DESCRIPTION: Kevin Kwan’s bestselling trilogy applies double standards: it mocks braggarts and the nouveau riche whilst sparing the old money, just as Juvenal once did. A reading through the lens of Lacan and an analysis of all three volumes reveal the desire these books cater to.

Crazy Rich Asians: Singapore’s Juvenal

Kevin Kwan’s trilogy – *Crazy Rich Asians* (2013), *China Rich Girlfriend* (2015) and *Rich People Problems* (2017) – tells the story of people who have everything and are constantly assessing who matters. The publisher compares Kwan to Jane Austen. A more apt forebear might be Juvenal, who mocked Rome’s social climbers in the name of old customs. Like him, Kwan applies double standards. Using Jacques Lacan’s theory of desire and a ‘distant reading’ of all three volumes, it can be shown what this mockery offers her readers: the prospect of one day being recognised as belonging to a world that determines rank.

A Hotel in Mayfair

The first volume begins with an affront. London, 1986: Three women from Singapore and Hong Kong stand in the lobby of an upmarket hotel with their children, soaked by the rain. The manager refuses to acknowledge their booking and sends the Chinese out onto the street. An hour later, the hotel belongs to their family. The purchase secures the women a suite and changes their status. However, the system that sorts guests by origin remains in place. It is merely their means of power that have switched sides.

The plot then reaches a threshold that cannot be crossed with money. Rachel Chu, an economics professor in New York and the daughter of a single Chinese immigrant, travels to Singapore with her boyfriend Nick Young and only learns there that he is the heir to one of Asia’s wealthiest families. His mother Eleanor and his grandmother Shang Su Yi, mistress of the Tyersall Park estate, regard Rachel as a gold-digger. In the second book, the couple get married, and Rachel finds her biological father, a wealthy Chinese politician . In the third, Su Yi dies, and the family fights over the house. The trilogy has sold millions of copies, and the 2018 film adaptation grossed $239 million worldwide.

What does this world want from me?

Lacan refers to the realm of language and social order as the Big Other. Families and institutions act as its representatives as soon as they judge what is valid and who matters. According to Lacan, desire arises from the difference between the need that an object can satisfy and the claim with which one demands attention from another person. That is why no object can definitively answer what one means to the other. This is where the question ‘Che vuoi?’ arises: what does the Other want from me? It is answered by the phantasm, a scene that establishes the subject’s position in relation to the Other’s desire. And Lacan notes that even the symbolic order has no final authority to guarantee its judgements. He writes this lack in the Other as S(Ⱥ).

Rachel is faced with this question. Nick’s family is investigating her lineage, Eleanor has a private detective looking into her origins, and at the bride’s hen party, Rachel finds a mutilated fish in her bag, with a message written in fish’s blood on the mirror above it stating that she is a gold-digger. What do these people want from her? Nick could buy her anything. The answer to what she means to his family is not in his hands. This question determines whether the trilogy reveals the lack in the Other or preserves the hope that, somewhere, genuine belonging will be reliably recognised. It opts for hope.

Brands as signifiers

According to the author’s own tally – the rules of which are explained at the end – the first volume lists around 195 brands, hotels, restaurants and vineyards with approximately 315 mentions; every 430th word is a name. These names function as signifiers in the Lacanian sense. A Goyard bag means something precisely because it is not a Louis Vuitton bag. At one point, all we learn about Kitty Pong, a soap opera actress, is that she was sitting in a restaurant with a Gucci handbag, a Gucci halter top, Gucci satin shorts and Gucci python boots. The list is the verdict.

The cleverest scene in the book takes place in Shenzhen. Eleanor and her wealthy friends buy ‘real fakes’ in a backstreet shop – surplus stock from the factories of luxury brands: ‘They look so real because they practically are real.’ With ladies like them, Carol Tai explains, no one would ever think the bag was fake. The same bag is a fake on a shop assistant’s arm and an original on Carol’s. Authenticity is a feat achieved by others. Here, the satire strikes at the rich themselves.

