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All 30 songs in Crazy Rich Asians, with scene descriptions. Listen to trailer music, OST, original score, and the full list of popular songs in the film.

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Kevin Kwan (born 1973/1974) is a Singaporean American novelist best known for his satirical novels Crazy Rich Asians, China Rich Girlfriend and Rich People Problems . In 2014, Kwan was named as one of the "Five Writers to Watch" on the list of Hollywood's Most Powerful Authors published by The Hollywood Reporter .

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August 13, 2018
One of the first things Kevin Kwan does after answering my call is thank me for being willing to reschedule our interview. We were originally supposed to talk earlier in the day, but he was accidentally double-booked. That's not surprising considering he's the author of the 2013 best-selling novel "Crazy Rich Asians" - the book behind Hollywood's first studio film in 25 years to have an all-Asian cast and feature Asian Americans in lead roles.

The film is just a few days away from being released in theaters across the United States and Kwan, 44, is in high demand.

"I literally have half an hour," he tells me when I ask how much time we have. There's not a trace of annoyance in his voice, he's simply stating a fact. "My next call is going to come in at 4."

The "Crazy Rich Asians" movie has generated excitement worldwide, some lauding it as "historic," "a watershed moment for Asian representation" and the "dawn of a new era." But for Kwan, the high expectations surrounding his work is a lot of pressure - "too much pressure," he said with a laugh.

In conceiving the story, Kwan did not set out to revolutionize Hollywood with a film that would bring about a sudden change in an industry rooted in tradition. When asked if he ever anticipated his work could have such an impact, he responded instantly and emphatically: "Not at all."

Just nine years ago, Kwan was at a different place in his life. He wasn't on a movie set in Malaysia. He wasn't being mobbed by reporters outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. He wasn't posing for photos alongside famous actors such as Michelle Yeoh ("Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"), Constance Wu ("Fresh Off the Boat") and Ken Jeong ("The Hangover").

He was in Houston, driving his father, who had been diagnosed with cancer, to daily chemotherapy appointments.

On these drives, with miles of highway stretching in front of them, Kwan said he and his father, who died in 2010, passed the time by reminiscing.

"I just felt it was so important at the time to reconnect with our past, our shared history," said Kwan, who was working as a creative consultant in New York at the time. "There was so much I didn't know that I wanted to know, that I tried to get to know without seeming morbid, without trying to say, 'I don't know how much time you have left, but I want to know all this stuff.'"

One of the things they talked about was life in Singapore, where Kwan was born and lived before his family moved to Houston when he was 11 years old.

This is an origin story Kwan has retold numerous times since 2013 when his debut novel, a glittery gold book about Singapore's 1 percent called "Crazy Rich Asians," first hit shelves. The book, and now the movie, tell the story of a Chinese-American economics professor named Rachel Chu who accompanies her boyfriend, Nick Young, back to Singapore to meet his family for the first time. What Rachel doesn't know is that Nick is the "Prince Harry of Asia," the heir to one of Singapore's largest family fortunes.
[An all-Asian cast and no martial arts: Why the 'Crazy Rich Asians' movie matters]
The fictional book is full of vivid descriptions of sprawling mansions, exotic getaways (on private jets, of course), high fashion and gluttonous feasts. While some of the details, such as a living room with a sunken pond full of baby sharks, seem almost too fantastical to be real, they are. Much of the novel is inspired by Kwan's personal experiences and its characters are loosely based on real people he knows.

"I come from an old establishment family from Singapore," he wrote in a feature for Town & Country, noting that his family tree dates back from the year 946. Kwan's paternal grandmother was the daughter of a founding director of one of Singapore's oldest banks. One of his great-uncles was a doctor who helped invent Tiger Balm.

Even decades later, Kwan can still picture the opulent world of which he had been a part.

"I remember I had an aunt that lived in a house that had this beautiful ceramic wall that was entirely a painting of a peacock," he said. "There were all these beautiful scenes from my childhood that really are coated in amber."

