Notice: All forms on this website are temporarily down for maintenance. You will not be able to complete a form to request information or a resource. We apologize for any inconvenience and will reactivate the forms as soon as possible.

Crazy Rich Asians — “Crazy Rich Asians” Trilogy

Credits

Readability Age Range

Publisher

Awards

Year Published

Book Review

Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan has been reviewed by Focus on the Family’s marriage and parenting magazine. It is the first book in the “Crazy Rich Asians” trilogy.

Plot Summary

Rachel Chu accepts an offer by her boyfriend, Nicholas Young, to spend the summer in Asia with him. They’ve been dating for two years, and since Nick’s inviting her to meet his family and attend his best friend Colin Khoo’s wedding, Rachel’s friends think he might propose to her on the trip. Nick isn’t marriage-minded, though — he just wants to introduce Rachel to his favorite foods, places and activities.

His family, however, sees Rachel’s invitation to the Khoo wedding as fraught with significance. Nick is from a complicated extended family based in Singapore; the Young, T’sien and Shang clan, all of whom are overseas Chinese, descendants of Chinese citizens who left mainland China before communism took root. His family members run international businesses, marry minor members of the Thai royal family and extravagantly spend their unfathomable wealth.

When Nick’s mom, Eleanor Young, hears through the gossip chain that her only son will bring a girlfriend to Singapore for his best friend’s wedding, she panics. Nick has kept his relationship with Rachel a secret. All that Eleanor is able to learn about Rachel is that she’s of Chinese descent and is a professor of economics in New York.

Eleanor is obsessed with her place in the international community of Asian socialites and is concerned that her son has picked a girl from a “new money” family, whose people have only maintained their wealth for 30 or 40 years. She hires a private investigator to dig into Rachel’s background and is horrified to learn that she was born in mainland China, immigrated to America as a baby and was raised by a single mother.

Eleanor isn’t the only family member with troubles. Nick’s cousin Astrid, who is like a sister to him, discovers that her husband, Michael, is cheating on her. When Astrid is confronted with overwhelming evidence of Michael’s infidelity, she gets distracted by her worries and crashes her car. When she wakes up after her concussion, she confronts her husband about his cheating, but instead of being willing to repair their relationship, he decides to move out of their shared apartment and initiate a divorce.

Rachel gets her first taste of the Young family fortune when Nick pays for a first-class luxury cabin for their flight. Soon, she’s sampling the amazing array of local Singaporean foods and enjoying the company of Nick’s down-to-earth best friend, Colin, and Colin’s fiancée, Araminta.

The next day, she is shocked when she arrives at Nick’s grandmother’s house for a party with close friends and family, only to discover that the house is essentially a palace. Rachel enjoys the party and is treated with courtesy by most of Nick’s relatives, though his mother, Eleanor, has purposely left Singapore for Shenzhen, China, for a few days, so she can make it clear that she does not welcome Rachel’s presence.

Rachel is invited to Araminta’s bachelorette party, which involves traveling on a private jet to an equally private island resort in Indonesia for the weekend. Rachel tries to enjoy the beautiful resort, but she is plagued by the other girls’ nasty comments about her inferior birth and financial insufficiency. The other girls break into Rachel’s hotel room, leave a bloody, butchered fish in her purse and write a threat on her mirror in fish blood.

At Colin’s bachelor party, Nick isn’t having a good time either. The festivities begin with one of Colin’s acquaintances, Bernard, dragging everyone to an underground dogfight in Macau, which Nick and Colin walk away from. Bernard then provides alcohol, drugs and prostitutes for all the guys on the weekend trip — once again, things that Nick and Colin avoid. Finally, to escape Bernard’s partying ways, Nick fakes a medical emergency and calls a helicopter to lift himself, Colin and two of their friends to a more enjoyable location — Australia.

After the disastrous bachelorette party weekend, Rachel doesn’t tell Nick how the other girls treated her. She and Nick go to dinner to meet his parents for the first time. Eleanor, anxious to keep Rachel at a distance, invites numerous friends and family members to make the meeting seem less significant. More and more social events fill up the week before the wedding, all of which go rather smoothly, but Eleanor is still plotting to break up Nick and Rachel.

Astrid’s husband, Michael, doesn’t come to the wedding because he’s visiting his mistress in Hong Kong. Astrid runs into an old flame of her own at the wedding. Charlie Wu was her fiancé when they were in college. Now they find they both have a strange kinship, since they are both living in sham marriages. Charlie offers to fly Astrid to Hong Kong in his plane so she can spy on her husband’s activities, and she accepts his offer.

Moved by emotion during Colin and Araminta’s wedding, Nick decides that he definitely wants to make Rachel his wife. At the reception, he attempts to propose to Rachel, but is interrupted by Mandy Ling, his first girlfriend, who is attempting to woo him away from Rachel, with Eleanor’s blessing. Francesca, another former flame, tells Rachel a raunchy story about her own romantic past with Nick, which makes Rachel break down in tears. When Nick realizes how badly all his acquaintances and even family members have been treating Rachel, he tells her how valuable she is to him and offers to take her to Malaysia for a few days to escape the social pressures.

Eleanor tells her son outright that he cannot marry Rachel, but he insists that he will. Eleanor takes her mother-in-law, Nick’s grandmother, to Malaysia to their family’s summerhouse to intercept Nick and Rachel. As soon as the couple reaches the summerhouse, Nick’s grandmother confronts him and tells him that he may not propose to Rachel because she is poor and she also comes from a terrible family.

Eleanor reveals old press clippings dug up by her private investigator, showing that Rachel’s father, Fang Min, did not die when she was a baby, as her mother told her. Fang Min remains in mainland China, serving a life sentence in prison for illegal cost-cutting measures, which led to construction accidents that killed dozens of people. Rachel faints from shock at the revelation.

