True to its title, Crazy Rich Asians features two hours of Asian people doing crazy and rich things. They purchase million-dollar-plus earrings; they fly helicopters to a bachelor party hosted on a floating container ship; and they host a wedding in an interior botanical garden, in which the bride walks down the aisle knee-deep in an artificial creek. Based upon Singaporean-American novelist Kevin Kwan’s 2013 novel, the film centers on a middle-class Chinese American economics professor, Rachel Chu, who travels back to her boyfriend Nick Young’s childhood home in Singapore and is introduced to his friends and their unfathomably opulent lifestyles. Its central tension pits Rachel’s American-bred individuality against the traditional, familial piety of Nick’s mother, Eleanor, who insists upon keeping the largest real estate and financial empire in the southeast Asian city-state within the families of the Singaporean elite.
The film has enjoyed substantial critical approval and been rewarded by box office numbers. For its champions, it succeeds in widening the Hollywood universe to include an underrepresented American minority group, portraying it in exceedingly optimistic terms. Many have echoed the director’s claim that “it’s not a movie, it’s a movement.” For its critics, the film is a disappointing foray into representation, obeying romantic-comedy formulae at the expense of saying something edgier about Asian-American life.
What is shared between these views is the choice to judge this film solely upon the basis of its portrayal of Asia, Asians, and Asian Americans, without a history or even acknowledgment of how they became so “crazy rich” in the first place. Without dismissing the film’s significance for so many, it should be recognized that the “Crazy Rich” and “Asian” in its title are performing different roles in the story. On the one hand, “Asian” provides political cover to “Crazy Rich,” as the film markets itself as a celebration of diversity rather than a celebration of the elite in an age of historic inequality, including within Asia and for Asian Americans themselves. On the other hand, neither is the “Crazy Rich” incidental, for to be wealthy is what marks the Asian characters as modern and relatable, even endearing.
This comes out clearly when Kwan’s story is contrasted against Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. That older film drew upon stories from the life of Tan’s mother, spent in Republican-era Shanghai (1911–1949), and it featured stock imagery from turn-of-the-century China: opium dens, concubinage and rape, arranged marriages, and foot binding. I can recall such scenes because they have been seared into my brain since I was 9 years old, dragged to the theater by my Taiwan-raised yet pro-China parents (an important distinction these days), and made slightly nauseous imagining the world my grandparents had left behind. The Joy Luck Club suggests that strong family bonds were what helped Chinese women weather and ultimately escape an oppressive, traditional society. Crazy Rich Asians turns that idea on its head. The conflict between Rachel and Eleanor conveys that strong family bonds are obstacles to empowerment for a new cosmopolitan Chinese diaspora that values individualism and romance. There is an implied historical process here, then, from old Asia as the antithesis of western individualism transformed dramatically into a new Asia embodying the future of capitalism.
The film has also come under criticism for presenting only a narrow slice of the Asian experience. Despite casting ethnic Japanese, Korean, Malay, and Filipino actors, it is ultimately rooted in the international history of the Chinese diaspora and its particular brands of capitalism. It also focuses exclusively upon the diaspora’s most elite segments.
But Crazy Rich Asians was written as something loosely inspired by Kwan’s own lived experiences, and the result is a story that has more nuance than most English-language works about the Chinese diaspora. Rather than chide him for not writing a more inclusive story, it seems more useful to ask why Kwan’s tale, based upon his idiosyncratic childhood as the scion of a Singaporean banking family, has resonated so strongly with a wider audience. What has it meant in the past, and what does it mean today, to celebrate Asian wealth? (...)
Afer independence in 1959, Singapore briefly attempted to unify with Malaysia to pursue a leftist strategy of national development via import substitution industrialization. But in 1965, Singapore separated again and joined a handful of small capitalist Asian countries in projects of export-led growth, inviting foreign investment, and promoting labor-intensive light industries to move up the global value chain. They were eventually dubbed the “four tiger” or “little dragon” economies: Taiwanese televisions, South Korean cars, Hong Kong wigs, and Singaporean semiconductors.
The “four tigers” era was deemed an economic miracle, marked by relatively egalitarian development and low unemployment. By the late ’70s and ’80s, they were facing diminishing returns. Rather than follow Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan into high-tech manufacturing, Singapore pivoted into invisible exports, offering those other economies the services of accounting, legal work, and management. The government also encouraged Singaporean capital to look abroad and invest in poorer Asian countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, and China, while it opened the doors for migrant workers from South Asia and other low-wage regions. It has since become a hub for international finance, but new growth has come at the cost of widening inequality.
