“Asian Pride Porn”: Neoliberal Multiculturalism and the
Narrative of Asian Racial Uplift in Kevin Kwan’s Crazy
Rich Asians Trilogy
Yuan Ding
MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., Volume 45, Number 3, Fall 2020,
pp. 65-82 (Article)
Published by Oxford University Press
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/780463
[ Access provided at 21 Apr 2022 20:53 GMT from Penn State Univ Libraries ]
“Asian Pride Porn”: Neoliberal
Multiculturalism and the Narrative of
Asian Racial Uplift in Kevin Kwan’s
Crazy Rich Asians Trilogy
Yuan Ding
University of Minnesota
Introduction
Viet Thanh Nguyen argues that to combat the pervasive stereotype of the model
minority “good subjects,” Asian American intellectuals have idealized the Asian
American body politic as “bad subjects,” signaling “a retroactive collectivization
of the Asian American experience” in opposition to the dominant social ideology.
While the Asian American “bad subject” functions to disavow the model minority
discourse and to resist the suturing of racialized individuals to the dominant US
culture, it also generates “symbolic capital that derives its worth from the idea of
political resistance and social change.” Thus, the positing of the “bad subject” and
the model minority as binaries often ignores the “contradiction and excesses that
made the bad subjects amenable to discipline by dominant society,” enabling
some Asian Americans to become “panethnic entrepreneurs” (Race 144).
Similarly, Mark Chiang points out the complicity of Asian American studies
departments, nestled in the neoliberal university institution, in transforming racial identity into cultural and symbolic forms of capital. While “material inequality remains a crucial domain of racial struggles” in the post-civil rights era,
Chiang observes, “for middle-class Asian Americans and other minorities, greater
access to material resources has shifted the center of gravity of racial politics more
toward the arena of symbolic struggles” (96).
While some Asian American scholars become more reflective about their own
complicity in the neoliberal cultural economy, others illuminate the ways in which
Asian American subjecthood has historically been shaped by market forces and
articulated through languages of accumulation and exchange. For example,
Christine So argues that Asian diasporics are represented as either deviant or
exemplary economic agents—that is, either unfair competitors in the job
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MELUS Volume 45 Number 3 (Fall 2020)
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market or model minorities, sometimes simultaneously both. In reading Asian
American characters in canonical immigrant literature as “agents of capitalism
gone awry,” So illuminates the racialized nature of capital exchange and its
cultural implications (8). Similarly, Laura Kang points out the “Asianization”
of global capitalism, especially since the 2008 economic crisis, attending to
“the ‘Asian’ as appended to capital in terms of the shifting international
political economy of accumulation, debt, and fiscal deficit” (301). These recent
trends in Asian American studies prompt the question: How does the
proliferation of neoliberal multiculturalism and the increasing global
dependence on Asian capital affect Asian racial formation in the United States
and globally? To answer this question, I turn my attention to Kevin Kwan’s
New York Times best-selling trilogy—Crazy Rich Asians (2013), China Rich
Girlfriend (2015), and Rich People Problems (2017), the first volume of which
was adapted into a movie in 2018. Situating the commercial success of the
Crazy Rich Asians movie and the original book series at the intersection of the
neoliberal multiculturalist cultural marketplace in the United States and the postcolonial capitalist modernity in Singapore and Hong Kong, I explore the complex
ways in which neoliberal discourses manage the Asian diasporic community’s
claim to cultural citizenship in the United States and globally.1
The first Hollywood production in twenty-five years to feature an all-Asian cast
since Wayne Wang’s The Joy Luck Club (1993), Crazy Rich Asians, directed by Jon
M. Chu, was hailed as a “watershed moment” for Asian American representation
in mainstream US media (Barnes; Matthew and France-Presse; “‘Crazy’”; Yang).
Although generally met with rave reviews in the United States, the movie elicited
criticism from transnational reviewers such as Sangeetha Thanapal and Hannah
Ellis-Petersen and Lily Kuo, all of whom rightly point out its uncritical replication
of neocolonial racial hierarchies within Singaporean society and challenge the
prima facie equating of the film’s popularity and commercial success to a victory
for Asian American representation. Still, many renowned Asian American critics,
such as Nguyen (“Asian”) and Hua Hsu, have defended the film’s representational
merit within the frame of US racial politics. Nguyen, for example, points out the
right of Asian Americans to experience a form of “narrative plentitude,” even, or
rather especially, in various forms of aesthetic mediocrity. Similarly, Hsu argues
for the necessity of having rounded and diverse representations of Asians on the
big screen, which he considers the true end point of representational equality.
