Crazy rich families
BORN and raised in Singapore, Kevin Kwan was descended from the old rich. His great-grandfather was a founding director of the nation’s oldest bank, the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation. His family lived in a wealthy neighborhood, where elegant houses hid behind forbidding gates, guards and dogs.
His mother and other female relatives had couture fittings in the private rooms of fashion houses. His mother, he reportedly quipped, was not so much born but “conceived” to shop. Though his family shopped more discreetly, Kwan describes in his book a bevy of mainland Chinese girls shopping in Paris like a “plague of locusts, descending on every boutique and decimating everything in sight [and] breathlessly posting every purchase on social media.”
Kwan’s grandparents were colonial Chinese, more British than the British. The family spoke English at home, and reveled in afternoon tea. Like the stereotypical English, they wore their wealth discreetly, and Kwan was so oblivious to the latter that he confessed to the South China Morning Post that he would have traded his pricey antique bed for his classmates’ modern bunk beds.
When Kwan, at 11, moved to Texas with his family, he became exposed to the US middle-class lifestyle. He attended Parson’s Design in New York, worked with Oprah, and in a skewering yet witty homage to his home continent, wrote two best-selling over-the-top satires of Asia’s uber-rich, “Crazy Rich Asians” and “China Rich Girlfriend.”
The English wit Dorothy Parker says, “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.” Kwan describes in salacious detail the lifestyles of the rich and famous, particularly those of the new rich in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, the excesses of which not even Robin Leach would have dreamed of.
Kwan claims to have thoroughly researched his books, having traveled to six-star hotels and dined on Michelin-starred meals. But part-way through, when a character claims that a Patek Philippe is only middle class these days, and that a Tourbillon (with gears made of “unclassified experimental metals intended for spy drones”) made by Richard Plumper (a thinly-veiled reference to Swiss watchmaker Richard Mille) is now THE Billionaire Wristband, I have become weary of the name-dropping and the brand-enumerating.
I have also begun to wonder: which stories are based on fact, and which, fiction?
Apparently, though the characters are made up, everything is anchored on reality. Kwan reportedly had to delete the most ostentatious details on his editor’s advice. In this millennium, Asia is indeed the setting for the new Vanity Fair.
And the core is composed of stratospherically wealthy families with business interests that span the globe.
Penny Wise, Pound Foolish
What I find riveting, particularly in Kwan’s second book, is not the plot, but his spot-on revelations and incisive social commentary on how these families live.
High-net-worth families maintain different accounts around the world. In the book, Singaporean matriarch Eleanor Young, whose parents lost their fortune during the Japanese occupation in the Second World War, learned a valuable lesson: Never put all your eggs in one basket.
Today, “it didn’t matter that her hometown of Singapore had become one of the world’s most secure financial hubs; Eleanor—like many of her friends—still kept money distributed among various banks around the globe, in safe havens that would prefer to remain unnamed.”
In the wake of the European recession though, many foreigners have gravitated toward Asia. More than 200,000 Europeans work in Shanghai, with 20,000 of them French, a lot of whom are graduates of INSEAD or École Polytechnique. Many are bankers. And some work as bartenders.
Yet the super rich can be surprisingly super stingy, in the tiniest ways. Eleanor prefers to dine at a nearby Wee Nam Kee only because parking is $2. Her real choice, a posh hotel restaurant, charged valet parking at $15, “which she would RATHER DIE than do.”
After dining at top restaurants in Paris, a trio of elderly Chinese ladies retreated to their suite in Shangri-La to heat ramen packets stashed in Louis Vuitton trunks. They were exhausted from shopping—one had bought an antique clock for more than four million euros after barely a glance. They would have dined at the hotel restaurant, but they had walked out after finding that fried rice cost 25 euros. “Tai leiren le! (That’s insane!)”
What may be insane is the mother of a Singaporean tech titan, who does not permit her cooks to turn on the lights in the kitchen till 7:30 p.m., leaving them “bumbling around in complete darkness, trying to make dinner.”
The author is on the board of Ateneo de Manila University’s Family Business Development Center. Get her book “Successful Family Businesses” at the University Press (e-mail [email protected].) E-mail the author at [email protected].
