The Hongcouver | Nose jobs, champagne and Lamborghinis: A hot mess of ‘ultra-rich Asians’ in Vancouver

HBICtv creator Kevin Li, born and bred on Vancouver’s working-class Eastside, has watched the demographics of the city’s 400,000-strong Chinese community shift over time.  “Growing up, the first Chinese people I knew were like me,” said Li this week. “The second generation were the Hong Kong immigrants … The past 10 years I’ve noticed another generation, the ones who are even more affluent, who have more money to spend. I was wondering ‘who are these people?’”

Li isn’t alone in his curiosity. Since announcing a casting call for his HBICtv show last week, Li has been inundated with interest from around the world. Much has focused on a promotional video for the June 26 casting call, which features a group of pretty, Putonghua-speaking women guzzling  champagne, zooming around in Lamborghinis and spending money like there’s no tomorrow. “As long as we have fun, who cares about spending a little bit of money,” opines “Crystal Chen”, in between catty remarks about a fellow diva’s nose job.

Li, who is producing the show with his Veyron Media partner Desmond Chen, isn’t worried that he is perpetuating a negative stereotype of Chinese immigrants in Vancouver as nouveau-riche vulgarians.

“These will be four or five girls, who are having fun, spending daddy’s money, that are enjoying life and funding an economy. I really don’t know what’s so bad about that…worse is if you are quick to judge people based on where they come from and what they have,” said Li. “Some people’s minds have already been made up, about what, quote unquote, ‘these people’ are like. What this show is meant to do is let people in on who these people are…we are all so quick to judge, ‘these people are from China, they’ve got money, so they are bad’. There is way more to it than that and that is what this show will open up.”