Why can’t author Kevin Kwan go home?
If there’s anyone the government of Singapore should thank for a renewed global interest in this island nation as a tourist destination, it’s Kevin Kwan.
The Singapore-born author wrote the best-selling comedy-of-manners novel “Crazy Rich Asians,” which has been transformed into a blockbuster movie that presents the 278-squaremile Southeast Asian country as a tourist’s paradise of luxury hotels, gleaming high-rises, delectable street food and tropical beach resorts. But as much as Kwan’s 2013 book is about people who seemingly avoid local politics by insulating themselves in a bubble of wealth and melodrama, the writer is aware that his native country has a dark reality. There are reasons, he said in an interview this week, that he has lived in the United States for 23 years.
It also turns out that he is a wanted man because of one of Singapore’s stringent government regulations. Kwan is accused in Singapore of avoiding the country’s compulsory military service and faces up to three years in prison were he to return home.
That’s the reason Kwan didn’t join Jon Chu, the film’s Palo Alto-reared director, and stars at the film’s premiere Tuesday night in Singapore, Page Six reported.
As if to remind Kwan of his “violation,” Singapore’s ministry of defense issued a statement Wednesday saying he had avoided national service and stayed away from the country without the required permission, the New York Times reported. Kwan,
44, left Singapore, a former British colony, when he was 11 and moved with his family to Houston.
Kwan acknowledged that “Crazy Rich Asians” and the other two novels in the “Crazy Rich Asians” trilogy deal with characters who exist in “a world that doesn’t really participate in these issues,” agreeing that they live “in a bubble.”
He said that Singaporeans who want the right to express themselves politically or personally either end up leaving the country for good, like he did, or they live part time in other places if they can manage it.
“Or they go and party on yachts in international waters,” he said, as the characters do in the book and in the film.
After earning $35 million for its opening, fiveday weekend, director Chu announced that a sequel is in the works, the Hollywood Reporter said. Warner Bros. has the option for Kwan’s entire trilogy, which includes 2015’s “China Rich Girlfriend” and 2017’s “Rich People Problems.”