This mixed reception of the movie prompts a closer look at Kwan’s original
book series, which has also had impressive commercial success and some critical
acclaim.2 Rather than belaboring the series’ representational politics, a welldocumented debate in Asian American studies, I focus on tracing the source of
its popularity, so as to address what is politically at stake when we consume neoliberal narratives such as the Crazy novels and filmic adaptation, hitherto referred
as the Crazy franchise.3
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Neoliberal Multiculturalism
A tale of the interclass romance between Nick Young, heir apparent to one of
Singapore’s biggest fortunes, and Rachel Chu, born to a first-generation Chinese
American single mother with an immigrant bootstrap backstory, the narrative
tension of the first volume of the series, Crazy Rich Asians, is centered on the intrusion of the Asian American middle class into the society of Asia’s uberwealthy. On the surface, the Crazy series falls squarely in the “wealth porn” or
“lifestyle porn” genre, fictional or journalistic writing depicting the lavish lifestyles of the wealthy to titillate the envious imagination of its readership (Gay;
Williams; Meyer). However, unlike works of fiction that typically fall into this category, overrepresented in recent commercial successes from the Fifty Shades of
Grey novel series (2011–17) and filmic adaptation to HBO’s adaptation of Big
Little Lies (2017–19), Kwan’s focus on Asia, according to Janet Maslin, “offers refreshing nouveau voyeurism to readers who long ago burned out on American
and English aspirational fantasies.” Taking issue with the image of the Asian diasporic as either “fresh off the boat” stoic immigrants or rule-abiding model minorities, Kwan depicts instead profligate, hedonistic, flexible citizens, such as
“Hennessy-swirling, cigar-puffing fat-cat Asian tycoons; fortune-hunting
‘Taiwanese tornadoes’; Hong Kong fashionista men (‘dandies in the truest sense
of the word’); . . . Chuppies (Chinese yuppies); Henwees (high-net worth individuals)”; and so forth, most of whom are conversant in posh Queen’s English, laced
with slang in Malay, Cantonese, and Hokkien dialects (Park). Thus, instead of
“wealth porn,” the Crazy series should more accurately be characterized as “pride
porn,” specifically, “Asian pride porn,” borrowing the title of Greg Pak’s 2012 facetious short film. A three-minute spoof that pokes fun at the porn industry’s
Asian obsession, the film features a straight-faced David Henry Hwang extoling
the virtues of a new “Asian Pride Porn,” featuring “positive images of confident
Asian American men and women caught on tape, in the hottest, hardcore action
currently illegal in North America” (Pak). Like Pak’s film, the Crazy franchise is
also a genre-bending experiment that aims to combat stereotypes and assert a
sense of ethnic pride in a genre traditionally conceived as unprogressive.
“Don’t you know there are children starving in America?” exclaims a wealthy
Singaporean grandmother, as she urges her granddaughters to finish their plates
(Kwan, Crazy 138).
To a large extent, the pride porn narrative in the Crazy franchise exemplifies
the “cultural logic of transnationality” proposed by Aihwa Ong, who theorizes the
strategies of flexible accumulation deployed by the transnational ethnic Chinese
elite to benefit from economic globalization. Unlike the subaltern subject, envisioned in traditional migration studies and postcolonial theories as either
oppressed or subversive, Ong’s diasporic Asian elites manage to take advantage
of their cultural adaptability, political ambiguity, and physical mobility to reap the
benefits of globalization. The pride porn narrative of the Crazy franchise relies on
a discourse of globalized “Asian racial uplift” to capitalize on the economic and
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cultural flexibility of Asian diasporics. Similar to the movement of African
American racial uplift in the first half of the twentieth century that, among other
things, highlights the elite status of a few in an effort to reimagine and reform the
collective behavior of the whole, the Crazy franchise likewise revamps the image
of Asia from one plagued by poverty and political turmoil to one characterized by
hedonism and opulence, heralding the economic decline of Europe and America.
Although the series satirizes the fatuous extravagance of its wealthy characters,
it also blithely condones the system of exploitation from which they profit.
Relying on the rhetorical sleight of hand that equates “free market” with
“freedom,” Kwan replicates the narrative of Asian triumphalism that seals the
status of Asian diasporics as flexible global citizens. In multiple encounters between racist white characters and wealthy Asians, the latter emerge triumphant
through pure meritocratic market competition, enacting the often self-fulfilling
revenge fantasies of (post)racial justice. If the African American racial uplift
movement relies on a Horatio Alger narrative that unintentionally reinforces
anti-black stereotypes and exacerbates class divisions within the African
American community, Kwan’s racial uplift narrative relies on the principle of
free-market meritocracy that enables an Asian elite class to take advantage of a
system that exploits the vast majority of Asian and Asian diasporic communities.
In championing Asian economic ascension as the foundation for racial uplift, the
Crazy franchise attributes the economic and cultural flexibility of diasporic Asians
to the unimpeded flow of global capital while obscuring the structural unevenness
such movement perpetuates.
