Retail Porn

An essay by Stella Chung on the Crazy Rich Asians phenomenon

For a while now, I have been mildly obsessed with Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians trilogy. I mean, of course, Crazy Rich Asians, China Rich Girlfriend and Rich People Problems. The reasons for my obsession are myriad. For one, Kevin Kwan is my friend’s namesake. Both Kevins attended Parsons School of Design in New York. They have apartments a few streets apart in Chelsea, Manhattan. When I met him at a literary festival a few years ago, the author Kevin told me Sotheby’s once telephoned him while preparing to deliver an artwork to him, and asked if he lived at the address belonging to The Kevin I Know (TKIK). When Crazy Rich Asians came out, and copies of the book with the sparkly gold cover and bold pink lettering lined the shelves of Singapore’s Books Kinokuniya, TKIK was bombarded with questions as to why he had been keeping his writing a secret. He hadn’t. He was the wrong Kevin.

For another reason, I grew up around wealthy classmates and family friends, but the portrayals I had seen of rich Singaporeans, Indonesians and Hong Kongers in staged and screened literature never matched the level of decadence I had witnessed: private jets; destination parties; foie gras and champagne brunches, followed by macaroon and dim sum high teas. While on a summer internship for Singapore’s state-controlled English-language newspaper, the Straits Times, I researched and wrote a feature for its Life! section on young Singaporeans’ lavish birthday parties. One subject, for instance, booked Singapore’s foremost nightclub for his 21st birthday party and gave his guests free flow of champagne.

My piece was meant to be a Singaporean take on MTV’s My Super Sweet 16 show. My editors encouraged me to pursue the story, so I extended my internship for two weeks to work on it with their help. When the managing editors, my bosses’ bosses, killed the story, I received a slip of paper, a filled-out form, explaining the decision: my story was not publishable because it “highlight[ed] income inequality.” An editor had scribbled this simple phrase in ballpoint ink. A few years later, a story on homeless Singaporeans that appeared in Al Jazeera news was disputed by authorities, and the existence of squatters on East Coast denied. I had grown up knowing abstractly that our state media was heavily controlled, but these incidents drove the point home, and showed me which issues it was eager to bury.

How fitting, then, that it is an American publisher, and Singaporean emigre, who has released this frothy, sprawling, sweeping survey of the buying, eating, partying habits of Asians with new money, old money, dirty money, and secret money. Make no mistake, the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy mocks the pretensions of the super-rich. Kwan’s satire is broad, especially when poking fun at the oafish Edison Cheng, or one-upping, backstabbing matriarchs who are in a Bible study group together, based on aunts Kwan may encounter on a regular basis — Kwan’s great-grandfather was one of the founding directors of Singapore's oldest bank, the Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation, and his parents moved him to the United States when he was eleven years old. The excess Kwan was exposed to as a child is apropos of the wonder Kwan imbues in his readers when describing (and fetishizing) the fabrics, food, and Filipino helpers in the world of his trilogy.

However accurate the broad satire in the books is, the moral impulse remains feeble. Kwan’s second book China Rich Girlfriend reveals that Rachel has a long-lost birth father who happens to be a mainland Chinese tycoon. So Nicholas’ family's objection to their relationship is now conveniently moot. The romances in these books follow characters with money, who live on prime land, wine and dine each other, and jet around to exotic getaways like Filipino island El Nido and Indonesian province Bali. At the end of the first novel, when Nicholas gives up his family fortune to be with the woman he loves, what is he really sacrificing? In material terms, it is unclear. They can still afford US$15-sandwiches from La Panineria, chocolate cake from Amy’s Bread, and breakfast at Tea & Sympathy. Yes, relations with his mother and grandma are frosty, but they don’t seem to figure largely in his New York life anyway. Does anything in his daily life change as a result of this choice?

The books fetishize the wealth they purport to mock, and Kwan’s prose can read like a cross between a screenplay and an issue of Vogue. Take this passage from China Rich Girlfriend:

While the ladies decided to spend the morning sampling all the free gourmet delicacies at Harrods’ famed Food Halls, Eleanor, discreetly dressed in a chic camel-coloured Akris pantsuit, racing green MaxMara swing coat, and her signature Cutler and Gross sunglasses, left the swanky building on Knightsbridge and walked two blocks east to the Berkeley hotel, where a Silver Jaguar XJL parked in front of a row of perfectly round topiaries.

