'Crazy Rich Asians' author Kevin Kwan on privilege, excess and believability
With an acclaimed new novel on the shelves and a movie in the works, writer Kevin Kwan talks about how his gilded upbringing in Singapore inspired his fiction
The first time Kevin Kwan realised something was slightly unusual about his Singapore childhood came when, as a tween, he and his family moved to Houston, Texas. "We settled into a perfectly nice, all-American suburb," says Kwan, "but the first thing that struck me was that these houses were far smaller than the one I had lived in, and none had fences or gates around them. They were just out in the open, with nothing but lawns and driveways separating each other."
He found it disconcerting: "Until that point," he says, "I had spent my whole life in a neighbourhood where every house was behind a tall fence and an electronic gate, and many houses even had guard dogs or security posts with 24-hour guards at the gate."
That was the landscape of his life in the Lion City as a scion of the old-money guard. Thinking back to his early years, he remembered one Singaporean family friend's house so vividly - "It was an enormous estate that had a sunken pond in the middle of the living room filled with baby sharks" - that the image stayed with him for decades, providing the inspiration for the character Peik Lin Goh's house in his 2013 international bestseller, Crazy Rich Asians.
Yet throughout his childhood, Kwan had no idea that he had lived in any bubble of privilege. In fact, he remembers throughout his youth he actually worried that his family was poor: "We lived in an old house with my grandparents, while so many of my schoolfriends got to live in these cool high-rise apartments with wall-to-wall carpeting and bunk beds. I had to sleep in an old antique bed, and all I wanted was a bunk bed."
Then, once his family had settled in Houston, it hit him. "I was 11 and I began to realise that my childhood had been rather different from the average Singaporean's," he says.