In his critique of the Asian American studies department as a neoliberal institution, Chiang observes that “identity politics has become inseparable from
model minority discourse” (96). Similarly, in her analysis of the Crazy series,
Grace Hong argues that “representations of a global, mobile Asian capitalist class”
(108) are “a particularly twenty-first century incarnation of Model Minority discourse” that “trades on a fetishization of mobility, associating Asian diasporic
populations with Asian capital as entities to be courted and as proof of the benefits of Western-style capitalism” (112). My reading of the Crazy franchise, in contrast, draws attention to its distinct departure from such US-centric theoretical
frameworks and instead teases out Kwan’s intentional deployment of
Sinophone cultures and Asian-style capitalism for racial uplift. In simultaneously
satirizing and capitalizing on the Europhilia and rampant consumerism of his
crazy rich characters, Kwan identifies and popularizes a new postcolonial capitalist Sinophone identity buttressed by the consumption of western cultural and
consumer products. Cheryl Naruse et al. define “postcolonial capitalism” as a critical framework with which one may consider “how postcolonial subjects, contexts, and discourses generate distinct forms of capitalist cultures and logic”
(2). “Postcolonial capitalism,” observe Naruse et al., “allows us to disarticulate
postcolonialism from anticolonialism, and examine contemporary capitalism
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Neoliberal Multiculturalism
from a postcolonial perspective” (5). Using the Crazy franchise as an example of
postcolonial capitalist narratives, I situate the rise of Asian American representation in US popular culture in the context of both an escalation of neoliberalism
worldwide and the reconfiguration of the capitalist global order due to the economic rise of newly industrialized postcolonial Asian regions. Although the
Crazy franchise derives its popularity through the creation of anti-model minority
stereotypes, the evocation of Asian-style capitalism, and the deployment of
Sinophone dialects, it also capitalizes on the figure of the Asian cosmopolitan
elite, whose flexible accumulation of material and symbolic capital depends on
the prescriptive consumption of Euro-American cultural and consumer products.
Despite capitalizing on the cultural pride of the Asian diasporic community, the
Crazy series’ painstaking prescription of good versus bad taste ultimately replicates Euro-American cultural standards, including its often neo-orientalist
rhetoric.
Neoliberal Multiculturalism
Asian pride porn narratives, such as the Crazy series, strategically deploy neoliberal multiculturalist rhetorics, characterized by the conflation of financial success
with racial equality, to reimagine diasporic Asian cultural citizenship and romanticize the process of diaspora through global capitalism. The Asian diasporics in
Kwan’s novels are ideal consumers, whose cosmopolitan status is maintained
through the consumption of European, and occasionally American, luxury goods.
For example, the shopaholic heiress Astrid Leong’s impeccably eclectic and unassuming fashion sense wins the hearts of both the series’ snobby characters
and its readers. Seen frequently in luxury designer gowns costing more than a
car, Astrid is reputed to be the only one who “could get away with wearing a simple linen dress to a ball” (Kwan, Crazy 41). The dress in question, as one might
have guessed, turns out to be “an original Madame Grès” (42). The characterization of Astrid exemplifies the neoliberal aesthetic that projects beauty onto wealth
and Kwan’s logic of racial uplift through consumption. During a romantic getaway in Paris in the mid-1990s, Astrid’s then teenage boyfriend, Charlie Wu, takes
her shopping at an exclusive designer boutique. Astrid’s first encounter with
European haute couture, however, is greeted with the cold shoulders of a haughty
shop assistant, prompting Charlie to pull strings at his father’s bank, eventually
getting the boutique owner to personally supervise her dress fitting. To further
teach the shop assistant a lesson in humility, Charlie instructs Astrid to pick
out “at least ten dresses”; as he explains, his “father always says, the only way
to get these ang mor gau sai to respect you is to smack them in the face with
your dua lan chiao money until they get on their knees” (425).4 This scenario
is exemplary of the neoliberal logic underpinning Kwan’s project: racial equality
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is seemingly only achievable through unimpeded free-market competition.
Prioritizing the site of consumption over the site of production of European luxury goods, however, Kwan’s crazy rich characters imagine material consumption
as a means to gain cultural and racial equity. The underlying irony, of course, is
that the site of production of the Western garment industry is usually in the
Global South, particularly in Asia, due to the low cost of labor and loose environmental regulations. Thus, the neoliberal rhetoric deployed here distracts from the
demands for labor equality and environmental justice. In addition to labor exploitation and devastating pollution, the outsourcing of the Western textile industry is
responsible for creating some of the earliest generations of the nouveaux riches in
East and Southeast Asia. Therefore, in focusing on the borderless existence of a
few wealthy individuals, the series celebrates a version of free-market justice that
masks the systemic racial and economic inequalities underpinning global capitalist expansion.
In the current post-civil rights political moment, enthusiasm for statemanaged multiculturalism reconfigures the cultural status of US ethnic minorities. Shedding the stigma of clannishness, Asian Americans have slowly emerged
as the token multicultural American subject. Jodi Melamed argues that
Neoliberal policy engenders new racial subjects, as it creates and distinguishes between newly privileged and stigmatized collectivities, yet multiculturalism codes the
wealth, mobility, and political power of neoliberalism’s beneficiaries to be the just
desserts of “multicultural world citizens,” while representing those neoliberalism
dispossesses to be handicapped by their own “monoculturalism” or other
historico-cultural deficiencies. (1)
In the Crazy series, white characters often serve as the antithesis of neoliberal
multiculturalist ideals, their monoculturalism manifesting in blatant racism.