That’s six product placements in one sentence. American readers, enthralled by the prospect of venturing into a hitherto unknown world of decadence halfway across the globe, will not be disappointed. The books always tell us what its characters are wearing, eating, and driving. But we know next to nothing about their inner lives, unless they spell out their thoughts in an email or tête-à-tête with another character, or unless Kwan tells us himself.

While Kwan’s first novel is told solely in third person, with the exception of some footnotes, he plays with formal innovation in the second and third books. Sometimes, this venture results in visual wit, as when Kwan reproduces the condolence notice that Edison Chen prints in the Straits Times after Su Yi’s death in Rich People Problems, a notice that conspicuously promotes his wealth management services. At other times, Kwan shoots himself in the foot: we read some of Rachel’s diary entries in China Rich Girlfriend while she and Nicholas traipse around Paris with her long-lost brother and his, well, China Rich Girlfriend, bunny boiler Colette Bing. Rachel, who has a PhD in economics, has a decidedly uneconomical gushing journaling style, complete with uncharacteristic interior design notes and hashtags.

In June 2017, Singaporean poet and cultural critic Ng Yi Sheng wrote a series of Facebook posts with the hashtag #crazyrichasiansmistakes. In his posts, he pointed out that Kwan’s first book was rife with factual errors and cultural snafus. Gurkhas do not wear turbans, the way Singaporeans spell roti prata is “prata” and not “paratha,” and Rachel, the non-rich Asian-American character through whose eyes we often see this brassy new world, is a rare PhD student with no student debt, despite coming from a single-parent household. To nitpick on fact-checking errors is, however, to miss the point - the commercial point - of the enterprise. Singapore is not the intended audience of this trilogy, each book of which has been a New York Times bestseller. For the few things the novels get wrong about Singapore, they are dead-on about the consumption habits of Asia’s super-rich. Kwan knows his Jason Wu from his Thakoon Phanichgul, his Ferran Adria from his Thomas Keller, and his alkaline diet from his organic gluten-free one. His well-researched tomes are a new form of Orientalism: instead of lifting the Orient’s veil to reveal geishas and sword-fighting, he leads us into an orgy of consumption so excessive as to feel pornographic. Kwan’s novels transcend national boundaries to become transnational retail porn.

It is not my aim to criticize Crazy Rich Asians as serious literature. (If I were to do so, I would borrow William Deresiewicz’s description of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s tendency “to cede reality to the camera,” and cite Annie Dillard’s advice against trying to make the printed word compete with the movies on their ground - “You can describe beautiful faces, car chases...until you run out of words, and you will not approach the movies’ spectacle.”) No, my goal here is to examine the global phenomenon that the books have become in the world of entertainment, and what that says about our transnational consumer and visual culture.

Kwan was offered a movie deal for his first book before it was published, so it may be helpful to think of Crazy Rich Asians as a media franchise comprising books and films, not unlike what Marvel’s The Avengers and DC Comics’ The Justice League have become. With that in mind, I have taken the liberty of commissioning these sketches of some CRA characters, as models for possible live action figures in the future. You’re welcome, Warner Brothers.

SHANG SU YI

Shang Su Yi is Nicholas’s grandma and matriarch of the Shang household, who passes away in Rich People Problems. In one of her first appearances, she is described as “having steel-gray hair held in place by an ivory headband, and she was dressed simply in a rose-colored silk blouse, tailored cream trousers, and brown loafers.”

RACHEL CHU

The protagonist Nicholas’s Asian-American economics professor girlfriend, in one of the dresses she picks at Araminta Lee’s hen party in Samsara resort. This is described as one of several “summery cocktail dresses made out of the lightest silk batiste, which reminded her of the simple shift dresses Jacqueline Kennedy wore in the sixties.” The dresses are said to be by a Javanese designer who hand-paints all his dresses.

ASTRID LEONG

Nicholas’s ethereal and stylish cousin, in a Madam Gres linen dress in buttercup yellow with Grecian folds.

BERNARD TAI

Nicholas’s playboy ex-classmate from Hong Kong in a mint green chalk-striped blazer, orange paisley ascot, and yellow suede loafers.

