It’s too crazy, lah

It’s a Hollywood movie that supposedly pits refined Chinese filial loyalty against crass American individualistic pursuit of love, and it is shot mainly in Singapore. Many Singaporeans, however, see Crazy Rich Asians as a racist and a flawed representation of the island’s diversity.

Entertaining in its way, the romcom is about Rachel Chu, a Chinese-American economics professor at New York University, who is accompanying her boyfriend Nick Young, a Chinese-Singaporean history professor , to his best friend’s wedding in Singapore. What Young has neglected to tell Chu is that he comes from old-money royalty and belongs to a family that’s preoccupied with marrying in the rarefied group of known wealthy Asian-Chinese families.

The opening scenes show a rich Singaporean family arriving drenched at a fancy hotel in London, only to be told by the racist manager that there is no booking in their name and that they should head to Chinatown instead. They exit, speak on the phone to family in Singapore and re-enter with a British lord, a friend of the family, who announces that they’ve bought up the hotel. And they promptly order their now new employees to clean up the wet and muddy floor.

The not-so-subtle message is that wealth, if you have enough of it, is indeed an effective weapon against the indignities of racism.

The movie is based on a book of the same title by Kevin Kwan, an American author of Chinese-Singaporean descent and great-grandson of the founder of OCBC Bank, who has been living in the US since he was 11. Kwan wrote the book to “introduce a contemporary Asia to a North American audience”. But if the film is “celebrated as a diversity win in the West, in the East it’s seen as more of the same Western gaze” and an erasure of Singapore’s ethnic diversity, as Nazry Bahrawi, literary and cultural critique at Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), sums up in his piece for Al Jazeera . This film is about ‘Asians’ as understood exclusively by North Americans, oblivious to their multiplicity — namely, the South Asians, Southeast Asians, Central Asians, Northeast Asians and East Asians.

So when Kwan and director John Chu revel in the fact that this is the first ‘Asian’ movie with a fully ‘Asian’ cast, we have to forgive them for meaning it in its restrictive American sense. Actually, the movie is specifically about a small elite group of Chinese Peranakan Singaporeans. Any 101 class on Singapore will introduce you to the ‘Peranakans’ – a group of people who are local-born but of foreign descent — usually Chinese with Malay, Thai or Indian ancestry.

Yet the movie opens with a quote by Napoleon, who is believed to have said, “China is a sleeping giant. Let her sleep, for when she wakes she will shake the world”. For Singaporeans, even those of Chinese descent, this felt like a travesty. How could this quote about China be relevant in a film about Chinese Peranakan Singaporeans?

As the Singaporean journalist Kirsten Han observes in the Hong Kong Free Press , “ CRA transforms Singapore from an island of diverse cultures into a Chinese state.” So it’s ironical that the movie is touted as highlighting the ‘power of diversity’ (Brooks Barnes, The New York Times ), because in Singapore it is seen as erasing diversity: of the brown bodies both within the elite Chinese Peranakan society and outside it.

“Rather than connecting us, CRA reinforces a narrative of division... while simultaneously erasing or occluding the other intimate connections and convergences that exist,” blogs Singaporean Girish Daswani, who teaches anthropology at the University of Toronto. This lack of representation is something artist and writer Sangeetha Thanappal, too, deplores as perpetuating “existing racist dynamics in Singapore”. “It simply is not the ‘Great Asian Hope’ that it is being portrayed as,” she writes in Intersectional Feminist Media .

What also has many wondering is why a North American audience would finally learn about, and respect contemporary Asians —namely, the Chinese — only if it saw them as super-rich. What’s more unfortunate is that a movie that could have showcased Singapore’s rich social and cultural heritage ended up glorifying a debauched super-rich lot who spared no thought about the social inequities around them (surprising for professors in economics/ history), flew around in private jets and snorted cocaine with utter disregard for the land’s stringent laws.

Annu Jalais is assistant professor at the National University of Singapore and recently the co-author of The Bengal Diaspora: Rethinking Muslim Migration

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