A few years later, American novelist Tom Wolfe was seen to have captured the zeitgeist of New York City, with his novel about “Masters of the Universe” and their “social x-ray” consorts in his Bonfire of the Vanities.
Now a Singapore-born, UK-educated New Yorker named Kevin Kwan has written what may be modern Singapore’s answer to these earlier novels, with Crazy Rich Asians.
The novel, published in June by the US publisher Doubleday, tells the story of three super-wealthy Chinese/Singaporean families, as the heir to one of the families’ fortunes brings his ABC (American-born Chinese) girlfriend home to Singapore from New York to attend with him the social wedding of the season.
Although the book has been out less than two months – and for now at least is not even available in the UK except as a download – a Hollywood production company has acquired the rights to turn it into a film, it was revealed on Wednesday.
Reviewers have likened Crazy Rich Asians to "vintage Jackie Collins and early Evelyn Waugh", and described it as "a Chinese Dallas meets Pride and Prejudice". Janet Maslin, the New York Times reviewer, said it offered "refreshing nouveau voyeurism to readers who long ago burned out on American and English aspirational fantasies".
"The wealth of the book is in the detail – of the personalities, the places, the clothes, and the colours of Singapore," added Louise Rosario of the South China Morning Post.
'Singlish'
Perhaps of greatest interest to many of those in the expatriate community who either live in Singpore or spend time there, Crazy Rich Asians brims with Cantonese, Indian, Malay and Singlish words and expressions that expats typically pick up, or in some cases simply overhear, as they go about their lives there. Dozens of these are explained in footnotes throughout the book.
These include alamak (an expression of shock or exasperation, like "oh dear" or "oh my God"); gum suey ah (Cantonese for "how rotten!"); ang mor gau sai ("red-haired dog sh**"); giam siap (Hokkien for "stingy", "miserly"); and dato (a Malaysian honorific, similar to a British knighthood; the wife of a dato is a datin).
Sum toong ah, readers learn, is Cantonese for “my heart aches”, while a "Chuppie" is a Chinese Yuppie (young, upwardly-mobile professional). The word "lah" is used frequently at the end of sentences to add emphasis, as in "Sorry to wake you, lah".
James Clavell did much the same thing in Noble House, peppering it with Hong Kong slang that was new to most of that book's non-Hong Kong-resident readers.
Some of the other nuggets to be found in Crazy Rich Asians:
- The signature uniform worn by all Singapore Airlines flight attendants today was designed by French fashion designer Pierre Balmain (who died in 1982), and was inspired by the Malaysian kebaya
- Stanford University, in California, is "that school in California for those people who can't get into Harvard"
- After the tycoon husband of Carol Tai, Dato Tai Toh Lui, makes a brief appearance during a ladies' luncheon at his home and informs his wife's guests of the imminent "collapse" of a company called Sina Land, the women cannot get to their cell phones fast enough to order their brokers to sell and short-sell the stock
- A Canadian Permanent Resident Card is described as being "perhaps the ultimate membership card" among upper-crust Chinese Hong Kongers, owing to its potential use as a "safe haven in case the powers that be in Beijing ever pulled a Tiananmen again"
- At one point, a character wishes she had brought her "Birkin and not my Kelly today", a reference, to those in the know, to two classic Hermès handbags, named after actresses Jane Birkin and Grace Kelly. (The Birkin is the larger and thus in this instance, the more desirable of the two; both retail for thousands of dollars each)
- Eddie (Edison) Cheng, one of the characters in the book whose family is from Hong Kong, is described as feeling "extremely deprived compared to most of his friends", as he lacks "a house on the Peak… his own plane… [and] a full-time crew for his yacht", which is also "much too small to host more than 10 guests for brunch comfortably"
- Among Singapore's upper crust, "only two boys' schools matter: Anglo-Chinese School and Raffles Institution", both established in the 1800s, and fierce rivals