In this sense, Singapore is not a new type of society. A century before Asian industrialization, similar patterns of inequality and patrimonial capitalism animated the celebrated novels about the European bourgeoisie, like Mansfield Park and Buddenbrooks. What those dense family dramas demonstrated was that capitalism is not just a static marketplace but also entails long processes of wealth accumulation marked by different phases and logics. A charitable reading for Crazy Rich Asians is that it is doing for the late 20th-century Chinese diaspora what those novels did for the bourgeoisie of Western Europe.
The most prominent family in Kwan’s story are the Youngs, whose original fortune dates back to Nick’s Chinese-born great-grandmother, presumably at the turn of the 20th century. The Youngs got in on the ground floor of an older, Victorian-era wealth, viewed by its caretakers as sociologically distinct from the newer elites found across the Asia-Pacific. The unstated irony is that owning lots of land in Singapore—and Malaysia and China, not to mention London and Hawaii—made the Young family this fabulously wealthy only because the rest of Asia, along with its nouveau riche, made the region so economically productive in recent decades. These tensions across geography and generation appear at the margins of the romantic plot. Nick’s cousin explains to Rachel that in Asia’s richest circles, you will find Hong Kongers, “Taiwan Tycoons,” and “Beijing Billionaires.” These families are not equals. In the novel, Eleanor initially mistakes Rachel for the heiress to a Taiwan plastics company, which Eleanor calculates as “very new money, made in the seventies and eighties, most likely.” A more palpable clash emerges from the story of Nick’s fabulously wealthy cousin, a real-estate investor, and her rocky marriage to a middle-class software engineer who frequently takes business trips to Shenzhen, China—Shenzhen, of course, a symbol of China’s own movement up the global value chain since the 1980s, having absorbed light industry and electronics manufacturing from the “four tigers.”
The film’s producers allegedly sought to minimize the book’s details of specific stereotypes between Asian groups, wary of alienating unfamiliar audience members. But the distinctions are inescapable throughout the story, and the story in fact would make little sense without them. (...)
All this is to say that for most observers in America by now, “Asia” has shed much of its earlier connotation as land of opium and concubinage, instead symbolizing the latest elite to ascend onto the world stage. For many American audiences, depictions of luxurious Singaporean parties will appear less as shocking revelation than as confirmation of a vague sense that the global economy is in transition. As satisfying as the Calthorpe hotel scene was, it is difficult to ignore just how much it mirrored “Yellow Peril” discourses by reductively portraying Chinese diasporic capitalists as a powerful and international economic force. It also points to the need to go beyond the very American, very management-inspired idea of “diversity” that would equate this film with “ethnic” movies centered on Black or Latinx American life. If modern racial categories have historically functioned as a way to make social inequality in market societies appear rooted in nature, then it follows that each of these groups has been typologized in different ways, owing to their different histories. The historic racist narrative of Black Americans was that they were lazy and undeserving of social mobility. The current narrative of Asian Americans is that they are too mobile, drilled in math and piano at an early age, hence unfair competition. This contrast in forms of racism should have been made clear, for instance, once journalists began openly to pit Black against Asian students in education policy debates. In this context, one wonders how the film will be received by the anti-globalization left or right. There is already a creeping sentiment of “Yellow Peril” in the US today, shared by all sides, suspicious of Chinese capital, labor, and college enrollments. The film borrows many of the same tropes but casts them in an innocent and humorous light. It is walking a fine line. Perhaps this is why Rachel must resolve the film’s encounters with the Singaporean capitalist sublime by insisting upon her individual desire, threatening to walk away from Nick’s family in the name of love, reassuring the audience that she may be Chinese by heritage but at heart remains unmistakably American.
The result is a certain ambivalence about Crazy Rich Asians and its reception. The film embodies an effort by the Asian diaspora to assert greater power in Hollywood, but many of them are already powerful economically, something that made both the story and its commercial success possible. It is fully understandable why the Asian diaspora is pushing for a formal equality with the European and American bourgeoisie before them; why the suggestion that Asians cannot also have the good life is a type of double standard or just textbook racism. But the substance of that equality takes the form of a highly destructive social behavior: endless wealth accumulation for its own sake, embodied in finance and real estate. So while the “four tigers” epoch successfully redistributed global wealth in a relatively egalitarian manner—as did other state-driven development projects across Asia, Africa, and the Americas—one fears that the future destiny of the new Asian bourgeoisie is to follow a by-now very old playbook of dynamic growth calcifying into a myopic old guard.
