And most of the hateful specimens in “China Rich Asians” are social-climbing husbands who want their wives to be more decorative, even if the men are using the wives’ fortunes to make themselves look important. Of course, we know the rules of this game: The more hateful a character, the more fun he is to read about. He wants to explore their values, if that’s the word: It seems that everyone is flagrantly competitive, always boastful, with no sense of shame where conspicuous consumption is concerned. He wants to fill it with lots of other, much more laughable new-money specimens, and to drop the brand names of everything they wear, eat, envy or acquire. In fact, if he didn’t have a wife who won’t have anything to do with Rachel, this would be a much shorter book. She is “China rich,” with those words used together as a single modifying phrase.Īnd it is “Kwan crazy” for her father to accept her instantly, even though he never knew she existed. He turns out to be - you might want to sit down for this - such a wealthy and important Chinese politician that Rachel isn’t just rich. Rachel has never known who her father was, but this is the book in which she finds out. They are Nick Young, a humble New York University professor who comes from such a powerful, venerable family that he stands to inherit an estate in the heart of Singapore that’s the size of Central Park, and Rachel Chu, who was raised in the United States by her Chinese mother. “Crazy Rich Asians” and “China Rich Girlfriend” have two nice, sensible main characters, just so these books can’t be called totally insulting. They join in a single shared pursuit: watching in horror as their youngest generations squander money in ways so staggering that Western show-offs look like pikers by comparison. Kwan has done well to invent him for “China Rich Girlfriend,” the second volume in what has been projected as a gossipy, good-humored trilogy that will follow the richest old families of Singapore, Hong Kong and a few from mainland China. His Asian readers may get his à clef references best, but for those of us who have to check out his claims, it barely matters whether Ming Ka-Ching is the real name of Hong Kong’s second-richest man. Kwan with a knowing attitude and all of Asia at his disposal.
A whole money-wasting continent had been milked dry.īut along came Mr.
There was nothing new to be said about crass New Yorkers, Texans, Hollywood types or even tech billionaires, whose excesses weren’t usually that showy. The vulgar rich had taken over reality TV, fictionalized TV (which seemed tepid by comparison), the occasional freakish documentary (like “The Queen of Versailles”) and the kind of fiction that heard its sell-by knell when “ Bergdorf Blondes” and all its copycats came along.
Kevin Kwan’s brand of giddy wealth porn arrived in 2013 with “ Crazy Rich Asians,” not a moment too soon to rescue a worn-out and useless genre.
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