Author Kevin Kwan’s affluent upbringing results in novel ‘Crazy Rich Asians’

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TORONTO – Zipping to global hot spots on private jets, dropping more money in one shopping spree than most people make in a year, and playing with exotic pets in luxurious homes was commonplace in author Kevin Kwan’s social circles during his childhood in Singapore.

“As a kid I went to a party one day and this woman had a chimpanzee, which I just was overjoyed to meet a chimpanzee in a private home,” the New York-based Kwan recalled during a recent stop in Toronto.

“I was dragged to some tea with my mom. I didn’t want to go, and I get there and there is a chimpanzee in the backyard. Like, how often do you see that? And I got to bond with it and I got to carry it. It was wearing diapers.”

Kwan’s affluent upbringing inspired his breezy debut novel, “Crazy Rich Asians,” a comical page-turning romp that’s a perfect summer beach read and has been lauded in magazines, including Vogue, O and Elle. It’s also earned praise from such bestselling authors as Jackie Collins, Plum Sykes and Michael Korda.

The newly published satire follows Manhattan-based professor Nicholas Young, heir to one of the largest fortunes in Asia, as he takes his “ABC” (American-born Chinese) girlfriend Rachel Chu to Singapore to attend a grand wedding and meet his relatives.

The Youngs are one of three filthy-rich families featured in the “Romeo and Juliet”-meets-“Cinderella”-meets-“Dynasty” story, which compares the modest “old money” attitude to the “new money” tribe of pomp and grandstanding in Southeast Asia. It also highlights divisions between mainland Chinese and “overseas Chinese.”

Like the Youngs, Kwan said his family also keeps a low profile about its fortunes and has a “sense of obligation that if you have money, you need to be charitable and help other people.”

“It’s hard to talk about it because I’ve always grown up coming from a very private family and you just never want to talk about yourself,” he said. “It’s rude, it’s not polite, it’s kind of tacky.

“So promoting this book has been a whole new challenge, because my default is just to play things down and not talk about it.”

The bespectacled 39-year-old did say he lived “in a nice house” in Singapore — a rarity and privilege in a region where most live in apartments due to scarcity of land. He attended private school there until age 12, when his family moved to Houston to pursue business interests.

Kwan attended high school with children of NASA astronauts, got a degree in media studies at the University of Houston, then moved to New York to study photography at the Parsons School of Design.

His childhood was “very lucky, privileged,” but was “in no way as extreme” as those of the characters in “Crazy Rich Asians” (Doubleday Canada).

“But I have been an intimate observer of some of the privilege that you see in this book,” added Kwan.

“Everything in the book is fiction, but it’s loosely inspired by stories from the past and things I saw and stories that are still playing out right now.”

Kwan embarked on the novel after being a creative consultant on visual books for Oprah Winfrey, Gore Vidal and Elizabeth Taylor. He also wrote the art book “I Was Cuba,” co-authored “Luck: The Essential Guide,” and did set design consulting on Broadway.

He started writing “Crazy Rich Asians” in 2010 in New York after his father got very ill and the two spent many hours reminiscing about their childhoods.

“It was a pretty dark time for me and so I wanted to sort of find a way to amuse myself,” said Kwan, who assured his family members they would not appear in the pages.

As he crafted the universal tale of complex families, he took inspiration from several authors, including Dominick Dunne, Jane Austen, Edith Wharton and Anthony Trollope.

“I wanted to tell kind of an Asian version of ‘Downton Abbey,'” said Kwan. “Asia is going through its own gilded age and there’s a great literary tradition of looking at this world, skewering this world, satirizing it, and I just felt like this is a missing gap.

“Because there’s all this money being made over in the Far East and there are lots of economic books about it … but no one’s just telling a fun, family story with a romance thrown in.

“No one’s really telling it from the perspective of these people that lead these lives, and showing the drama and complications that occur when you have that kind of money.”

The book’s ending paves the way to a follow-up novel, and Kwan admitted he would like to spin it into a trilogy.

He’s also open to a big-screen adaptation.

“There have been some discussions, yeah,” Kwan teased when asked if he’s been contacted about film rights. “That’s all I can say.”

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