The wealthy Asian characters, on the other hand, are default “multicultural” subjects due to the juxtaposition of their ethnicity and their cosmopolitan consumption patterns. They are also characterized as deserving neoliberal subjects on
account of their wealth. The white peripheral characters, in contrast, are coded
as monocultural, therefore deserving punishment, often in financial form.
For example, the series’ first volume opens with two Singaporean Chinese
heiresses and their young children seeking shelter at the Calthorpe, a luxury hotel
in 1986 London. Despite having a reservation for the largest suite in the establishment, the families are denied accommodation by a snooty concierge, comically
named Ormsby, out of concern for the “Dowager Marchioness of Uckfield,”
who must be spared “these foreigners” at the breakfast table (Kwan, Crazy 4).
In response to this blatant discrimination, Felicity Leong, wife of Harry Leong,
business tycoon and golf buddy of the aristocratic owner of the Calthorpe, pulls
strings and purchases the hotel. The deliriously cathartic moment comes when an
incredulous Ormsby is informed of the hotel’s change of ownership and his
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Neoliberal Multiculturalism
immediate dismissal. This opening effectively aligns neoliberal principles with
multiculturalist discourses of equality: racial justice is doled out through the indiscriminate hand of “free” trade. Given the hotel’s aristocratic ownership, the
transfer of power amounts to a symbolic transfer of empires. This opening scene
also firmly aligns readerly sympathy with the series’ wealthy Asian characters,
who end up occupying the moral high ground as the underdogs, despite their
class privilege. Indeed, the defeat of the white concierge symbolizes the defeat
of the Western oppressor despite the fact that the true moral of the tale lies in
the celebration of cold hard cash as an indiscriminate equalizer of power. In
the act of purchasing the hotel and expelling its racist employee, Felicity Leong
manipulates the lever of global capitalism to right the historic wrong dealt to
Asians everywhere, particularly that of British colonialism in Singapore. The
irony, however, is that these rhetorical encounters between Asian and white characters all feature the former as consumer and the latter as provider of service or
producer of merchandise, when in reality the relationship is often the reverse.
Therefore, Kwan’s narrative of Asian racial uplift through consumption actually
obscures the inherent disadvantages of the Global South in the process of economic globalization. Just as the suturing of state-sanctioned anti-racist discourse
to American nationalism obscures systemic racism, a narrative of diasporic Asian
cosmopolitanism fueled by excessive material consumption creates the illusion of
equal opportunity under global capitalism, obscuring the actual wealth disparity
between the Global North and the Global South and the racialized exploitation of
the latter.
Sinophone Panethnicity and Flexible Citizenship
Colleen Lye asks: “What has been Asian American literature’s contribution to the
social construction of the pan-ethnic identity and how has this varied, depending
on the character of Asian American racial formation at the time?” (486) As the
title of the Crazy series’ first volume—Crazy Rich Asians—suggests, Kwan
aims to replace the nation-state with a more flexible kind of panethnic cultural
citizenship. Barring the charge of representational synecdoche that substitutes
the “Asian” for the Sinophone, Kwan’s panethnic project is arguably successful,
achieved through the consistent use of the Sinophone languages (Mandarin,
Cantonese, and Hokkien) by characters from different countries, including
Asian Americans. For example, one of the most common epithets evoked
throughout the narrative is ang mor, short for ang mor gau sai, a Hokkien racial
slur for white people that literally translates to “red-haired” (ang mor) “dog shit”
(gau sai). Despite its incendiary literal meaning, ang mor is most often deployed
humorously, to ridicule a particular type of Euro-American privilege, as in:
“[Eleanor] had always found Asian girls with American accents to be quite
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ridiculous. They all sounded like they were faking it, trying to sound so ang mor”
(Kwan, Crazy 60–61). The humor with which the term is invoked renders it less
offensive while providing vicarious vindication to the series’ Asian readers, most
of whom are not strangers to racialized verbal insults directed at their variously
accented English. In addition to the strategic use of common languages, the series
fosters panethnic solidarity by validating pidgin English. The footnote for gahmen, for instance, simply reads: “Correct Singlish pronunciation for ‘government’” (376). Thus, the deployment of both Sinophone and “Singlish”
(Singaporean English) phrases throughout the series contributes to Kwan’s panethnic project of racial uplift through the affirmation of multicultural differences.
Given the charged history of continental colonialism by the Han ethnic
Chinese in Asia and the cultural nationalist practices of the People’s Republic
of China, substituting “Chinese” with “Sinophone” offers a more inclusive possibility for panethnic community building. Thus, Shu-mei Shih suggests replacing
the term “overseas Chinese” or “diasporic Chinese” with the term “Sinophone” to
designate Sinic language speakers living within and outside of mainland China.
