My Take | Crazy Asian wealth porn has its funny side
Gentle put-downs of America in the hit film are amusing, but should we be in awe of such super-rich individuals or repelled?
I admit I enjoyed watching Crazy Rich Asians, though I did so with guilty pleasure. Some gentle put-downs of America were amusing.
A rich Singaporean father, played by Korean-American comedian Ken Jeong, reprimanded his children for not finishing their meal: “Eat your food. Many children are starving in America.”
Or when our heroine Rachel, played by Constance Wu of the popular American TV sitcom Fresh Off the Boat, was amazed by a butterfly garden while walking through Singapore’s Changi Airport: “At JFK [airport in New York], it’s all salmonella and despair.”
But amusement aside, it strikes me the whole purpose of the film exercise is to glamorise and legitimise the super-rich in Asia, many of whom are ethnic Chinese in real life. Should we, as the audience and hoi polloi, be tantalised and awed by the display of mega wealth, which has been described, by most accounts, as accurate. Or should we rather be repelled?
It’s not true that the rise of Asian wealth has been a neglected subject. A whole book genre has emerged in recent decades, though most on the subject, such as Joe Studwell’s Asian Godfathers: Money and Power in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, examine its historical, economic, political and social contexts.