SINGAPORE - In the United States, Asian Americans are often seen as the "model minority": hardworking, highly educated and law-abiding.

It is a label that reduces a group of 20 million people to a handful of stereotypes.

San Francisco-based Singaporean author Kirstin Chen, 41, says: "People paint Asian America as a monolith, but underneath, there is so much complexity."

The idea of the model minority lies at the heart of her third novel, Counterfeit, where two women - Ava, who is Chinese American, and Winnie, who is from mainland China - team up to grow a counterfeit handbag scheme into a global operation.

The story begins when Ava and Winnie - who had first met as roommates at Stanford University - cross paths again in their late 30s.

Strait-laced Ava, who gave up her law career to raise her son, seems to have the perfect life - but only on the surface.

Winnie, who had dropped out of college, is doing well - thanks to her scheme involving luxury handbag replicas.

Counterfeit joins a wave of recent novels out of America that challenge the "model minority" myth - from Charles Yu's Interior Chinatown (2020, buy here) to Grace D. Li's Portrait Of A Thief (2022, buy here, borrow here).

Last month, Chen's novel made its way onto The New York Times' bestsellers list. Sony Pictures Television's TriStar has also won the TV rights to the book.

One of Chen's inspirations for the book was the real-life con artiste Praepitcha Smatsorabudh, a Thai pre-school teacher in America who supplemented her income with profits from a designer handbag scam. She was eventually arrested in 2016.

"I'm guessing one of the reasons she was so successful was that she was the antithesis of what you would think of as a criminal," says Chen via Zoom from San Francisco.

Chen started writing Counterfeit in 2017 during a residency at Nanyang Technological University.

Her research took her to Hong Kong and Guangdong province, where she visited a handbag factory, as well as fake bag markets.

"Especially in the US, people use 'Made in China' as shorthand for bad quality, but the reality is so much more nuanced. The factory I visited was state-of-the-art."

Her research also opened her eyes to the fact that there are parts of Italy, known for their fashion production, that now have large numbers of Chinese-run factories manufacturing "Made in Italy" brands.

Chen is a handbag lover. One of her "sentimental favourites" is a Chanel sequined evening bag she inherited from her grandmother.

She says Counterfeit was a reaction to her last book, Bury What We Cannot Take (2018, buy here), which was set in 1950s Maoist China.

She had joked to her spouse, paediatric oncologist Asmin Tulpule, that her third book should require no research and be on something she knew a lot about: handbags.

"Eventually, it grew into this novel about counterfeit handbags and ended up requiring a lot of research," she adds with a laugh.

Chen, who teaches creative writing part-time, enrolled in a school in America when she was 15.

She later majored in comparative literature at Stanford University.

People often assumed she was Asian American. "Because I had this insider-outsider position, I was able to observe things that maybe if you were fully entrenched in the community, you would take for granted."

What has her experience of Asian stereotypes been like?

She cites the cover of her 2014 debut Soy Sauce For Beginners (buy here), showing the stylised back of a woman's head - an "exoticised portrait of an Asian woman" - as an example of racial stereotyping.

She adds that she also gets mistaken for her other Asian friends.

"Here in San Francisco, I have a very close-knit group of Asian-American women writers, and we have all been mistaken for one another at one time or another. It seems very benign - except that our careers depend on us being recognised."

Chen's next novel will be set in Harvard, in "the dirty cut-throat world of paediatric cancer research".

She compares it with the American TV series Succession (2018 to present), a story about people wrestling for control of a company: "Succession, but with nerds."

• Counterfeit ($29.96) is available to buy here and borrow here