Fashion Illustrations by Eelyn Tang. Singaporean designer Eelyn Tang worked in the banking industry before pursuing her lifelong passion for fashion design. She graduated from the Parsons School of Design in New York, and started the Bridal and Occasion wear label Love, Yu in 2009.

A few months ago, a friend alerted me to a Crazy Rich Asians open casting call. Trying to find out as much as I could about the film project, I decided to send in a CV and self-introductory video and try to insinuate myself into the film production. An email reply instructed me to tape myself reading sides by Rachel Chu. The first side was Rachel’s first scene - a game theory lecture she delivers to economics students. The second was a scene between her and her antagonistic prospective mother-in-law Eleanor Young, which takes place over a game of mahjong. This latter scene is not in the book. In the movie script, the dynamic between Rachel and Eleanor is nuanced yet clear. The film’s director John Cho worked with KL-born screenwriter Adele Lim on the screenplay. And he has said that Lim added her knowledge of Malaysian Chinese family dynamics to the mix. For this reason, and because Kwan’s prose is so highly steeped in visual culture, I believe the films will offer us more than the books did. As a side-note, the part I auditioned for went to Hollywood star Constance Wu from ABC’s Fresh Off the Boat.

In her book of essays The White Album, Joan Didion writes, “A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image.” For a long time now, Singapore has been identified internationally with the late Lee Kuan Yew, the country’s first Prime Minister, because he had obsessed about it in the way Didion described. Now his children are fighting over that legacy. The final book of Kevin Kwan’s trilogy, Rich People Problems could be the name of a movie based on the ongoing estate battle within the Lee family. The current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, the former head of telecommunications giant SingTel Lee Hsien Yang, and the head of the National Neurological Institute Lee Wei-Ling are fighting over the fate of their father’s estate, which comprises the family house on Oxley Road, Singapore. The Prime Minister wants to preserve the house as a symbol of the nation’s past but his siblings wish to sell it, in accordance to their father’s desire not to have any memorial erected to him. Singapore’s commentators agree that it is in the ruling People’s Action Party’s interest to preserve the house as a historical monument. After all, it is a crucial part of the party’s origin myth.

Rich People Problems also features an estate battle, which was likely to have been inspired by true events. Kwan says he began to write Crazy Rich Asians while caring for his dying father, and reminiscing with him about their time in Singapore. In the novel, the protagonist Nick is likewise driven to repair his relationship with his dying grandma Shang Su-Yi (pictured above in pink), who is not unlike Lee Kuan Yew in her iron rule, high-handedness, and disdain of flattery, even when she is its subject. After finding out that Su Yi’s palatial mansion Tyersall Park sheltered British and Australian officers during World War Two, Nick surmounts various obstacles posed by the mainland Chinese Colette Bing, securing a deal to preserve the sprawling estate as a heritage site. As Nicholas says near the end of the book, “This house should be a historic landmark, a heritage site for all Singaporeans. It’s far too important to be altered in any way, and I believe conservationists would argue it urgently needs to be preserved.” Nick has chosen to give up his wealth twice - the first time for Rachel, the second time for the public good. But it is doubtful if he has paid any real price, given that his life continues to be so privileged. As for the house on Oxley Road, one can only guess the outcome of the ongoing battle.

For all the criticisms that Singapore literati have directed against Crazy Rich Asians, this admittedly naive essayist is optimistic that the film will spark more international literary interest in Singapore—not just Lee Kuan Yew’s or Kevin Kwan’s Singapore, but Gopal Baratham’s Singapore, Hwee Hwee Tan’s Singapore, Audrey Chin’s Singapore, and many more. I provide, for free, a suggested reading list below.

SUGGESTED READING

Saint Jack by Paul Theroux
Little Ironies: Stories of Singapore by Catherine Lim
A Candle or the Sun by Gopal Baratham
Mammon Inc. by Hwee Hwee Tan
Corridors by Alfian Sa’at
Sarong Party Girl by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan
City of Small Blessings by Simon Tay
The Colin Cheong Collection
Ministry of Moral Panic by Amanda Lee Koe
The Inlet by Claire Tham
Kappa Quartet by Daryl Qilin Yam
State of Emergency by Jeremy Tiang

Stella Chung writes poetry and fiction. Her short story “DnD” was published in Singapore’s Romance Volume Two (Renaissance Publishing).