The film has enjoyed substantial critical approval and been rewarded by box office numbers. For its champions, it succeeds in widening the Hollywood universe to include an underrepresented American minority group, portraying it in exceedingly optimistic terms. Many have echoed the director’s claim that “it’s not a movie, it’s a movement.” For its critics, the film is a disappointing foray into representation, obeying romantic-comedy formulae at the expense of saying something edgier about Asian-American life.What is shared between these views is the choice to judge this film solely upon the basis of its portrayal of Asia, Asians, and Asian Americans, without a history or even acknowledgment of how they became so “crazy rich” in the first place. Without dismissing the film’s significance for so many, it should be recognized that the “Crazy Rich” and “Asian” in its title are performing different roles in the story. On the one hand, “Asian” provides political cover to “Crazy Rich,” as the film markets itself as a celebration of diversity rather than a celebration of the elite in an age of historic inequality, including within Asia and for Asian Americans themselves. On the other hand, neither is the “Crazy Rich” incidental, for to be wealthy is what marks the Asian characters as modern and relatable, even endearing.
This comes out clearly when Kwan’s story is contrasted against Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. That older film drew upon stories from the life of Tan’s mother, spent in Republican-era Shanghai (1911–1949), and it featured stock imagery from turn-of-the-century China: opium dens, concubinage and rape, arranged marriages, and foot binding. I can recall such scenes because they have been seared into my brain since I was 9 years old, dragged to the theater by my Taiwan-raised yet pro-China parents (an important distinction these days), and made slightly nauseous imagining the world my grandparents had left behind. The Joy Luck Club suggests that strong family bonds were what helped Chinese women weather and ultimately escape an oppressive, traditional society. Crazy Rich Asians turns that idea on its head. The conflict between Rachel and Eleanor conveys that strong family bonds are obstacles to empowerment for a new cosmopolitan Chinese diaspora that values individualism and romance. There is an implied historical process here, then, from old Asia as the antithesis of western individualism transformed dramatically into a new Asia embodying the future of capitalism.
The film has also come under criticism for presenting only a narrow slice of the Asian experience. Despite casting ethnic Japanese, Korean, Malay, and Filipino actors, it is ultimately rooted in the international history of the Chinese diaspora and its particular brands of capitalism. It also focuses exclusively upon the diaspora’s most elite segments.
But Crazy Rich Asians was written as something loosely inspired by Kwan’s own lived experiences, and the result is a story that has more nuance than most English-language works about the Chinese diaspora. Rather than chide him for not writing a more inclusive story, it seems more useful to ask why Kwan’s tale, based upon his idiosyncratic childhood as the scion of a Singaporean banking family, has resonated so strongly with a wider audience. What has it meant in the past, and what does it mean today, to celebrate Asian wealth? (...)
Afer independence in 1959, Singapore briefly attempted to unify with Malaysia to pursue a leftist strategy of national development via import substitution industrialization. But in 1965, Singapore separated again and joined a handful of small capitalist Asian countries in projects of export-led growth, inviting foreign investment, and promoting labor-intensive light industries to move up the global value chain. They were eventually dubbed the “four tiger” or “little dragon” economies: Taiwanese televisions, South Korean cars, Hong Kong wigs, and Singaporean semiconductors.
The “four tigers” era was deemed an economic miracle, marked by relatively egalitarian development and low unemployment. By the late ’70s and ’80s, they were facing diminishing returns. Rather than follow Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan into high-tech manufacturing, Singapore pivoted into invisible exports, offering those other economies the services of accounting, legal work, and management. The government also encouraged Singaporean capital to look abroad and invest in poorer Asian countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, and China, while it opened the doors for migrant workers from South Asia and other low-wage regions. It has since become a hub for international finance, but new growth has come at the cost of widening inequality.