Across the three volumes, the density of brand names falls from 2.4 to 2.2 to 1.5 per thousand words, whilst the number of words relating to money increases by 70 per cent. In the epilogue to the third volume, the density rises once more to 3.3. At the wedding, the guests place bets on the designer of the wedding dress and recognise McQueen: ‘Sarah Burton does it again!’ The dress itself is given a sentence. The names simply replace a description.

Emotions labelled

Kwan’s prose rarely names emotions. There are seven words such as ‘fear’, ‘shame’ or ‘joy’ per thousand words, compared with 15.5 in Austen’s *Emma*. This figure remains consistent across all three volumes, as do sentence length and the proportion of dialogue. Emotions are conveyed through adverbs and speech verbs. Nick kisses Rachel ‘jubilantly’, Astrid strolls ‘purposefully’ on a treadmill, and verbs such as ‘cooed’, ‘cackled’ and ‘gushed’ appear 0.53 times per thousand words in Kwan’s work, compared with 0.07 times in *Emma*. The adverb clings to the gesture like a label on a product. Kwan tells her story through the imaginary, through poses and postures, and attaches signifiers to them that define their meaning.

Counting the characters reveals where the inner life is lacking. In the first volume, Su Yi has the fewest named emotions and the fewest brands around her. In the text, she is the site of judgement, and this is how Lacan understands the Big Other. It is only in the third volume, in which she dies, that she is given emotions. In the roughly 3,900 words surrounding her death, Nick has seven sentences, one of which names an emotion: ‘Nicky just stood there, looking stunned.’ A little later, he stands in front of the hoarding at the site of his favourite pasta shop, which announces ‘TORY BURCH Opening Summer 2015’, and sinks to the pavement in despair. He is mourning a pasta shop that is being replaced by a brand. In the text, the grandmother was always more of a place than a person.

Double standards

The mockery targets every level of wealth, but stops short of Tyersall Park, which on Google Earth is a blank patch with no name on the gate. Nick’s cousin Astrid, the most beautiful woman in the trilogy, rejects the diamond ring from her admirer Charlie in the first volume, describing “the thirty-nine-carat diamond solitaire he presented as far too vulgar, flinging it onto the slopes”. Her parents are appalled by ‘such shameless new money’. The same extravagance is called ‘good taste’ when it comes to Astrid and ‘new money’ when it comes to Charlie. The guests judge Aramina’s wedding dress as if it were a work of art, whilst Kitty’s Gucci is looked down upon. Both are wearing designer labels. In one case, the text speaks of connoisseurship; in the other, of ostentation.

In the second volume, moderation becomes the guiding principle. A tutor from a long-established Hong Kong family prescribes a reading list for Kitty: all of Austen’s works, four of Wharton’s novels, *Vanity Fair*, *Anna Karenina* and Trollope’s Palliser series, followed by a test to see if she is ‘ready to attempt some light Proust’. Kwan is familiar with the canon of society novels and uses it as a course in etiquette. In the third volume, Kitty chases after a title in the ‘ ’ palace of a Malay sultana – one that would surpass that of her stepdaughter – and is told that Su Yi had long since been Lady Young ‘and never even used that title. Alamak, what would Su Yi need a title for?’ Anyone seeking a title is ridiculous. Anyone who has one and does not use it stands above everyone else.

Satire has often been conservative throughout history. Juvenal mocked freedmen and social climbers in the name of ancient Roman custom. Kwan follows in this tradition. His satire is genuine and serves the interests of the old money. With its double standards, it organises the desires of its readers. Laughing at the social climbers creates distance, whilst admiration for old money keeps alive the desire to be accepted. The novel portrays many representatives of ‘the Other’ as fallible, whilst sparing ‘the Other’ itself. It does not speak of the lack within ‘the Other’.