The novel, which has since become part of a widely popular trilogy, does not intend to glorify wealth, Kwan is adamant about this. He said he aimed to give readers a glimpse into an otherwise exclusive way of life that many, especially those in Western cultures, aren't even aware actually exists.

"I really did see this as an ethnography of a culture and a species of people," he said. "It is meant to be deeply satirical of this world. . . . I'm putting a lens on it and allowing people to make their own decisions about how they feel about this."

Writing with a Western audience in mind, Kwan said he framed the narrative around an Asian American who visits Asia for the first time. He didn't think people living in Asia would be interested in reading about crazy rich Asians because "they have their own stories, this is old hat for them."

"I felt like the perfect vehicle was to the tell the story through eyes of an Asian American because that's the perfect entry point into this world," he said. "You think you're Asian. You think you know what you're experiencing and then you realize it's nothing like what you thought."

Despite focusing the novel on an Asian American experience, Kwan noticed that the demographic was not among his novel's original fan base.

"I felt there was a reticence toward my book from Asian Americans and justifiably so, I never took offense to it," he said. "It is kind of a provocative title, and I think Asian Americans are so used to the disappointment of anything portraying their culture that's not done right, not accurate. Naturally, there was a deep suspicion at first when this book first came out."

Instead, his early adopters were members of the New York media, people in the fashion industry and "the upper east side crowd," he said. Kwan recalled one "brilliant" promotional strategy in which copies of the book were placed on every seat of the Hampton Jitney - "the bus service that every Manhattanite who doesn't have his own private plane takes," he calls it.

"It was this captive audience of the right people," he said.

Vogue editor in chief Anna Wintour was also one of the first people to champion the book, excerpting and publishing part of it in an issue of the magazine. "That was monumental," Kwan said.

Perhaps even more monumental, however, is that Kwan's book has since garnered widespread support from the Asian American community and is now at the center of a movement to advance diversity in Hollywood, an industry known for not casting Asians in lead roles and casting white actors as nonwhite characters. With its all-Asian cast and Asian American leads, the "Crazy Rich Asians" movie aims to prove that Asian actors and narratives centered on Asian or Asian American experiences are bankable.
['Asian, ew gross': How the 'Crazy Rich Asians' movie could help change stereotypes about Asian men]

Beneath the depictions of glitz and glam is a story that rings true for many Asian Americans, Nancy Wang Yuen, chair of Biola University's sociology department, told The Washington Post. The book and film capture the experience of an Asian American who feels like a "fish out of water in Asia," Yuen said.

"The Hollywood trope is to cast a white person as an 'outsider' in Asia, but I think that they don't understand Asian Americans also feel like an outsider in Asia," she said. "We are every bit as American as a white person, especially if we were born and raised in the United States."

Kwan never expected his book would be at the forefront of the fight for Asian and Asian American representation in mainstream media. The process of adapting the novel for the screen began roughly five years ago, long before the movement really started taking shape, he said, adding that the excitement the film has generated is largely because of "the luck of timing."

"It's deeply touching and I feel very lucky," he said. "This is something you couldn't have engineered. When cultural movements happen, it's so beyond your control."

There's a lot riding on this two-hour "Meet the Parents"-esque romantic comedy - namely the hopes of more than 17 million Asian Americans who have been repeatedly let down by movies and TV shows - and Kwan knows it. When asked how he felt about the possibility that "Crazy Rich Asians" could be the turning point for representation in Hollywood, Kwan was at a loss for words.

Laughing, he responded, "I don't even know how to answer that question, that's just way too much pressure."

"This movie cannot be everything for everyone," he continued after a brief pause, acknowledging that the film has faced criticism, including its failure to represent a broader Asian experience.
[Is 'Crazy Rich Asians' Asian enough?]
But, Kwan said he never meant for his book or the movie to depict the "entire entirety of the Asian experience, rather it is a "very specific movie about a very specific world."

"If anything, it only represents the 1 percent," he said. "And there's another 99 percent that really deserve so much more. If we can just be part of this effort and part of the groundswell, that's all we're asking to do."