Unlike “diaspora,” which connotes dislocation and dispossession, “Sinophone”
is more “placid,” pointing toward “a linguistic present and future without destiny” (“Concept” 716). Whereas ethnicity is a fixed social construct, observe
Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, a linguistic identity results in a
“community in the present,” which sustains an illusion of having “always existed,
but lays down no destiny for the successive generations” (98–99). Echoing Balibar
and Wallerstein, Shih argues for linguistic commonalities as an alternative organizing principle for the collective identification of the ethnic Chinese. To this end,
Shih defines the “Sinophone” as “a network of places of cultural production outside China and on the margins of China and Chineseness, where a historical process of heterogenizing and localizing of continental Chinese culture has been
taking place for several centuries” (Visuality 4). Whereas monolingualism of
the national language is a form of nationalism that is “deterministic, atavistic,
and philosophically weak, foreclosing present and future potentialities,” Shih
observes, the Sinophone offers a heteroglossia of possibilities (“Concept” 716).
Additionally, the concept of the Sinophone also challenges the cultural nationalist emphasis in the field of Asian American studies, galvanized by the polemical
relationship between assimilation and cultural preservation and exercised in
demands for citizenship and civil rights. Indeed, the accolades garnered by the
Crazy franchise are in no small part due to the allure of the cultural and linguistic
flexibility of its cosmopolitan Sinophone characters. The protagonist Nick Young,
for instance, is not your typical “fresh off the boat” immigrant. In addition to his
classic good looks and refined taste, his British accent is a source of constant
amazement and amusement to his American friends. On their first encounter,
Rachel is pleasantly surprised by the differences between Nick and the typical
Asian American men she boycotts as potential partners, men who “not so subtly
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Neoliberal Multiculturalism
flaunted [their] own SAT stats,” inherited family wealth, and potential earnings,
all while judging Asian American women with equally superficial and skewed
standards (Kwan, Crazy 91). Unlike these men, characterized as extreme model
minorities, Nick represents a new type of flexible global citizen, whose exotic cultural background and ambiguous citizenship status only enhance his enjoyment
of a transnational lifestyle.
“Flexible citizenship,” as Ong defines it, is “the cultural logics of capitalist accumulation, travel, and displacement that induce subjects to respond fluidly and
opportunistically to changing political-economic conditions” (6). In addition to
Nick Young, multiple other characters in the series obtain foreign residencies
for both political and cultural reasons. Nick’s cousin, Eddie Cheng, for example,
secures Canadian permanent residency for his wife and kids “in case the powers
that be in Beijing ever pulled a Tiananmen again” (Kwan, Crazy 80). Nick’s father,
Philip, on the other hand, exiles himself in Australia largely to escape the tethers
of family responsibility and the increasingly materialistic Singaporean culture, a
sentiment Nick shares. Despite the different motivations, however, all of these
wealthy Singaporeans are flexible due to their excessive wealth, which allows
them to obtain global residences and, eventually, multiple residencies.
Although distinct from model minorities, the flexible Sinophone characters in
the series are celebrated on account of their utter lack of threat to the existing
neoliberal economy, not to mention their tacit endorsement of racialized labor
exploitation. Portrayed mostly as entrepreneurs (with the occasional doctor or
professor), Kwan’s crazy rich characters are job providers rather than job seekers,
whose flexible citizenship is bolstered literally by their ability to hop on a private
jet at a moment’s notice. Meanwhile, their live-in domestic employees, often
darker-skinned, are literally taken from their homelands (mainland China and
Thailand) and prevented from ever returning despite various gestures of employer benevolence. Charlie Wu, for example, commissions a brand-new retirement home for his childhood nanny in the village of her youth. She refuses
such largess, however, claiming that the Wu mansion has now become her real
home. Far from evidence of the kindness of the Wu family, the nanny’s reluctance
to return is likely due to the loss of connection to her extended family over the
decades she has been away. In a similar depiction of employer largess, Shang
Su Yi’s live-in housekeeper, Lee Ah Ling, and their chef, Lim Ah Ching, receive
a “cash legacy” of three million and two million dollars each on the death of
the Shang matriarch. Both scenarios function to exonerate the Asian elite from
charges of exploitation and divert criticism from the exploitative modus operandi
of the Asian elite class and the deeply colonial legacy they perpetuate.
Finally, while the frequent use of Sinophone dialects energizes the series’ diasporic readers and gestures toward a panethnic communal identity, the equally
prevalent flaunting of British English by the crazy rich characters also suggests the
deep influence of British colonialism on Singapore and by extension the entire
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Asia-Pacific region. While the older generation’s conversation is strewn with
Sinophone colloquialisms, the British-educated children and grandchildren, or
“third-generation-and-above rich,” speak English almost exclusively.5 In fact,
with a few exceptions such as the Shang matriarch, Su Yi, all Singaporean and
second-generation-rich Chinese characters go by English names. For Kwan’s
Singaporean elites, the only commodity more sought after than designer luxury
brands is a British public school education and a perfect Queen’s English, both
of which serve to prove the old money’s superiority to the nouveaux riches and
equality to the elitist ang mor. In addition to being a private language used among
intimate friends and family, the Hokkien colloquialisms used by the younger generation, especially male characters, are frequently lowbrow, punctuated by crass
epithets indicating a lack of “taste” or culture. If the name-dropping of designer
brands ad nauseam by characters such as Eddie Cheng betrays a curious sense of
insecurity undergirding his pomposity, the equally prevalent sprinkling of
Sinophone colloquialisms seems to preserve a mere façade of diversity in a series
that derives its popularity largely from being written in English.
