Louis Vuitton bags filled with ramen

The confused pleasure of fiction about the super-wealthy

July 23, 2016 11:53 pm | Updated July 24, 2016 02:48 am IST

Illustration: Satwik Gade

Illustration: Satwik Gade

A friend who recently moved to Hong Kong gave me Kevin Kwan’s China Rich Girlfriend; few birthday gifts have excited me more. I had longed to read Kwan’s first book Crazy Rich Asians and then lost track of the book. The book blogs I follow do not steadily propel me towards South-East Asian books as often as they push me in the direction of yet another thin-as-gruel coming-of-age American novel. What a mistake that is when we could all be eating from the steamy hotpot of Kevin Kwan novels. This is not to say that Kwan is hearty. Instead, every page has delicious little titbits from the lives of the ridiculously wealthy in China, Singapore and Hong Kong that hit your bliss point every time.

Continuous avarice Readers from pre-liberalisation India, these books will remind you of your confused pleasure from the books you bought from the pavements back then: Judith Krantz, Jackie Collins and other books, with big hair, shoulder pads and solitaires the size of a baby’s fist. Kwan’s stories of locust-like Chinese shopping sprees in Paris, frenetic partying in Dubai (with Gordon Ramsay manning the live pasta counter) or sports car collectors in Singapore are continuously comic. But eventually, by the time you get to the fashion blogger-daughter of a Chinese billionaire building a house to match the resort she couldn’t buy — complete with climate-controlled closets and Vegas-style dancing fountains — you’re in a fine stage of hotpot-induced food coma.

Kwan’s books have almost no plot, but what keeps things moving is the continuous avarice of the older generation in marrying their children further up the vertiginous ladder. And the truest source of comedy in Kwan’s books is the super-wealthy Asian’s simultaneous ability to pour money down the drain and also penny-pinch like OCD crabs. Scene after scene deploys this contrast. Middle-aged Singaporean ladies spending millions on random tchotchkes in London, but shocked at the idea of having to spend on hotels when they could stay with distant family instead. Elderly Chinese ladies carrying Louis Vuitton trunks full of ramen packets to Paris because “25 euros for fried rice” is insane. A young woman in a Singapore supermarket is on the phone with her agent who is bidding steadily higher on her behalf at a Hong Kong art auction. As she shops for groceries and keeps an eye on her son, she calmly tells her nervous agent that if she does acquire this exorbitant piece of Chinese art, she is going to donate it anonymously to her favourite museum. At the top of the bidding spiral, she and her agent on the phone agree that perhaps $195 million is just a tad too silly and exit the bidding. She hangs up and gets her super-saver coupons out of her handbag for the supermarket cashier.

The kind of story about a certain billionaire that kept making the rounds was this — if he saw an uneaten katori (dish) of dal on his dining table, he apparently asked in a pained voice: who ordered this extra dal? Or that a favourite party game of the Bombay rich would be to go up to the billionaire and ask him what the price of bhindi that day was. Apparently he always knew.

The comedy of Kwan and our Bombay billionaire is in the moral tale that the hot-air balloon of impossible wealth is tethered (loosely) by old-fashioned thrift. Without it (the comedy or the morality, take your pick), would we continuously read entire novels about the zombie rich and their lifeless purchases? I’m not sure. Neither is Kwan because he introduces a misguided morality plot point or two such as the takedown of the extravagant Collette (she of the climate-controlled closet). As actor and comedian Arthur Chu writes about China Rich Girlfriend : “The bad people are the nouveau riche, like Astrid’s insecure husband, or too-extravagant mainlanders like Colette. But when it comes to old-money Singaporeans like Astrid, Rachel’s husband or presumably Kevin Kwan himself — people who are cultured and discreet about their privilege — the book is firmly on their side.”

Nearly a decade ago, when Janet Malcolm wrote about the Gossip Girl novels, she remarked that its author Cecily von Ziegesar understands “that the princes and princesses of fairy tales require the foil of beggars and commoners, and so, of her six main characters, only three belong to the world of the disgustingly rich.” (Kwan’s token foil Rachel Chu is less foil and more cellophane).

What money does Fiction has explored how money twists people, how the lack of money twists people (Hilary Mantel’s An Experiment in Love ). Fiction sometimes bitterly accepts that money can only come from crime (Honoré de Balzac), or self-consciously admits to its seductions (Martin Amis in Money where the author steps in as a character to prevent the consumerist protagonist’s self-destruction but succumbs himself). Fiction has written about people transcending money or pointed out yet again that money doesn’t guarantee love ( The Great Gatsby or Gilmore Girls ). Ziegesar does something clever too. Blaire Waldorf drove the “label education” of the series but she was also the over-the-top rich girl who wanted more and more, and plotted maniacally and failed. There’s of course the probably made-up but perfect exchange between Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald said: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” And Hemingway: “Yes, they have more money.”

The Kevin Kwan books differ from other books about wealth in one significant way. Everything is about money in the Kwan novels in the way that everything is about sex in porn. Or in the way that the Shobhaa De novels pretend to be about sex but are all about money. One big giveaway in the Kwan novels? No sex.

Nisha Susan is a writer and a co-founder of the online feminist magazine The Ladies Finger .

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