The Ugly Duckling

Rachel survives the first volume because she behaves appropriately. She is clever, modest and unflappable, and never comes across as a woman who is using Nick as a springboard to success. Herein lies the phantasm of the trilogy: belonging is earned by those who do not visibly crave it. One is chosen because one does not curry favour, and gains access without having to see oneself as a candidate. Underlying this is a fairy-tale formula. Rachel is Cinderella, Eleanor is the stepmother, the heiresses with the fish are the wicked stepsisters, and Cinderella becomes a princess because she possesses the virtues that are valued in the castle anyway. The second volume reworks the fairy tale. With the belated arrival of the father, Cinderella becomes the ugly duckling who was a swan from the very beginning, and Kwan describes as lineage what, for Lacan, is a function: the Name-of-the-Father, which secures the subject’s place in the order. In retrospect, Rachel’s virtue reveals her origins. The family need not alter their criteria for social evaluation at all, because Rachel had, after all, met them from birth.

After that, the restraint has served its purpose. In the second volume, Rachel flies to Paris in the private jet of the heiress Colette Bing, and a chapter from her diary reveals where that modesty has gone. She takes ‘a million pictures … from every angle’ of the dressing table in the hotel suite. When a fellow traveller buys an entire wall full of handbags, she notes “#OMFG #thisjustgotreal”. She orders a couture jacket, and standing outside Colette’s bathroom, her plan to retile her own bathroom in New York is scrapped: “I don’t want it retiled, Nick, I want this!” A few chapters later, she raises the only objection in the volume. A couture dress that costs more than the measles vaccination for a thousand children is “unconscionable”. Her friend Peik Lin responds with the classic argument of the wealthy: that luxury provides a livelihood for the seamstresses. The economics professor doesn’t disagree, says “Okay, point taken” and makes a joke about Mao. Rachel doesn’t quite take to Paris. Towards the end of the week, over dinner with Astrid, she says of the shopping sprees: ‘It was fascinating for the first couple of days, but then it just got tedious.’ Nick says he’s ‘hit my limit with them’. The text allows for this weariness but draws no conclusion from it. An objection that brings about change would contradict the thesis of this essay. In the trilogy, nobody changes anything.

In the third volume, Rachel resists her family’s pressure to have a child on two occasions: “I just snap my fingers and a baby will magically appear?” On the very last page, she is pregnant. The fairy tale ends as it began. Cinderella gets the prince, and her ‘no’ yields to the wishes of the household.

People on the margins of order

It is at the margins that what Lacan calls the Real makes itself felt – that which is not absorbed in the fulfilment of desire. In the first volume, Michael Teo, Astrid’s husband from a humble background, utters the only sentence that directly challenges wealth itself: he cannot stand by and watch these people spend a fortune on a wedding whilst half the world is starving. Kwan puts these words into the mouth of a man who, at the very same moment, invents an affair so as not to have to break up, and the plot subsequently focuses solely on his honesty. Rachel’s mother, Kerry, reveals late in the story that she was married to a rich man who beat her. The story clarifies Rachel’s origins, but does not challenge the established order.

In the second volume, we learn in passing that Carlton, Rachel’s half-brother, killed a young woman and paralysed another in a car race in London, ‘all covered up by the Baos’. The chapter concludes with a footnote about the Bugatti he was just about to race in again: ‘Park one in your garage today for $2.7 million.’ In the third volume, Charlie’s ex-wife Isabel alternates between outbursts following the hurt caused by the break-up, a party for two hundred guests whilst in a state of dysphoric mania, and two miraculous recoveries, the first whilst eating cream of asparagus soup with Astrid. Her throwing of laksa at a church banquet is an ‘acting out’ in the Lacanian sense, a message to the Other delivered before an audience. Kwan turns this into slapstick.

Throughout all three volumes, the staff remain mere props. The first volume refers to servants 236 times by their job titles and only 28 times by name. Malays and Indians, who together make up more than a fifth of Singapore’s population, appear almost exclusively as drivers, security guards and domestic staff. The question of who is recognised within the household overshadows the question of who keeps the household running.