Postcolonial Capitalism and the Cultural Capital of “Taste” and
“History”
Commenting on the post-independence economic miracle of Singapore, C. J.
Wan-ling Wee observes that Singapore is “distinct among postcolonial societies
in its valorisation of the colonial past as part of the telos of progress and freedom
that results in the not-quite-democratic and sterile cultural inauthenticity ascribed to the island” (4). The series’ concluding installment, Rich People
Problems, for example, offers an intriguing rewriting of Singaporean colonial history, constructed through the fragmented memories of Su Yi, the Shang matriarch. As Su Yi’s mind deteriorates toward the end of her life, the narrative
gains a historical perspective through multiple flashbacks to her younger days
spent during the Japanese invasion of Singapore in the 1940s. These flashbacks
exist in part to testify to the Shangs’ old-guard bona fides and in part to highlight
Singapore’s post-independence economic boom. In one flashback, for example,
Su Yi recalls the tale behind a medal of courage she received from the Queen
of England. After attending a clandestine meeting during the Japanese occupation, Su Yi was arrested for breaking curfew and escorted to a Japanese military
compound under the control of a colonel “known for his brutality.” Despite the
sight of soldiers “carrying a body that was covered by a bloody sheet” on entering
the colonel’s residence, she finds the colonel a “tall, elegant man sitting at the
grand piano playing Beethoven.” In a last-ditch effort to save herself, Su Yi correctly identifies what he is playing as Concerto No. 5. Delighted by her knowledge,
the colonel requests a performance of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” and sets her free
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Neoliberal Multiculturalism
afterward. Although overtly a critique of the Japanese invasion of Singapore, this
episode surprisingly rests on a celebration of shared Europhilia between Su Yi and
the colonel, which emerges as the ultimate moral of the story. As Su Yi finishes
playing, she “[sees] that there [a]re tears in his eyes. It turns out that before the
war, he had been in the diplomatic corps in Paris. Debussy was his favorite”
(Kwan, Rich 171). Despite indisputable evidence of the colonel’s brutality, the episode seems to emphasize his humanity, evinced through his European humanist
sensibilities. Su Yi’s European education and upbringing, itself a consequence of
British colonialism, emerges as a curious moral rejoinder to Kwan’s overt critique
of imperialism, compounded by the seal of approval from the Queen.
The contradiction between the overt critique of the Japanese invasion and tacit
endorsement of British colonial rule—and the global movement of capital that
drives and sustains it—is a central paradox of the postcolonial capitalist narrative
of the series. This paradox is perhaps best examined through the Singaporean and
Hong Kong cultural establishments’ obsession with “taste,” manifesting in consumption patterns, as a way to exclude the nouveaux riches from accumulating
cultural capital. While Kwan constantly pokes fun at the frivolous extravagance
of his crazy rich characters, the satirical fervor of the series is reserved mainly
for the mainland Chinese consumers, whose relentless flaunting of wealth
through flashy purchases betrays a lack of taste. The Asian cultural establishment’s insistence on acquiring good “taste” not only betrays an anxiety over
the preservation of its own relatively new cultural capital but also highlights
the legacy of Euro-American cultural hegemony in the newly industrialized postcolonial Asian regions.
Thanks to the capital accumulated via colonial expansion (which triggers the
industrial revolution), Europe has traditionally had the privilege of defining the
global narrative on “taste,” the afterimage of which still circulates globally today.
On the limits to the accumulation of cultural capital, Ong observes that “while the
‘global cultural economy’ of people, products, and ideas may be characterized by
disjunctures, regimes of consumption and credentialisation are definitely hierarchized, with Europe and America setting the standards of international middleclass style” (90). “What happens,” Ong goes on to ask, “when strategies of cultural
accumulation run up against regimes of racial difference and hierarchy, so that
the possession of cultural capital is rendered somewhat ineffectual for being embodied in racially inferior agents?” (93) Kwan’s prescription of flexible accumulation through the acquisition of “taste” offers one answer. In China Rich
Girlfriend, Corinna Ko-Tung, descendent of the nebulous Ko-Tung clan and career consultant for social climbers, prescribes appearance and behavioral adjustments to help her nouveaux riches clients break into the upper echelons of
Southeast Asian haute societies. For her client Kitty Pong (a former mainland
China B-film actress turned trophy wife), Corinna suggests implementing drastic
changes to improve practically every aspect of her life, from appearance and
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wardrobe to lifestyle and conversational skills. The latter can be improved,
according to Corinna, through the diligent reading of English-language—especially British—authors, such as Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, William
Makepeace Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, and Evelyn Waugh (166–67). Apart
from alluding to the obvious Anglophilia in Southeast Asian culture, Kwan effectively alligns himself with these authors, whose works are themselves part documentation and part instruction for the social climbers of their time. In fact, many
of these novels can be read as nineteenth-century wealth porn, offering their
middle-class readers a glimpse of the gilded lives of the landed gentry.
