Review | Kevin Kwan’s Rich People Problems hustles his comic trilogy to a neat conclusion

Rich People Problems
by Kevin Kwan
Doubleday

After the success of Kevin Kwan’s first two novels, Crazy Rich Asians (2013) and China Rich Girlfriend (2015), expectations for the third in the trilogy, Rich People Problems, couldn’t be higher.

Here, money, race, family and social background clash like an Asian version of The Forsyte Saga, but with greater levity and a lot more shopping as Kwan continues his tales of the lives of Asia’s ultra-rich by reuniting us with series favourites. They include matriarch Shang Su Yi; avaricious social climber Kitty (now the wife of billionaire Jack Bing, China’s second richest man); Jack’s daughter, Colette, whose marriage to a British peer spurs Kitty to ever-greater absurdities; and the preposterous Eddie Cheng.

Before revving up the plot engine, Kwan spends a good deal of time reintroducing the large cast of characters, with their petty jealousies, sibling rivalries and mind-boggling expenditure.

Examples of their extravagance and entitled behaviour include an aeroplane turned around mid-flight, necessitating the dumping of a quarter of a million litres of fuel; Kitty’s spending €175,000 (HK$1.5 million) on a couture dress for her five-year-old daughter, Gisele, and then immediately ordering two more, so she has one for each house (in Singapore, Shanghai and Beverly Hills); and perhaps craziest of all, cosmetic surgery for an arowana fish, although since this raises its value (from S$175,000 [HK$985,000] to S$250,000) it’s perhaps less nutty than it sounds. Kwan, lending credence to the old saying that life is often stranger than fiction, claims all these incidents draw on real events.

Fascinating for the outsider is a careful delineation of the East Asian racial hierarchy, to wit, in descending order: “Chindo, Singaporean, Hong Konger, Malaysian Chinese, Eurasian, Asian American living in New York or Los Angeles, Asian American working in private equity in Connecticut, Canadian Asian from Vancouver or Toronto, Australian Chinese from Sydney or Melbourne, Thai, Filipino from Forbes park, American Born Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean, Mainland Chinese, common Indonesian.”