Kevin Kwan satirises the lives of Asia's crazy rich

THE combination of absurd wealth and the Asian custom of flaunting fortune has made Kevin Kwan's satirical novel a hit, and the talk of Hollywood.

Kevin Kwan

RICH kids deliriously detached from the concerns of working people, flaunting absurd symbols of wealth, adhering to codes of behaviour that make them the unwitting playthings of fate's cruel ironies ... if you thought 19th century England provided rich material for satire, you haven't been paying attention to the Asian century.

You could be forgiven for not noticing, though. Most of this wealth exists deep behind the secure walls of exclusive resorts and residential enclaves in Macau, Singapore, Shenzhen and Hong Kong.

If you do cross paths with Asia’s absurdly rich, it is as they are being ushered past the high-rollers room to the secret inner sanctum of a Macau casino, or as they alight from a G5 into a fleet of Rolls-Royces waiting for them on the tarmac.

Now you can also find them, in all their glorious vanity, in the pages of Kevin Kwan’s cracking novel, Crazy Rich Asians, a story about competitive wealth, tradition and hypocrisy told with an expert satirist's combination of affection and astonishment. It is a world where a G5 can be referred to as a "tin can", spending money is "better than sex" and the rebellion of youth is magnified by the arrogance of privilege.

The novel follows Nick Young as he takes his girlfriend Rachel Chu home to Singapore for a friend's wedding. Rachel is unaware of quite how wealthy Nick's family is, nor how appallingly judgmental this makes them.

One of Kwan’s main focuses is the distinction between old and new Asian money. The former is discreet while the latter succumbs to the deep Asian desire to display or even exaggerate one’s net worth.

“In China and other parts of Asia they will spend all their money on whatever they can show off,” he says as we sit outside Single Origin café in Surry Hills, Sydney.

“They live in these tiny little pigeonholes, but the moment they leave the apartment they slap on the Patek Philippe and get into the Jaguar. It’s all for show. It’s human nature when you first make your big fortune to want to show off a bit. I don’t begrudge that whatsoever.”

Kwan, who moved with his family from Singapore to the US aged 11, has a way of softening some vowel sounds, so that “whatsoever” sounds like “whatsoevah”. It is a part of a casual, gregarious and curious persona - the perfect cover for a writer - that, on the surface, reveals little about his own background. His American accent might be Manhattan or San Clemente, his smartly casual ensemble (white jeans, dark shirt and black designer jacket) might be Fifth Avenue or Orchard Road.

As it turns out, his bling-free style is simply the discretion of old Asian money, which also explains how he avoided the conventional career choices that most of his Singaporean peers were forced to follow.

“My father came from old money,” he says. “There was less of an expectation for the children to earn a living.” His father studied architecture at Sydney University, his aunts became artists. Kwan and his siblings were whisked to the US so they could pursue equally creative occupations beyond Singapore.

“I think he saw early that I wasn’t going to be a doctor or lawyer,” he says. “In Singapore in the 70s and 80s you either went straight academic or you were f..ked. So he very smartly took his kids out of that.”

Australia plays a few cameo roles in Crazy Rich Asians. The most significant scene is when the protagonist, Nick Young, bails from a bucks weekend with hookers and cocaine aboard a yacht outside Macau to fly to Uluru, via chopper and private jet, for the supposedly best flat white in the world.

Kwan is obviously affectionate towards Australia, a country he visits often, and where he wrote a chunk of the novel while staying with friends in Cremorne Point, Sydney.

He says the book’s sequel, which he has already begun, will reveal even more about Asia’s combined future, and the hangover it is destined to endure.

“Things are going to be more of a challenge than people think,” he says. “There is a huge bubble happening in mainland China. When that pops it’s going to trickle down and affect the rest of Southeast Asia. There will be an enormous contraction. You’ve had almost more than a decade of complete growth, and things have to catch up with themselves at some point.”

Not that Kwan looks particularly concerned. The next phase of Crazy Rich Asians is likely to pay off handsomely for him. Hollywood began courting him before he’d even finished the book, and the fight for the film rights was apparently intense.

He has chosen Hunger Games producer Nina Jacobson. “She has an amazing track record of taking books and transforming them into films in original ways,” he says.

Speculation about the cast has already begun, but it is the roles they will fill that is most important to Kwan. A Hollywood film with an all-Asian cast will be another step in the process of redefining Asians as more than bit players in life's drama, Kwan says.

“The book has really hit a nerve, especially for Asian North Americans,” he says. “You never see empowered, sophisticated, sexy Asians. A Canadian reader emailed me and said, 'thank you for writing a book where you gave an Asian guy a penis!' He said he could read the book and relate to it as a confident, empowered person, not just someone who works in IT.”

Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan (Allen & Unwin, $30)

Twitter: @fredpawle