Where It All Goes Down
Singapore (Er, Mostly)
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to bop around Southeast Asia, peeking into the windows of the richest people and ogling all their fancy things? Ditto.
Luckily Crazy Rich Asians offers us just that from chapter to chapter, letting us jet from Singapore to New York to Hong Kong, and from ritzy residence to fancy dinner club.
Why all the changes in setting? One aspect of the novel's purpose is to catalogue the material wealth of these Asians while giving us a glimpse behind the walls. The characters are not all holed up in one giant house like MTV's The Real World; they're dispersed across their many properties across many countries in SE Asia. Kwan does a nice job of identifying time and place of each chapter and clearly marks any flashback we warp through.
Through this approach, we're able to see the different homes and lifestyles of the characters, from Carol Tai's "Star Trek House" to Astrid's "cramped" flat. The juxtaposition of Singapore with New York also serves to provide a foil to the wealth we encounter in the book. New York City is considered one of the wealthiest cities in the United States, but the life Nick and Rachel lead there is paltry compared to the lifestyles of the rich and famous in Singapore.
The setting, while seemingly frivolous as we party on an island in the Indian Ocean or avoid dog fights in Macau, is a character of sorts in the novel. Not only does it give context to the characters and their motivations and biases, it helps us see a different dimension of the people. The characters on the fringes of the social elite, those who aspire to be within the circle of Shang Su Yi's kin only see the external, they only see the setting. However, when we're given an inside peek into all different residences, we see how the characters interact with their worlds and what it says about their values:
Nick Young has few possessions in his studio in New York City; Astrid Leong would rather be happily married to her husband and live in a small-by-Singapore-standards flat; Eddie Cheng is just as materialistic as the world he has created for himself.