Kevin Kwan’s 2013 novel Crazy Rich Asians caught my eye upon its release, if only for its flashy cover and provocative title (are the Asians themselves crazy, or just crazy-rich? Can you have the latter without the former?). I admit I didn’t think much more about it until I heard the book was being made into a movie, coming to theatres in summer 2018. Remembering that after Catwoman (2004) and Electra (2005) both tanked at the box office, we didn’t see another female-led superhero movie for twelve years, I figured I would have to show up and support this all-Asian cast and help it become a true Hollywood hit, for the sake of Asians on the big-screen if not for Kwan’s story itself. And since I rarely sit down to a film adaptation without reading the source novel first, I decided to give this crazy rich wild ride a go.
Crazy Rich Asians propels us into an elite and elusive class of people that are often (entirely?) excluded from Western media and storytelling — the ludicrously wealthy Singaporean Chinese who had the “good sense” to get themselves and their money out of China before succumbing to Communism. As a North-American Born Chinese reader whose own ancestors hail from the same locale those of our protagonist, Rachel Chu, I felt I might fit perfectly into Kwan’s ideal reader demographic. Rachel, the ABC (American-Born Chinese) girlfriend of Nick Young, Singapore’s most eligible bachelor and heir to a vast fortune, travels across the globe to meet Nick’s family without any preparation for pseudo-royalty she encounters there or for the lengths to which they will go to sabotage their romance. As a young professional of Asian descent who identifies more as a Canadian than of any other cultural ethnicity, I could empathize with Rachel’s wild journey into an experience of Asian-ness previously unknown to her. The many generational and regional preconceptions woven into the story of what it means to be a “certain type” of Asian stood out as the most interesting aspects of Kwan’s novel: Rachel’s Millenial and American expectations of warm family relationships, her mother Kerry’s expectations of traditional parenthood harkening to her upbringing in Mainland China, her friend Peik Lin’s experience with Singaporean wealth (an experience that, she will learn, is not all-encompassing), and of course, her boyfriend Nick’s desensitized oblivion to the novelty of his family’s lifestyle.
I wanted to appreciate Kwan’s perspective, as an author whose own cultural upbringing (Singaporean descent, living in Manhattan) mirrors that of his characters, however, instead of appreciating the insights in his social commentary, I found myself bored by the predictable direction of his conclusions, a few of which including an overall message that money corrupts and that infinite money corrupts infinitely. The eponymous Crazy Rich Asians are presented as ruthless, cruel, shallow, selfish, and manipulative, with few exceptions. Entire narrative unfolds on an extreme end of superlatives that quickly becomes tiresome and exhausting. While Kwan’s critique of wealth and excess may be heartfelt, his decision not to explore the psychologies of these characters in any real depth makes for a novel that is equally shallow.
Speaking of shallow, Crazy Rich Asians was utterly void of character development, a quality I can rarely abide in a novel, especially one of this length. Every character, including the protagonist, is two-dimensional and does not change in any significant way over the novel’s 400+ pages. The tome’s pseudo-epic style is presumably a deliberate choice; however, if the sheer size and scale of the Singaporean social network and their wealth is intended primarily to overwhelm, that could have been accomplished in far fewer pages. Paragraphs upon paragraphs devoted to describing items (of clothing, furniture, jewelry, and architecture) are poor substitutes for plot. Though I appreciate Kwan’s attempt to convey the intricacy and complexity of elite Singaporean society, the quantity of characters that are so painstakingly introduced in the book’s first 200 pages have little meaningful significance to the rest of the novel. For example, several characters fulfill identical narrative roles (such as Rachel’s romantic rivals, Mandy and Francesca), and vanish from the story after a scant few appearances.
I’ve gotten into more than a few disagreements with friends about the various merits (or lack thereof) of a book based on my personal aversion to stories that don’t engage with their characters’ psychologies. I find it nearly impossible to engage with stories that privilege events and actions without exploring the characters’ motivations or internal lives — without the human element, what incentive is there for me to become invested in the narrative? Why should I care what happens these people? Perhaps this deeply personal and emotional approach to reading puts me in the minority, but I sincerely doubt it, and I balk at the audacity of authors who ask me to engage with characters for 400+ pages who give me nothing of themselves in return for my time.