The Euro-American cultural dominance on “taste” is in no small part due to its
successful capitalizing of history. If Asian immigrants’ obsession with generationcounting in response to the stereotype of Asian Americans as perpetual aliens
suggests the value of “nativeness” in the pursuit of social equity, the family diagrams at the beginning of each volume in the Crazy series suggest a similar impulse to preserve social status through claiming history. Despite their staggering
wealth, nouveaux riches individuals such as Kitty Pong cannot enjoy the true
privilege of high society until acquiring the patina of old wealth. As Corinna
points out:
For the crowd you [Kitty] seek to impress, your money means nothing. Especially
these days, when twenty something Mainlanders have burst onto the scene with
billions a piece, the old guard have resorted to new ways of stratifying themselves.
What matters more than ever now are bloodlines and when your family first made
its money. Which province of China did your family originate from? Which dialect
group? . . . Are you second-, third-, or fourth-generation rich? And how was the
fortune made? . . . Every minute detail matters. For instance, you can have ten billion dollars but still be considered nothing more than a speck of dirt by the Keungs,
who are down to their last hundred million but can trace their lineage to the Duke of
Yansheng. (153–54)
The term old guard, referring to a handful of Hong Kong families whose wealth
dates back generations, illustrates the rigid social stratification in the newly industrialized Southeast Asian regions, where the upper class preserves its symbolic
capital by curating family history. The fact that upstarts such as Kitty can access
symbolic capital through the strategic collection of antique art and the fact that
Corinna can turn her inherited social status into a financially profitable enterprise
both illustrate the flexible accumulation of, and conversion among, various forms
of capital. The first generation’s initial infusion of economic capital trickles down
to the second generation not only in the form of material wealth but also in the
symbolic capital acquired through education and connections, which is then converted into and passed on through the racialized cultural economy of “taste” and
the neoliberal commodification of history.
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Neoliberal Multiculturalism
The Crazy series’ prescription of taste and commodification of history is, in
many instances, two sides of the same coin. Nowhere is this better exemplified
than in the lavish lifestyle of Astrid Leong, the “ravishingly beautiful and faultlessly elegant” “double heiress,” who is consistently depicted wearing
museum-grade antique clothing and accessories (xii). One bracelet, we are
told, is real Etruscan, “made in 650 BC,” not a replica from the designers at
Lalaounis, to the dismay of her nouveaux riches admirers (330). Another example
is the ultimate sale of Tyersall Park, the legendary Shang family estate. A rare
colonial-style estate with Asian accents, this much-coveted property is said to
possess a “perfect patina of age that no amount of money can buy” (Kwan,
Rich 176). Its ownership, according to some, is akin to “owning Central Park
in New York” (Kwan, China 88). On the passing of Shang Su Yi, the estate is
sold to a group led by none other than Nick Young, Su Yi’s favorite grandson,
who springs into action on hearing the news of its imminent sale to a mainland
Chinese business tycoon. Pulling strings to have the estate declared a “national
historic landmark,” Nick manages to circumvent the existing contract with the
Chinese mogul, intent on converting the estate into a modern luxury home.
Under the new stewardship of Nick and friends, the main house will be turned
into a national museum and the wings converted into a private hotel and event
venue. The servants’ quarters, to the delight of some and dismay of others,
will be turned into affordable public housing. This deal serves as the crown jewel
of the neoliberal racial uplift narrative of the series, signaling the conclusion of the
Young family saga: the country benefits from patriots such as Nick, who is devoted to the preservation of its history and the service of its average citizens;
the Shang and Young family members each receive proceeds in a breathtaking
lump sum; the sale of the house absolves Nick from further obligations to his family and thus to Singapore, allowing him the freedom to pursue a truly flexible cosmopolitan lifestyle with Rachel in the United States; and last but not least, the
historic treasure of Singapore remains out of reach for the distasteful nouveaux
riches mainland Chinese. Nick’s strategy of declaring the estate a “historic landmark” in order to annul an existing contract is perhaps the most revealing metaphor for the cultural establishment’s capitalizing of history, and the sale of
Tyersall Park encapsulates Kwan’s version of Singaporean history from colonial
subjugation to capitalist modernization.