In Hong Kong, Michael tells Astrid that he hasn’t been having an affair. He’s been elaborately faking an affair so he can get out of his marriage with her. For five years, her family has treated him like an outsider and an inferior, and he hates the fact that he can never earn enough money to support her properly. With tears in his eyes, he begs her to divorce him. Astrid’s ex-fiancé, Charlie, however, advises her that Michael still loves her and that she should stall the divorce for a year to let him change his mind.

Rachel stays with a friend for a few days and resolves to go see her birth father in prison in China. Rachel meets with Nick and breaks up with him, tired of the constant drama and bitterness that his family has introduced into her life. Nick grieves for a week until Colin returns from his honeymoon and convinces Nick that his relationship with Rachel is worth fighting for.

As Rachel prepares to fly to China, her mother, Kerry, arrives in Singapore on a private plane chartered by Nick. Kerry says that Fang Min was not Rachel’s real father. Kerry married Fang Min when she was a teenager, but his horrific domestic abuse drove her to seek comfort from a kinder man, who was Rachel’s real birth father. Fang Min’s parents were disappointed that Rachel was born a girl and wanted to pour acid in her eye so that they could claim she had a birth defect and thus get around China’s one-child policy and have a grandson.

Rather than let her child be mutilated, Kerry left China for America. Rachel feels relieved that her mother had good reasons for hiding the truth from her and feels closer to her mother than ever. She reconciles with Nick and thanks him for flying her mother out to Singapore.

Christian Beliefs

Eleanor Young attends a Bible study with other women of the Singaporean elite. They analyze Bible verses from their study guides. Most members use the NAS version, but one insists on using King James because she went to Catholic school where the nuns emphasized the superiority of that version. Eleanor prays that her son’s girlfriend will not be Taiwanese, as she has heard.

Carol Tai attends charity galas partly because she feels it is her obligation as a born-again Christian, but also because her husband hopes her charity work will help further his business endeavors. Carol mentions that the Bible says we must accept what we cannot change, which is inaccurate, but also correctly quotes Matthew 7:1. A pentecostal preacher named Sister Gracie smashes all the images of animals in Carol Tai’s house, with Carol’s permission, because pictures of animals are supposedly satanic objects.

Proper girls from the Singaporean elite families are supposed to attend one of three exclusive private Christian schools and participate in youth groups and Bible studies throughout their teen years.

Colin and Araminta are married in a Methodist church by a bishop. Charli Wu fell in love with Astrid at a youth group meeting where she was singing the Christian song “Pass it On.”

Other Belief Systems

Rachel’s best friend is Sylvia, and her husband is Jewish.

Araminta’s private resort is called Samsara, which she says is Sanskrit for “flowing on through the states of existence.” She says her mother designed the resort to be a place where people could experience rebirth.

Mehmet notes that Ayers Rock in Australia is a very spiritual place, and Nick says that it’s a sacred site to the Aborigines.

Annabel Lee made her daughter Araminta attend a Methodist girls school and go to Youth Fellowship at a church for the social connections, even though their family is Buddhist.

Authority Roles

Eleanor loves her son, but her plans for his well-being are entirely centered on arranging his marriage to a wealthy woman of influence. She spies on his life, even going so far as to hire a private investigator to dig up secrets about his girlfriend.

Cecilia Cheng is more interested in horseback riding than in raising her 4-year-old son. Eddie Cheng is an authoritarian in his children’s lives, yelling and dictating their every action. Eddie screams at his son for spilling orange soda on his father’s suit and chases after the boy in an attempt to beat him.

Most parents in the novel are either exceptionally indulgent or extremely demanding in their attitudes toward children. Rachel’s mother, Kerry, is loving and supportive of her daughter, always offering a warm perspective and wise advice. She immigrated to the United States so her husband’s family would not abuse her daughter.

Profanity & Violence

Words used include d–n, the f-word, h—, b–tard, b–ch, s—, c–t, p—y, c–k, and a–.

An underground dogfight features bleeding dogs with parts of their skin already chewed off.

Sexual Content

Rachel’s mother doesn’t mind that her daughter sleeps with her boyfriend before marriage, but warns her that Nick’s parents might not feel the same way. She provides separate sleeping arrangements for them.

Discussions of adultery and affairs are common among the socialites in the novel. Eddie Cheng always keeps a mistress, despite being married, as does his best friend.

Astrid and her husband, Michael, have sex. She discovers he’s cheating on her by reading an inappropriate text on his phone. Much of Astrid and Michael’s early relationship is based on sexual chemistry rather than on an emotional connection.

At Colin’s bachelor party, Bernard receives oral sex from a prostitute and arranges for other members of the party to sleep with prostitutes, too. A scene is described involving members of the bachelor party eating ice cream sundaes off of the private parts of prostitutes.

Kitty Fong wears a form-fitting dress with see-through panels that reveal her nipples. She wears the outfit to meet her fiancé’s family, and family members with small children have to usher the children out of the room to avoid seeing the partial nudity.

Francesca tells Rachel a story about herself, Mandy and Nick having a threesome when they were 16. Rachel’s mother married as a teenager and her cruel husband cheated on her and also forced her to participate in threesomes with himself and other women. Rachel’s mother began to have an affair with a kind teenage boy who lived in her same apartment, which resulted in her pregnancy with Rachel.

Discussion Topics

None.

Additional Comments

You can request a review of a title you can’t find at [email protected].

Book reviews cover the content, themes and worldviews of fiction books, not their literary merit, and equip parents to decide whether a book is appropriate for their children. The inclusion of a book’s review does not constitute an endorsement by Focus on the Family.