Some months ago, I had a cousin unexpectedly pass away in Huizhou, China. I didn’t know him well, and I hadn’t seen him in over twenty years. My dad quickly flew in from America, and I was subsequently dispatched from Singapore. The cousin, in his sixties, was living with a much younger girlfriend and his 95-year-old mother. His only daughter had just begun a corporate career in London. He himself was an only child and it was unclear where my aged aunt would live. It was all pretty tense, and so I decided to take my dad on a day trip to Shenzhen.
Before economic reforms of the 1980s, Shenzhen was a sleepy fishing settlement that was best known for its sweet oysters, its fortunes overshadowed by brilliant Hong Kong just across the border. Today, Shenzhen is to the Age of Tech what Manchester and Pittsburgh were for the Industrial Revolution. In the 2000s, Apple and the Chinese government partnered to make the once quiet villages an electronics manufacturing hub. Since then, every iPhone—three billion and counting—is assembled there. Shenzhen has now well surpassed Hong Kong’s GDP and the city has the fifth-highest number of billionaires in the world. Here in the Pearl Delta region, you see capitalism with Chinese characteristics, alive and kicking.
The last time I was there was over 30 years ago. Then Shenzhen meant something else entirely: cheap food, cheap massages, and cheap luxury. Relatives brought me to seafood feasts and reflexology. I followed one to buy knockoff Prada, Gucci, Louis Vuitton for her banking clients—the illicit thrill of having the logo without the price tag.
I thought of all this earlier this year when, during the Trump tariff brouhahas, I read articles on the rise of the “super fakes.” One journalist confessed in the New York Times that he was buying multiple Birkin dupes for less than $100 (instead of the $20,000 retail). On TikTok, a Goyard Saint Louis can be had for $400 instead of $14,000. Chinese manufacturers now push these across social media, falsely claiming Hermès bags and Lululemon leggings are produced in the same factories as the real ones. In these cases, the micro-distinctions between “real” and “fake” has become as metaphysical as the Buddhist Heart Sutra’s doctrine of “form is emptiness and emptiness is form.”
I admit I’m susceptible. As the son of small business owners, I grew up equating discount with virtue. My father used to wear Ralph Lauren polos and Timberlands. For an immigrant, it was, of course, all aspiration: we wear what we want to become. For me, I cycled through Gap, J. Crew, Brooks Brothers. Later, after some time in Europe, I coveted Balibaris and Sunspel—but never at full price. Finding bargains remains a core family ethic.
The night before our trip, I did some research online. I knew about Dafen village from Winnie Wong’s book Van Gogh on Demand, where out-of-work art school graduates churn out replicas the Dutch artist, Leonardos, and Warhols destined for American living rooms and European lobbies. But Dafen was a bit out of the way. And the big-name malls seemed interchangeable with Singapore’s: polished, anonymous, identical. My father suggested Luohu Commercial City.
Luohu is a relic of an earlier Shenzhen: a sprawling multi-story, windowless mall, a little shabby, a little low-brow. Outside, buses deposit day-trippers; shoppers glued to their cell-phone apps waited for their ride-shares. Inside, scouts lurk by stairwells, scanning the crowd. A nod, an eye-contact, is all it takes. “Watches? Clothes? Electronics?” If you hesitate, they follow.
I did and they did. One zeroed in. We tried to escape by ducking into the ground floor, a carnival of food stalls—giant white buns, heaving claypot rice bowls, fruits that spanned the spectrum of the rainbow, lacquered ducks strung by their necks, juices glittering under the improbable shades of neon lights. Undeterred, he waited outside and led us upstairs. Narrow corridors stretch like a labyrinth, lined with boutiques hawking bags, watches, sneakers, electronics. The vibe was chill—it was early evening; the storekeepers were eating their take-outs on stools; their kids were playing in front of the window displays. Yes, I was looking for clothes.
I thought the scout would intuit my style: I was wearing khaki shorts and a dark Lacoste polo. But he took me to one shop that offered baroque streetwear; another, the baggy silhouettes of Y2K revival. Eventually, he figured it out. He took my father and I to a stall of subtler distinction: rows and columns of Burberry, Loro Piana, Brunello Cucinelli. Perhaps my once preppy style has grown up to what Instagram christens “old money”?
To linger in Luohu is to see capitalism in its barest form, a copulation of desire and commodities. Much of the inventory was hidden, revealed only if you asked. Bargaining was a kind of theater, each side performing ritual indignation until the price collapsed. It helped that my dad and the storekeeper spoke the same Teochew dialect.
I walked out with a bulging plastic bag of “quiet luxury.” Yet the first flush of dopamine was followed by letdown—the German Kaufrausch, the frenzy of shopping, always contains the seeds of its hangover. To buy a fake is to experience desire and shame in the same swipe.
“Fake” in Chinese is a shanzhai (山寨). Originally it meant a “mountain hideout,” named for the place where the down-and-out characters from the novel Water Margin escaped from the corrupt regime. Today it encompasses high-end dupes and rebrands like Adidos and Samsing; novels like Harry Potter and the Porcelain Doll. To this phenomenon the German-Korean thinker Byung-Chul Han has dedicated a short treatise entitled Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese. Han posits that Eastern thought “deconstructs” the Western notion of the “real,” “authentic,” and “original.” What Western laws see theft of intellectual property for the enterprising Chinese becomes a combinatory adaptation, a leveling of power, a resistance against corporate behemoths. Louhu, in the transitional zone between the once socialist China and Westernized Hong Kong, exists as a sort of shanzhai, a mountain enclave of capitalist simulacra that captures the postmodern yearnings of today’s price-conscious hyper-consumers.
Le style c’est l’homme même, “Style is the man himself,” declared Comte de Buffon in the eighteenth century. How is fashion a sign of self-fashioning? How is it both a mark of authenticity and convention? Clothing as identity is by no means new. In the Soviet Union and Benedict monasteries, your worker’s jacket or habit forms your very identity. Last year I had seen a stylish student wearing a black Arc’teryx windbreaker and I wanted one. Whether I felt an inner cringe when I bought the fake in Louhan, I not sure, but it was certainly a cosplay of micro-pleasure, the illusion of possessing luxury on a dime.
On the two-hour car ride back to Huizhou with my father, we were quiet, the plastic bag sat between us, heavy with counterfeits. Was this shopping spree part distraction, part nostalgia, part mourning for my dead cousin? When I got home I did something I had never done: I discreetly snipped the labels out of the clothes. Was it an act of erasure, a way of inhabiting third-rate quality while refusing its proof? Later I remembered that my nonagenarian aunt told me that before he died, Michael has almost made shopping for cheap stuff on Taobao and Temu a full-time hobby.