Conclusion
It is not my intention to dismiss the political potential of deploying neoliberal
multiculturalist rhetorical strategies to narrate transnational communal belonging. In fact, the success of the Crazy film proves the effectiveness of the Asian
pride-porn genre in promoting more flexible panethnic alliances among diasporic
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Asian communities. In purchasing tickets to the movie, Asian Americans have
transformed their consumer dollars into collective cultural capital for the Asian
American community, and such cultural capital has the promise to reproduce itself. The film’s director, Jon Chu, justifies the collective decision to turn down a
lucrative buyout offer from Netflix in preference for Warner Bros by pointing out
the symbolic capital residing in the cinema: “We were gifted this position to make
a decision no one else can make, which is turning down the big payday for rolling
the dice [on the box office]—but being invited to the big party, which is people
paying money to go see us.” One of the movie’s producers, Nina Jacobson, further
indicates the ways in which the cultural capital of a big-screen success can change
the rules of the industry: “You can look at Get Out, you can look at Black
Panther—it changes the whole economics of the business when movies like
that succeed” (Sun and Ford). The Crazy franchise indisputably succeeds in conferring collective cultural and symbolic capital onto the Asian diaspora, which in
turn opens the door for greater and more varied Asian American representations
in US popular culture, both on the big screen and for streaming production companies such as Netflix, as evidenced by a number of subsequent filmic successes
such as To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (2018), Always Be My Maybe (2019), The
Farewell (2019), To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You (2020), and Tigertail (2020).
As Pamela Thoma points out, “it is through engagement with commercial media culture that Americans come to see themselves (or not) as enfranchised national citizens.” As both a political-economic system and a social philosophy,
Thoma notes, neoliberalism manages the “cultural expression of citizenship
claims through intensifying subjects’ allegiances to communities, including racial
and ethnic communities” ("Negotiating"). The Crazy film’s impressive box office
success, and the sheer volume and caliber of the responses mobilized by this otherwise middle-brow romantic comedy, is itself a testament to the success of neoliberal multiculturalist representational politics in creating and commercializing
racial and cultural belonging. Rather than taking for granted the oppositional
stance of Asian American or Asian diasporic cultural production, my reading
of the Crazy franchise as Asian pride porn demonstrates the effectiveness of a
globalized neoliberal discourse of racial uplift in reimagining Asian diasporic cultural citizenship. However, it is worth delving into the exact nature of the narrative that has catapulted Asian representation into current mainstream American
culture. As the Crazy series suggests, cultural capital is acquired largely through
the consumption of the right kinds of objects—that is, European ones. While
relics from Asia carry great value, they are valued mainly as vessels of history,
such as a Ming vase or the much sought-after antique scroll, “The Palace of
Eighteen Perfections” (Kwan, China 23). Although cultural capital can be accrued
through obtaining these “Orientalia,” Western culture confers value in more abstract and symbolic forms, in the acquisition of a posh British accent, a British
education, royal titles, and knowledge of classical European art and culture.
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Neoliberal Multiculturalism
In affirming the neoliberal multiculturalist celebration of Asian economic ascension under the rationales of the free market, the Crazy franchise creates a
Sinophone linguistic and cultural identity as a technology of late global capital
expansion. This is reflected in the series’ emphasis on lineage, indicated in the
elaborate family diagrams at the beginning of each volume. More than a nod
to ancestral worship, these family diagrams mainly serve to prescribe the proper
passage of wealth, as the generations prior to wealth acquisition are not mentioned in the family map just as Singaporean history prior to British colonization
is written over. The neoliberal narrative of Asian racial uplift also renders class
conflicts between old and new moneyed groups via a racialized cultural economy
of “taste.” This further manifests in Chu’s filmic adaptation, which fully sublimates the class disparity between Nick and Rachel into a clash between traditional
Chinese family values (embodied in Eleanor) and American individualism (embodied in Rachel). Rather than a sign of improving equality, the emergence of an
elite class in countries such as Singapore and China is simultaneous to their growing economic disparity and social stratification. Ultimately, the financial success
of the Crazy franchise illuminates the ways in which its narratives of racial uplift
function as part of the neoliberal economic habitus that shifts attention away from
the conditions of inequality inherent in the current world system.
Notes
1. For more context on Asian American cultural citizenship, see Pamela Thoma
(Asian) and Lori Kido Lopez.
2. In her book review in The Guardian, for example, Patricia Park praises the series’
first volume as a breath of fresh air, creating “a new wave of stereotypes” of the
Asian diasporic. Tapping into the irony of “those being stereotyped stereotyp[ing] right back,” Kevin Kwan produces “a reversal of the collective gaze.”
3. Questions of how to faithfully represent a community created out of strategic essentialist contingencies haunt the study of Asian American cultural and literary
production, culminating in Frank Chin’s much publicized critique of Maxine
Hong Kingston’s misrepresentation of Chinese culture in The Woman Warrior:
Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976). Since then, many Asian
American scholars have pondered the public’s skewed demand for representational authenticity from ethnic artists and writers. Lisa Lowe, most notably,
“underscore[s] Asian American heterogeneities (particularly class, gender, and
national differences among Asians) . . . to negotiate with those modes of argumentation that continue to uphold a politics based on ethnic ‘identity’” (28).
4. Ang mor gau sai is a Hokkien racial slur for white people. An author’s note in the
novel notes that dua lan chiao is Hokkien for “big cock” (Kwan, Crazy 425).
5. “First-generation rich” refers to the generation who accumulated the wealth, and
the second- and third-generation rich are their children and grandchildren.
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