A truth universally acknowledged in East Asia is that a wealthy married woman with ample free time is in want of a worthy adversary. Colloquially referred to as a tai tais – the Chinese equivalent of Britain’s WAGs – these women have a towering presence in the social lives of the upper-middle class, the apparent indolence of their days matched only by the intensity of their work as professional social gatekeepers, moderators, and guardians to the business empires largely carved out by their husbands. When Eleanor Young (Michelle Yeoh), wife to a Singaporean property magnate and Queen Mother tai tai to rule them all, meets her beloved son’s new girlfriend, a spirited, Chinese-American economics professor with no apparent title to her name – well, it’s time to get out the pitchfork, disguised in the usual rich-lady faux-niceness.
Jon M. Chu’s Crazy Rich Asians opens as Eleanor enters an elegant hotel in London on a rainy cold night in 1990 with her children. On discovering that the family are Chinese, the hotel clerk refuses to show the family to their room and suggests instead that they instead find lodgings in Chinatown. Unceremoniously ejected, she makes a quick phone call to her husband, huddled with her children in a quintessentially English red telephone booth while the rain beats down on the street outside. She then walks back into the hotel. The deal’s been done – the hotel is now under her possession. “Do get a mop,” she snaps at the stupefied clerk.
In 2018, 28 years on, Eleanor has lost none of her bite. Matriarch to the ultra-rich Young family, she eagerly awaits the arrival of her son, Nick (Henry Golding), who has since left Singapore for New York, where he lives a lowkey life playing basketball at the local YMCA. She hopes to convince him to come back for good, but there’s one big problem: the relentlessly active tai tai gossip grapevine has informed her that he’s bringing home a girlfriend. This is every tai tai’s nightmare: to send your children abroad for a Western education, as any sensible upper-middle class Chinese parent would do, and then lose them to the unstoppable force of Western culturalisation, exemplified in the form of an unconventionally brash and free-spirited boyfriend or girlfriend who doesn’t even speak good Chinese. When she meets Rachel Chu (Constance Wu) – a smart, raised-by-a-poor-single-mother economics professor who is too roundly American to subscribe to neo-Confucian ideals of putting family first – she knows she’s met her equal, and her threat. How will Nick, serious American girlfriend in tow, ever agree to move back to Singapore now?
As the first Hollywood film to feature an all-Asian cast since The Joy Luck Club in 1993, Crazy Rich Asians has faced critical scrutiny and commercial pressures that would not apply to any other ‘ordinary’ Hollywood rom-com. Is it really meaningful diversity, some ask, if it explores the stories of the inordinately wealthy? Others have expressed concern about stereotyping all Asians as lavish, morally blighted denizens of extreme wealth. And then there’s the question of who isn’t there, or who is shunted to the side – South Asian characters are sparsely featured in the film, and those who are present are overwhelmingly portrayed as servants. The inevitable trap of conversations around ‘representation’ today, after all, is that your cultural product can never just be a cultural product in itself and the characters can never just be characters. The work is always going to be answerable to concerns about whether or not these are the right depictions, the right characters, and the right concerns.
As critics of Crazy Rich Asians charge, the film is indeed an unfettered spectacle on the gross excesses of late capitalist wealth, featuring devastatingly self-absorbed individuals who think little about the inevitably ugly origins of their riches. When Rachel meets Nick’s family and friends back in Singapore, she sees them entangled in a lavish display of high-flung materialism. Nick attends a bachelor party for his best friend, Collin Pang (Chris Pang) that takes place aboard a private boat in the middle of international waters, with bikini-clad Miss Universe contestants flown in to serve as human décor. While their childhood friend, Bernard Tsai (Jimmy O. Yang), who organised the night, loves the attention – and the ladies! – it’s made clear that Collin and Nick, as ‘good rich guys’, do not approve; not every billionaire bachelor is evil! A tai tai dotes on her tiny pedigree dogs, stupidly named ‘Astor’ and ‘Rockefeller’. There’s a fake river at Collin’s 40-million dollar wedding. But perhaps the most unbelievable element of all is Rachel Chu’s breezy, wow that’s wild but fun! reaction to it all. You might think that an economics professor born to a working-class mother might have a more complicated response.