Kwan comes close to plumbing the depths of Eleanor Young, Rachel’s imposing and conniving potential mother-in-law. Eleanor holds a potentially fascinating and contradictory position as Rachel’s chief antagonist who is also beloved by her chief ally, Nick. While there is room here for delightfully hyperbolic drama à la Monster-in-Law (a superficial potential that is not even satisfyingly exploited in its own right), Eleanor hints at profoundly intriguing layers to her characterization when Nick forcefully denounces her for her meddling. Though the reader has only witnessed Eleanor seemingly acting out of vicious and shallow self-interest and classism, she laments to her companion that her child does not appreciate her lifetime of self-sacrifice on his behalf, allowing herself to take the brunt of her relatives ill-will while maneuvering Nick into familial positions that garnered him nothing but love and admiration. Though she never wanted for material wealth, Eleanor sacrificed a great deal of emotional currency in her goal of securing her son’s future. While this exchange reveals a great capacity for complexity and empathy in Eleanor as an aged, female villain — not to mention profound potential for establishing universal themes of inter-generational discord, gendered family dynamics, and cross-cultural burdens of leveraging for female social power — Kwan barely devotes a paragraph to this aspect of Eleanor’s character, which is even dismissed by her conversation partner. Kwan might be deliberately refusing to engage in order to emphasize the wealthy class’s superficiality, but that does not, to me, make for an interesting story, especially not a story of this length.
Even our heroes are not spared this cursory, two-dimensional treatment, as Kwan devotes himself to the expositional tactic of telling without showing (a practice I despise). Rachel Chu, the protagonist, is a stereotypical Model Immigrant success story, with little else to her character than the facts of her upbringing (a feature she shares with every other character as well). As the child of a long-suffering immigrant from Guangdong Province who escaped an oppressive marriage in Shanghai to slave away in working-class America, Rachel applies her mother’s strong work ethic to her education and works her way up the professional ladder to become a high-ranking Manhattan professional and poster-child for the American Dream. While these qualities make Rachel a likeable and relatable character in a generic sort of way, they are also boring as hell. Rachel, then, comes across as less of a character in her right than a wooden placeholder for Kwan’s presumably middle-class American reader.
The POV character Astrid Leong, unlike her Crazy Rich relatives, is presented as a sympathetic character despite having more money than God. She is universally beloved within her universe, and I suppose the reader is supposed to love, or at least root for, her, too, though Kwan provides us with no reasons why this should be. The text suggests she is a fundamentally “good” person, but does not give Astrid any interests or hobbies other than spending boundless money on haute couture and attending charity balls. In failing to flesh out any of the characters, Astrid is practically indistinguishable from her odious relatives, making it very hard to see why we shouldn’t lump her in with all the rest.
Finally, Rachel’s love interest Nick, also garners sympathy for his decision to work for a living as a tenured professor in Manhattan (horrors!). Nick’s obliviousness to his family’s exceptional circumstances and his failure to mentally prepare Rachel for what awaits her in Singapore (not to mention his failure to foresee how his family would treat her) present Nick as inconsiderate instead of sweetly charming. After the requisite trial by fire, Rachel and Nick’s relationship is saved by the grace of a grand gesture (a gesture that, once again, takes the form of an excessive display of wealth), despite Rachel’s firm and repeated requests for privacy and distance from Nick and his overbearing world. These are not attractive traits, and yet Nick is packaged as the narrative’s white knight. The reader is led to believe that Nick is one of the only members of his family to have missed out on the family’s snobbery gene, but gives no insight into what experiences made him such an exception. Alas, another missed opportunity for layered characterization.
The book’s sole moment of character development and catharsis (in which wilting flower Fiona rebelliously screams at her tyrannical husband on a staircase) is dropped like a bomb, then never discussed again. As Crazy Rich Asians serves as the first volume in a trilogy, it’s possible that Kwan is using this novel to set up his cast for meaningful development in the sequels, however, that absence of development and characterization in these pages makes it an exhausting and unsatisfying read.
HOWEVER the things that made this book a rather tedious novel would, I believe, work in its favour on the big screen, namely its richly detailed visual aesthetic, a simplistic plot that adheres to tried-and-true, crowd-pleasing formulae, a protagonist favourable biased toward Hollywood’s middle-class American audience, and characters who are vaguely likable even when they are given little to say or do. With the right cast to pull it off, the Crazy Rich Asians movie has the potential to be a thrilling and sexy foray into an elite realm of scandal and couture in the vein of 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada.
I’m still committed to seeing the film in theatres, but I won’t be reading the sequels anytime soon.
Sip of the day: Nyx “Chocolate Crepe” on a travel mug of dark coffee.
Lipstick On My Teacup 