Chen’s 2022 novel, Counterfeit, Chen decolonizes one of the core instruments of finance capital, authentic and stable currency, through a send up of counterfeit luxury commodities. I argue that Chen’s novel offers something more than a story about the market in fake purses. The circulation of counterfeit goods in the novel illuminates the larger anxieties of global capital about the fictions that undergird ideas of the real and the fake. These anxieties have been tied to fictions of finance from the beginning of the introduction of paper currency in the nineteenth century and the failure to resolve them emerges with particular force in the current crisis of luxury counterfeit goods that Chen’s novel so skillfully exposes. 

Biography 

Lily Cho is Associate Professor of English at York University. Her current SSHRC-funded project, Asian Values: Fictions of Finance and Beautiful Money, explores diasporic movement and theories of value in postcolonial Asia. Her book, Mass Capture: Chinese Head Tax and the Making of Non-Citizens, was supported by SSHRC and won the Association for Asian American Studies’ 2023 prize for Outstanding Achievement in the Multidisciplinary Category.