The House: From Symbol to Fire

Tyersall Park functions like the letter in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’, which Lacan read in a seminar in 1956 and placed at the beginning of his *Écrits*. We never find out what is written in the Queen’s letter. What matters is where it is located, and who holds it is determined by the letter itself. It is hidden in the most visible spot of all: a letter holder above the fireplace. On Google Earth, Tyersall House is an empty patch in the middle of the city, and all the characters align themselves according to who holds it or wants to own . Su Yi inherited it from her father, and the final clause of the will bequeaths ‘my house in SINGAPORE’ as a percentage to her son, daughters and two grandchildren, without naming the property. Eddie blurts out: ‘You didn’t mention Tyersall Park at all!’ Shares are passed on, but the signifier remains behind. In the same scene, for the first time in the trilogy, the servants are given full names, each accompanied by a bequest, ranging from three million for the housekeeper Lee Ah Ling to 250,000 dollars for the driver Ahmad bin Youssef. We only learn their names when the mistress awards them a sum.

Poe and Lacan must leave the letter blank. Only as a signifier without content can it glide and arrange the characters according to its course. Kwan’s narrative style cannot sustain this emptiness. In the end, she needs content that authenticates the house. The finale of the third volume answers every unanswered question with a document. In Su Yi’s diary, Nick finds a letter from Windsor Castle in which George VI thanks her for Tyersall Park providing refuge to British officers during the war: ‘Your acts of heroism, too many to recount here, will never be forgotten.’ The second volume had adorned itself with the phrase attributed to Balzac: ‘Behind every fortune lies a great crime’. The third responds with a letter of thanks from a king. Lacan’s statement that a letter always reaches its destination comes true to the letter: the letter returns to Nick, and what must remain blank in Lacan’s account is read aloud. The letter speaks of ‘acts of heroism’, and the novel places it at the end as confirmation of the claim to ownership.

Tyersall Park subsequently becomes the ‘Tyersall Park Hotel and Museum’, a boutique hotel with guest villas designed by Axel Vervoordt. Next to it, a village for ‘artists and middle-income families’ is being built by the Goh family, the nouveau riche with the golden Venus from the first volume. It is fully booked on the very first day, because no one ‘with less than ten million dollars’ can otherwise get a house with a garden. Astrid, who used to wear Parisian couture and never spoke of it, is in the Philippines sewing ‘Astrid Leong Resort Wear 2016’ from fabric she has woven herself, ‘a bamboo cotton, hand-dyed in ocean water’. The final image is Nick’s view of the house, ‘alive, reborn’.

The arc of the trilogy leads from the house as a symbol to the house as a design brand. The nouveau riche are accepted as soon as they build what the old money wants and marry into the circle. The Great Other, without want, survives by transforming himself into a product, and a king thanks him for his heroism.

Eddie, the ideal reader

The publisher promoted the first volume as a ‘Pride and Prejudice-like send-up’; critics hailed it as a satire on materialism. Lacan calls the point at which a signifier halts the glide of meaning and retroactively fixes a chain of signs the ‘quilting stitch’ (French: point de capiton). It is a central concept in his psychoanalysis and denotes the point at which the freely interpretable meanings of language—which glide without limit —are suddenly pinned down and fixed by a fixed signifier (a ‘master signifier’ such as God, freedom or truth). The label ‘satire’ also functions as such a ‘point de capiton’. Under this title, 195 brands and a diamond in the snow read as a critique, and the desire to be recognised by the order of rank is given the name of a critique of that very order. Netflix turned the title into a genre in 2023 and announced the New York spin-off of ‘Bling Empire’ with the tagline ‘Meet the Real-Life Crazy Rich Asians’.

