Back when I first started pursuing a career in theatre, someone very close to me asked me why I wanted to throw my lot into this craft:
“There are no leading Asian (Chinese) male hollywood stars; there’s no future in it!”
I’m going to skip everything wrong about that sentence and focus on its essence (to me): How will you succeed where others have failed?
When Crazy Rich Asians first made its waves in the trailers, my interest was piqued. I like stories, and having Singapore as a locale for this story was close to me! I grew up here and wanted to see how this place would be recreated into a canvas for storytelling.
The movie was released and the yelling came: This is not the Singapore we know! Where are the other races! This story is not about The Everyday Singaporean!
I jumped quickly into the fight without watching the movie: It’s not about you, you are not crazy rich, it’s a story – can you not enjoy things?!
But when I finally watched the movie, I began to realise some things (spoilers ahead):
- The stars of my childhood are on the big screen telling a story that I care about.
Tan Kheng Hua, Selena Tan, Amy Cheng, Fiona Xie, Pierre Png, Koh Chieng Mun are people I watched on stage and on TV while growing up and it is SURREAL to see them all together in the same mise en scene.
2. The Singapore up there is the Singapore everyone knows but is perhaps to scared to admit to being a part of.
Family feuds, marital mistrust and the battle of passion and pragmatism are common to pretty much everyone living all over the world. When you throw the term “asian values” into the equation, you have Fear and Face and Internal Conflict masking themselves as Respect, Filial Piety and Pragmatism. We are living in a stew of traditions and slaves to our pasts and we are no different from the social strata depicted in the movie. The aunties reading the word of God as they gossiped and threw shade at the start of the movie seemed to be taken from actual scenes in my life. I knew these people too.
3. True wealth is being true to your truth.
We are all bound by the fear of not being enough. We are petrified when we lose face, we are hamstrung by social gaffes and we are too scared to do things that scare us. We are both Rachel Chu and Eleanor Young; scared to appear like someone we are not and yet scared to be the people we are. We are scared to go “Bok Bok Bitch” when it matters and too proud to offer our emerald rings when the time is right.
4. Crazy Rich People
Crazy Rich Asians seems to be describing the surface of the characters depicted in the story, but look deeper. There are 5 people who you can say are crazy rich at the end of the film: Rachel, who lay everything on the line in a SICK MAHJONG GAME, Nick, who lay his family on the line (and who was really the damsel in distress), Eleanor, who gave up her horcrux, Astrid, who did what SMRT should do (fire the general) and Kerry Chu, who already did what everyone else should have done in an epic backstory. They got out of the stew of tradition and properness and embraced themselves for who they were. Everyone else, you could say, is just wealthy.
And when you look deeper and see richness for what it should truly be called – happiness and contentment, this is a story of people who started out poor and ended up immensely happy and content, enough for themselves.
So how does it represent Singapore? How does it represent me? How does one succeed where others have failed? I think this movie answers all those questions for me in an unexpectedly truthful and ugly way; in a way that paints an accurate picture of a country and people I both hate and love for different reasons.
It’s so awfully meta that something as blah and plain as Rachel Chu (CRA) comes crashing without warning into our cushy culturally proper lives (rich or middle class or poor) and points out our flaws, has a scandal dug up by the biggest busybody in the land (guess who released the news that a Singaporean allegedly defaulted NS), and then went “Bok Bok Bitch” and made friends with the Burmese Princess because she is culturally aware (we are still not at that stage yet).
So appreciate the story and look at the mirror. No one actually made wings out of wax and fell to their death but everyone knows that flying close to the sun is something that everyone will try at least once in their lives.