Five Questions With Kevin Kwan

There is always that one book that defines the summer, and this year that honour goes to Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians. This outrageously hysterical debut novel follows three super rich (extra emphasis on both super and rich) Asian families and their over-the-top lifestyles. Private jets, five-star hotels, haute couture, haute cuisine: Crazy Rich Asians will make you cringe, and perhaps even jealous-cry, but, most importantly, it will boundlessly entertain.

How much of the book was inspired by your childhood in Singapore? What does your family think of your book?

A lot of it. That was the original inspiration, to write about this world that I grew up knowing. It was only after leaving it and moving it to Houston, Texas, that I realized that I had a weird childhood.

Right now, my family is very amused by the book. It’s less exotic to them. Like, for my mother, having seen a lot of this in her life, it’s old hat to her. She’d rather watch Downton Abbey.

The rise of the Asian billionaire is unprecedented. Ten years ago, there were no Chinese billionaires on the Forbes list, and now there are over a hundred. In fashion, for example, have you noticed that a lot of brands had to make adjustments for the new luxury market?

I think there is a great deal of adjustments. The ones that are savvy really had to tailor their collections: they changed the silhouettes, they changed the sizing.

And there is a rise in the Asian-American designer. Alexander Wang designing for Balenciaga wouldn’t have happened ten years ago. What are your thoughts how these positions will develop further?

I think it’s an amazing time to see how this continues to grow. And anything that nurtures talent in the East, I’m all for. Because for so long, there’d been so much emphasis on Asians, both in Asia and here, to go into engineering, medicine, law get these professional, corporate degrees and get a safe job. But now I think there’s much more of a consciousness as you see these success stories: Jason Wu designing for Michelle Obama, Alexander Wang for Balenciaga.

In your book you touch on some really crazy food your characters enjoy. What’s the craziest rich Asian dish you’ve had?

When I was younger, I had fox paw. I remember that being a delicacy. Pigeon soup that was lovely, actually.

People have compared you to the likes of Edith Wharton and Jane Austen. How does that feel?

There are pretty amazing comparisons and I have a lot to live up to. It’s amazing that people would even utter my name near those writers. But I was very influenced by them. I was a literature major back in college, so I read a lot of the English classics and I’ve always loved Jane Austen. Edith Wharton was more of a recent discovery. In every culture there had been tradition of parodying and satirizing the world of the privileged and the rich. Jane Austen was doing that in England in the 19th century, Edith Wharton was doing it in America in the early 20th century. Asia now is going through this amazing gilded age, and, to my knowledge, no one has really been talking about it.

Photography: Alexis Rodriguez-Duarte