The ideal reader of these books is Eddie Cheng, Nick’s cousin. He works at ‘Hong Kong’s most prestigious investment bank’ and keeps a spreadsheet of his parents’ wealth, ‘diligently updating it every week based on property valuations and then calculating his potential future share’. He knows every one of his more than seventy watches and every room and who furnished it. His flat was featured in ‘Hong Kong Tattle’, the society magazine that the novel recreates. Where Kwan narrates from Eddie’s perspective, the tone is indistinguishable from the rest of the book: ‘Here at last was someone with style—the girl was wearing a sleeveless ice-blue Emilia Wickstead jumpsuit, blue suede ankle boots, and casually slung over her shoulder was the sort of handbag that Eddie was sure had a three-year waiting list.’ Thus the trilogy depicts the world as an inventory and an assessment. Eddie’s share of the text doubles from the first to the third volume. He is the reader’s mirror image in the imaginary realm, a doppelgänger whom one is allowed to laugh at so as not to recognise oneself in him. The reader identifies with Rachel, but reads through Eddie’s eyes. Laughing at Eddie relieves the reader of the absurdity of seeing the world as Eddie does. The trilogy is a romantic comedy for private equity advisers: it evaluates, restructures and sells, and in the end it saves the family estate by turning it into a hotel.

About the methodology

The figures are taken from a count of the full English texts of all three volumes (each containing around 135,000 words). The count included brands, hotels, restaurants and vineyards using a list of names; words denoting emotions based on around 150 word stems; verbs of saying followed by an adverb ending in ‘-ly’; and sentences in which a character is referred to by name. The same counting lists were applied to three of Austen’s novels, as well as to works by Chesterton and Melville. The figures therefore measure word usage. They serve to identify scenes, and the argument is based on a reading of these scenes. The count was carried out using an AI assistant (Claude, Anthropic), and every notable figure was cross-checked against the relevant passage in the novel. In literary studies, counts of this kind are known as stylometry and as ‘distant reading’ in the sense used by Franco Moretti. What is new is the possibility of combining both approaches in a single process. Word lists, rules and all tables are included in the methodological appendix; the article and appendix are available for download as PDF files.

Key points in brief

•            Kwan applies double standards. For Astrid, ‘waste’ means ‘good taste’, whilst for Charlie it means ‘new money’. In this respect, he follows in the conservative tradition of Juvenal.

•            Brands function as signifiers. Across all three volumes, Kwan names emotions half as often as Austen does and expresses them through adverbs. Su Yi, the matriarch, is the seat of judgement.

•            Rachel’s phantasm is: to be accepted without having to seek it. In Paris, she raves about couture and hotel bathrooms; her objection to luxury goes unanswered, and her refusal to have a child ends in pregnancy.

•            Michael, Kerry, the dead woman from London, Isabel and the staff illustrate the cost of order. Kwan ticks them off as episodes.

•            The finale transforms Tyersall Park into a boutique hotel; a letter from George VI attests to the family’s heroism. The trilogy leads from the house as a symbol to the house as a design brand.

•            The ideal reader is the ridiculous Eddie Cheng. The label ‘satire’ acts as a stitch, allowing the catalogue to be read as supposed criticism.

Glossary: Lacan’s terms

Sources

·        Kevin Kwan: *Crazy Rich Asians*. Doubleday 2013; *China Rich Girlfriend*. Doubleday 2015; *Rich People Problems*. Doubleday 2017. Author’s own count based on the full texts

·        Comparative texts from the NLTK-Gutenberg corpus (Austen, Chesterton, Melville)

·        Jacques Lacan: Écrits. Seuil 1966, including ‘The Seminar on “The Stolen Letter”’ (1956), ‘The Mirror Stage’ (1949), ‘The Meaning of the Phallus’ (1958), ‘On a Question Preceding Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis’ (1958), ‘Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire’ (1960)

·        Jacques Lacan: *Le Séminaire*, Book III. *Les psychoses*. Seuil 1981; Book VI. *Le désir et son interprétation*. La Martinière 2013; Book X. *L’angoisse*. Seuil 2004

·        Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Jacques Lacan

·        Jacques Cazotte: *Le Diable amoureux*. 1772

·        Edgar Allan Poe: The Purloined Letter. 1844

·        Juvenal: Satires. c. 100–130 AD

·        Honoré de Balzac: *Le Père Goriot*. 1835

·        Penguin Random House: Crazy Rich Asians

·        NPR: Crazy Rich Asians, Lives of the 0.001 per cent (2013)

·        The Hollywood Reporter: Opening weekend

·        Netflix Tudum: Bling Empire New York

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