In this sense, Singapore is not a new type of society. A century before Asian industrialization, similar patterns of inequality and patrimonial capitalism animated the celebrated novels about the European bourgeoisie, like Mansfield Park and Buddenbrooks. What those dense family dramas demonstrated was that capitalism is not just a static marketplace but also entails long processes of wealth accumulation marked by different phases and logics. A charitable reading for Crazy Rich Asians is that it is doing for the late 20th-century Chinese diaspora what those novels did for the bourgeoisie of Western Europe.
The most prominent family in Kwan’s story are the Youngs, whose original fortune dates back to Nick’s Chinese-born great-grandmother, presumably at the turn of the 20th century. The Youngs got in on the ground floor of an older, Victorian-era wealth, viewed by its caretakers as sociologically distinct from the newer elites found across the Asia-Pacific. The unstated irony is that owning lots of land in Singapore—and Malaysia and China, not to mention London and Hawaii—made the Young family this fabulously wealthy only because the rest of Asia, along with its nouveau riche, made the region so economically productive in recent decades. These tensions across geography and generation appear at the margins of the romantic plot. Nick’s cousin explains to Rachel that in Asia’s richest circles, you will find Hong Kongers, “Taiwan Tycoons,” and “Beijing Billionaires.” These families are not equals. In the novel, Eleanor initially mistakes Rachel for the heiress to a Taiwan plastics company, which Eleanor calculates as “very new money, made in the seventies and eighties, most likely.” A more palpable clash emerges from the story of Nick’s fabulously wealthy cousin, a real-estate investor, and her rocky marriage to a middle-class software engineer who frequently takes business trips to Shenzhen, China—Shenzhen, of course, a symbol of China’s own movement up the global value chain since the 1980s, having absorbed light industry and electronics manufacturing from the “four tigers.”
The film’s producers allegedly sought to minimize the book’s details of specific stereotypes between Asian groups, wary of alienating unfamiliar audience members. But the distinctions are inescapable throughout the story, and the story in fact would make little sense without them. (...)
All this is to say that for most observers in America by now, “Asia” has shed much of its earlier connotation as land of opium and concubinage, instead symbolizing the latest elite to ascend onto the world stage. For many American audiences, depictions of luxurious Singaporean parties will appear less as shocking revelation than as confirmation of a vague sense that the global economy is in transition. As satisfying as the Calthorpe hotel scene was, it is difficult to ignore just how much it mirrored “Yellow Peril” discourses by reductively portraying Chinese diasporic capitalists as a powerful and international economic force. It also points to the need to go beyond the very American, very management-inspired idea of “diversity” that would equate this film with “ethnic” movies centered on Black or Latinx American life. If modern racial categories have historically functioned as a way to make social inequality in market societies appear rooted in nature, then it follows that each of these groups has been typologized in different ways, owing to their different histories. The historic racist narrative of Black Americans was that they were lazy and undeserving of social mobility. The current narrative of Asian Americans is that they are too mobile, drilled in math and piano at an early age, hence unfair competition. This contrast in forms of racism should have been made clear, for instance, once journalists began openly to pit Black against Asian students in education policy debates. In this context, one wonders how the film will be received by the anti-globalization left or right. There is already a creeping sentiment of “Yellow Peril” in the US today, shared by all sides, suspicious of Chinese capital, labor, and college enrollments. The film borrows many of the same tropes but casts them in an innocent and humorous light. It is walking a fine line. Perhaps this is why Rachel must resolve the film’s encounters with the Singaporean capitalist sublime by insisting upon her individual desire, threatening to walk away from Nick’s family in the name of love, reassuring the audience that she may be Chinese by heritage but at heart remains unmistakably American.
The result is a certain ambivalence about Crazy Rich Asians and its reception. The film embodies an effort by the Asian diaspora to assert greater power in Hollywood, but many of them are already powerful economically, something that made both the story and its commercial success possible. It is fully understandable why the Asian diaspora is pushing for a formal equality with the European and American bourgeoisie before them; why the suggestion that Asians cannot also have the good life is a type of double standard or just textbook racism. But the substance of that equality takes the form of a highly destructive social behavior: endless wealth accumulation for its own sake, embodied in finance and real estate. So while the “four tigers” epoch successfully redistributed global wealth in a relatively egalitarian manner—as did other state-driven development projects across Asia, Africa, and the Americas—one fears that the future destiny of the new Asian bourgeoisie is to follow a by-now very old playbook of dynamic growth calcifying into a myopic old guard.
by Andrew Liu, n+1 | Read more:
Image: Crazy Rich Asians