And yet, maybe this is the point. To offer an untimely tale about the perversely redemptive uses of capital, centred around individuals whose self-images depend almost entirely on flashing the cash (It is telling that Kevin Kwan, the author of Crazy Rich Asians, himself a renegade New York-dwelling child of extremely wealthy Singaporeans, partly bases the novel on his personal experiences.) Singapore, in this Crazy Rich imagination, serves as a hyper-neoliberal quasi-Disneyland, where a suffocating cultural authoritarianism meets an almost fundamentalist zeal for the free market. And it’s where, importantly, the old-moneyed aristocracy still negotiate the racial politics of colonialism, bolstering their domestic cultural capital through the relentless acquisition of Western signifiers – Vogue photoshoots; Oxford degrees, and literally buying out racist London hotels. During a particularly heated couple’s argument, Rachel asks Nick whether his snooty family sees her as lesser because she didn’t go to an English boarding school. Then there is, as always, the blighted human collateral behind the pleasures of extreme wealth. In the closed world of these crazy rich Asians, maids and security guards – almost always from South Asia, as they are in real life – do the hard behind-the-scenes, thankless labour that make the effortless indulgence of the 1% possible. Is this a harmless escapist fantasy, or former insider’s self-critique?
Representation is important, but it is never the end. The risk of ‘representation discourse’ is that it can flatten films to the mere plane of surface-level signifiers. Beyond the question of who is on-screen and who is not, it is imperative to ask and what are these people trying to say? The answer is always more complicated than “I’m here, and it’s good that I am”. For the general public, Crazy Rich Asians is an age-old tale of boy meets girl. But look a little closer and you’ll see an uncomfortably effusive but occasionally enlightening image of crazy rich Asia, ever-embedded in the relentless acquisition of hard wealth while chasing the softer cultural capital of Western signifiers of prestige. And despite all the luxuries that come with wealth, the results can be quite tragic. It is the story of sending your children halfway across the world so you can boast about your Etonian son to your fellow tai tais at cocktail parties and the ensuing cultural clash when, having suckled at the teat of Western liberal individualism for too long, your boarding school-educated sons and daughters are too swept up by the exhortations of their private school teachers to follow their dreams and be that guitarist to listen to your dated Confucian ideals of filial piety. Crazy Rich Asians is a romcom. But, as Eleanor Young and Rachel Chu sit head-to-head at the mahjong table, engaged in a battle of wits to see who comes out of the Chinese strategy game the better – American economic game theory versus received Singaporean wisdom – the subtext quietly floats to the top. It’s also a tale of civilisation struggle mediated through the world-ending and world-creating power of capital.
There were two things that were jarring about watching Crazy Rich Asians in 2018. First, was the presence of characters who looked like me, talked like me, ate my same food, and were also subject to the world-shattering power of Chinese parental guilt. Second was the utterly shameless celebration of wealth and all its portents, something that seemed a little dated, a little too Gossip Girl, for 2018 and all its righteous anger about how billionaires have ruined our world. But the second could not exist without the first and I understand why Crazy Rich Asians opens with that racist hotel scene. Capitalism has a way of adapting to the winds of history; in this case, cold hard cash has become the bulwark of a moneyed East Asia against deeply entrenched racism. You can really buy your way into elite respect, no matter how many other less wealthy bodies, communities, and countries have to fall in order for you to get there. This is the accidental genius of Crazy Rich Asians; it shows how wealth, in the end, makes fools of us all.
Rebecca Liu is a freelance writer living in London. She is an editor for Kings Review, and tweets at @becbecliuliu
