Crazy Rich Asians was our book club reading for March. I was slow to get started. My daughter said it was a quick read and made her laugh, but I’d met some women from the book club who described it as trashy. They’d given up after two or three chapters. With these commendations, I began to read with mixed feelings. But I loved the story and its message.
The novel is a love story between Nick (a rich Asian) and Rachel (an Asian from mainland China taken to the US as a baby). The story shows them navigating the context of crazy richness that spawns conspicuous consumption, snobbery and the nastiness that accompanies the protection of property.
It’s set in Singapore where Nick is the best man to Colin Khoo. Colin, from one of the richest families in the world, is going to marry Araminta Lee, from mainland China. She's a ‘supa-model’ and her father is one of the richest men in China. Unbeknown to Rachel, she is attending a ‘royal wedding’ and that means its front-page news.
This wedding locates the story, which tracks Rachel and Nick, both young professors at an American university, to Singapore. There, Rachel meets the families that have established ‘super-richness’ as a way of life.
There are secrets galore in the super-rich world of Singapore. Keven Kwan, the author, shows us these relationships between the super-rich, inside families and with outsiders –– servants, service providers and those who try to get into super-rich families, those who fall out of them and those, like Nick and Rachel, who don’t really notice super-richness until they have to deal with its excesses.
There’s lots to love in this book. I particularly liked the opening scene where super-rich Asian women are refused a room by the puffy male hotel manager. As an Englishwoman, I felt for those Asian women subject to the English manager’s pompous snobbery, which cascades down status orders based on gender as much as race and class. But Kwan also lifts the curtain on that cascading snobbery. He shows how the pathetic snobbery of people like the manager, draws them into this culture of wealth and power. He also shows how those at the top set up those hierarchies, using wealth to secure subservience and breeding prejudice as they protect their property.
So, this book isn’t just about Asians; it’s an expression of our times. It’s a commentary on our world that sanctifies richness and celebrates material excess. Endorsed by governments as well as the antics of the rich, the royals and the ruling elites, Kevin Kwan reveals the cultural politics that steers our path as humans towards the precipice of climate catastrophe. Yet within this story, there is also another reality: a celebration of those who step outside fortune and fame to find life and love beyond destructive super-richness.
Title: Crazy Rich Asians
Author: Kevin Kwan
Published: 2014
Publisher: Allen and Unwin
Category: Fiction
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