Trophy assets, record-breaking dresses and plastic surgery for fish: Inside the world of the ‘Crazy Rich Asians’

Accompanied by his mother, aunt and cousins, Nick arrives at a fictional Mayfair hotel called the Calthorpe after a long flight from their native Singapore. Confirming their reservation of the master suite, a particularly snooty general manager named Ormsby – clearly shocked that the surname ‘Young’ should belong to an Asian woman – inexplicably turns them away. “Perhaps [try] someplace in Chinatown?” he sneers.

So they buy the hotel. Yes, just like that. Still in reception, a few indignant phone calls to Nick’s uncle – one of the wealthiest men in Singapore – sees strings pulled with the Calthorpe’s owner (one Lord Rupert Calthorpe-Cavendish-Gore, of course) and the property sold. A few minutes later, the owner reintroduces the family to Ormsby as his new employer. The message is clear: providing you can afford it, revenge is a dish best served instantly. 

Released in the UK next month, Crazy Rich Asians has many tropes of a conventional rom-com. In the present day, it tells the story of a young Asian-American woman who falls for Nick, now a history professor in New York. She travels to Singapore to meet his family for the first time, only to realise he isn’t just a history professor, but in fact scion to one of the wealthiest dynasties in Asia. (No, it didn’t occur to her to Google him). Cue a lot of status anxiety, a lot of intrigue, and a lot of opulence.

Though the novel was once described as a cross between Dallas and Downton Abbey, there is no denying that Crazy Rich Asians breaks new ground. It is the first major Hollywood project to feature an all-Asian cast in a generation; the first rom-com to top the US box office in three years; and, perhaps most blatantly, the first film to show the quite amazing opulence of the Far East’s fast-growing ultra-rich.

“It’s exaggerated for comic effect, but Singapore is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and there a lot of very, very rich people here, as there are in London or New York,” says James Crabtree, a writer and academic who has lived in Singapore for the past three years. His new book, The Billionaire Raj studies the new gilded age of India’s elite in the 21st century, yet while not quite as indiscreet, he’s noticed that Singapore’s rich can be just as excessive.

“The shops, the sports cars, you do see it. What you see in Crazy Rich Asians is satire, poking fun at the rich, but when you look into it, some of the most preposterous things in the story turn out to be entirely true.”

Take that opening scene, for example. In a recent radio interview, Kevin Kwan, the flamboyant 44-year-old Singaporean-American author of the Crazy Rich Asians novel and its sequels, admitted it is “loosely inspired by a true story” about a family he knows. Many of the characters in the book were based on people who have crossed his path – no wonder, perhaps, given his great-grandfather was one of the founding directors of Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation, Singapore’s oldest bank.

He recalls one family who “arrived in London late and found the reservation wasn’t being honoured at the hotel. In the real story [they] just very kindly told the manager, ‘you can give me my rooms, or I can put an ad in every English-speaking newspaper around the world tomorrow morning just explaining what’s happened to me. You choose.’”

They didn’t buy that hotel, then, but likely could have. After all, since the financial crash in 2008, Asian billionaires have been purchasing trophy assets all over the UK, be they domestic properties, football clubs or hotels, and in doing so have rebranded the face of the one per cent. In 2010, the eccentric Malaysian billionaire Vincent Tan bought Cardiff City, and promptly maddened its fans by changing their kit from blue to red (since reversed). Singaporean billionaire Kwek Leng Chan owns the four-star Thistle hotel brand, the Royal Horseguards hotel in Whitehall and the Clermont Club in Berkeley Square – even the Dorchester is owned by the Sultan of Brunei. 

“Some bought for investment reasons, some might have been football fans, and some were trophies. But there’s a lot of money seeping in. They’ve made a big impact on the property market in the UK, and I don’t see any reason why it’s going to stop,” Crabtree says. “A lot is made of India’s importance post-Brexit, but Singapore and Malaysia should be near the top of Liam Fox’s list. If he wants investment deals, the so-called ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ are ripe for it.”

The rise of the ultra-rich in Asia is staggering. Just over a decade ago, China was thought to have no billionaires. Now, it makes up 20 per cent of the global billionaires list having added 101 in just the past year, swelling the continent’s total to 637 – more than the 563 from the United States, and producing two new ones every week. With an average age of 55, China’s billionaire cohort is also statistically younger than their American and European counterparts, who reach this level of wealth at 61 and 62 respectively.

‘You can’t imagine how staggeringly rich these people are, Marie-Hélène,’’ one character in Kwan’s novel says. ‘‘The houses, the servants, the style in which they live. It makes the Arnaults [one of Europe’s richest families, owners of LVMH Louis Vuitton] look like peasants.’’

The fact they are newly-minted doesn’t necessarily make Asian rich people ‘crazier’ than your average British billionaire, but watching the film, you could be forgiven for thinking it might. In one scene, a woman boasts of paying thousands of dollars for plastic surgery for her prized dragon fish, which you might believe to be a work of fiction – until the New York Times interviewed a piscine cosmetic surgeon in Singapore earlier this year. Eye-lifts and chin jobs are the most common requests, he said. 

Juliana Chan, the 25-year-old CEO of Wildtype Media Group in Singapore, recognises the wealth on display in Crazy Rich Asians, though insists it isn’t flaunted quite so ostentatiously. 

“There is a very lavish wedding in the film, and that is definitely a time when you see the amount of money these people have to spend,” she says. “My sister was once a viola player and she was flown, with her quartet, all the staff and crew, and hundreds of guests, to Bali for a cliff-top wedding that was timed to start just as the sun set behind the couple. They like to show off at weddings, I guess.”

Feiping Chang, a glamorous Taiwanese native who grew up in Sydney and Singapore, certainly did. The finance worker and Hong Kong socialite, who posts much of her enivable lifestyle to her 50k-strong following on Instagram, married financier Lincoln Li in a three-day clifftop ceremony in an area of Capri the government had previously banned weddings in. As well as a cake topped with 15kg of fresh strawberries, Chang commissioned two couture gowns from Giambattista Valli – one of which was the largest dress the Italian designer had ever made.  

It’s an extreme lifestyle, but Juliana Chan – who took her entire staff to the cinema to see the film, such is the excitement among most Singaporeans – doesn’t mind the ultra-rich being the focus of the story. Something needed to be first, after all.

“There have been some people in Singapore who have been angry that it shows only the rich side of life here, but what can you do? It can’t be about everything,” she says. “To me it’s just a very cute romcom, and amazing that it’s the first time we’ve got a movie like this, with Asian people, and all about Singapore.”

Crazy Rich Asians is released nationwide on September 14