NEW FILM ERA

Singapore’s oldest banks. One of his great-uncles was a doctor who helped invent Tiger Balm.

Even decades later, Kwan can still picture the opulent world of which he had been a part. “There were all these beautiful scenes from my childhood that really are coated in amber.”

Kwan is adamant that the novel, which has since become part of a widely popular trilogy, does not intend to glorify wealth. He said he aimed to give readers a glimpse into an otherwise exclusive way of life that many, especially those in Western cultures, aren’t even aware actually exists.

“I really did see this as an ethnography of a culture and a species of people,” he said. “It is meant to be deeply satirical of this world... I’m putting a lens on it and allowing people to make their own decisions about how they feel about this.”

Writing with a Western audience in mind, Kwan said he had framed the narrative around an Asian-American who visited Asia for the first time. He didn’t think people living in Asia would be interested in reading about “crazy rich” Asians because “they have their own stories; this is old hat for them”.

“I felt like the perfect vehicle was to the tell the story through eyes of an Asian-American because that’s the perfect entry point into this world,” he said. “You think you’re Asian. You think you know what you’re experiencing and then you realise it’s nothing like what you thought.”

Despite focusing the novel on an Asian-American experience, Kwan noticed that the demographic was not among his novel’s original fan base.

“I felt there was a reticence towards my book from Asian-Americans and justifiably so; I never took offence at it,” he said. “It is kind of a provocative title and I think Asian-Americans are so used to the disappointment of anything portraying their culture that’s not done right, not accurate. Naturally, there was a deep suspicion at first when this book first came out.”

Instead, his early adopters were members of the New York media, people in the fashion industry and “the Upper East Side crowd”, he said. Kwan recalled one “brilliant” promotional strategy in which copies of the book were placed on every seat of the Hampton Jitney – “the bus service that every Manhattanite who doesn’t have his own private plane takes,” he calls it.

Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour was also one of the first people to champion the book, excerpting and publishing part of it in an issue of the magazine. “That was monumental,” Kwan said.

Perhaps even more monumental, however, is that Kwan’s book has since garnered widespread support from the Asian-American community and is now at the centre of a movement to advance diversity in Hollywood, an industry known for not casting Asians in lead roles and casting white actors as non-white characters. With its allAsian cast and Asian-American leads, the Crazy Rich Asians movie aims to prove that Asian actors and narratives centred on Asian or Asian-American experiences are bankable.

Beneath the depictions of glitz and glam was a story that rang true for many Asian-Americans, Nancy Wang Yuen, chair of Biola University’s sociology department, said. The book and film captured the experience of an Asian-American who felt like a “fish out of water in Asia”, Yuen said. “The Hollywood trope is to cast a white person as an ‘outsider’ in Asia, but I think that they don’t understand Asian-Americans also feel like an outsider in Asia,” she said. “We are every bit as American as a white person, especially if we were born and raised in the United States.”

The process of adapting the novel for the screen began roughly five years ago, long before the movement really started taking shape, Kwan said, adding that the excitement the film had generated was largely because of “the luck of timing”.

There’s a lot riding on this twohour Meet the Parents-esque romantic comedy – namely the hopes of more than 17 million Asian-Americans who have been repeatedly let down by movies and TV shows – and Kwan knows it. When asked how he felt about the possibility that Crazy Rich Asians could be the turning point for representation in Hollywood, he was at a loss for words. “I don’t even know how to answer that question, that’s just way too much pressure. This movie cannot be everything for everyone,” he said, acknowledging that the film had faced criticism, including its failure to represent a broader Asian experience.

But, Kwan said he never meant his book or the movie to depict the “entire entirety of the Asian experience; rather it is a specific movie about a specific world”.

While some of the details such as a living room with a sunken pool full of baby sharks seem too fantastical to be real, they are