"If we are part of that icebreaker that breaks through the iceberg in front of us and allows so many other stories to come through and so much more talent to be showcased, I would feel extraordinarily privileged to be part of that."
More from Morning Mix: A black adviser in Trump's West Wing? Kellyanne Conway is stumped. Widow of Texas church shooter: 'I will love him always, but I will always hate what he did'

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Is 'Crazy Rich Asians' historic? 'That's just way too much pressure,' says Kevin Kwan, who wrote the book.

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August 13, 2018 One of the first things Kevin Kwan does after answering my call is thank me for being willing to reschedule our interview. We were originally supposed to talk earlier in the day, but he was accidentally double-booked.

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'Crazy Rich Asians' | Anatomy of a Scene

Jon M. Chu narrates a sequence from his film.

Hey, this is Jon M. Chu, director of "Crazy Rich Asians." And this is in the beginning of the movie, where we get to meet Rachel Chu, played by the incredible Constance Wu, and Nick Young, played by Henry Golding, who, this is his first movie. We found him from our accountant in Malaysia. He was a travel host there. Never done a movie before, so this is his first movie. This is his second day shooting. And he really improved every day he was there. He's an incredible actor, actually, and super natural. And you're going to see him a lot. And he plays the lead in our movie. And here, he's inviting her to Singapore to meet his family. What she doesn't know is that his family is the richest in Singapore. And so she's about to fly into a hornet's nest, as they say. This is a very popular section in the book. In our script, it's about two sentences. So we had to design from the ground up. But in the book, they talk about how all the gossip spreads through Radio 1 Asia. And you can see her slyly taking a cell phone pic there. And she's going to pass it on to all the friends, socialites, ex-girlfriends, family members to destroy this American girl coming to Singapore to take their man. How did we communicate this stuff is through text message and social media. And there's so much and so many ways you can do it. We really didn't want to shoot people's screens. So we tried to come up with the most buoyant way that even the book describes of how information passes. So we had these wispy, colorful things, sort of in the colors of the book covers, that spread through all the people throughout Singapore. And we had a great company, Aspect Ratio, to help design it. There's my baby in the second there, screaming "no," that was born about two weeks after we finished shooting. And then we really wanted to show that this information was spreading all around the world and ending up at this beautiful home, during this Bible study, where we meet Michelle Yeoh, who plays Nick Young's mother and wants nothing to do with this American girl coming to Singapore, which is very relatable to my experience as an Asian-American going to Asia for the first time, where it feels sort of like home but not like home. And that's really what our movie is about is this dual cultural identity that we all go through, especially in this generation of no matter where you're from - whether you're Asian or not - everyone's figuring out who we want to be for the future. And so text messaging is a great way to show all the ways that those things spread.

Jon M. Chu narrates a sequence from his film. Credit Credit... Sanja Bucko/Warner Bros.

Crazy Rich Asians

Directed by Jon M. Chu

Comedy, Romance

PG-13

2 hours

As of the moment as an Instagram feed, "Crazy Rich Asians" revisits Jane Austen's timeless universal truth about a man in possession of a fortune being in want of a wife. The man in question is Nick Young (Henry Golding), the exquisitely eligible scion of a Singapore real estate family. The scale of his fortune is suggested by the first scene, in which his mother, insulted by the manager of a fancy London hotel, buys it out from under him.

There's no doubt in Nick's mind about whom he wants to marry: Rachel Chu (Constance Wu), an economics professor at N.Y.U. originally from Queens. She and Nick, who have been together for a year, are clearly a perfect match. At least in Manhattan. But when they travel back to Singapore for a wedding, Rachel finds herself subjected to the disapproving scrutiny of the older generation and vicious sniping from potential rivals.

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Constance Wu stars in the romantic comedy "Crazy Rich Asians," the director Jon M. Chu's adaptation of Kevin Kwan's best-selling novel. Credit... Sanja Bucko/Warner Bros.

Every romantic comedy depends on obstacles to the central couple's ultimate happiness. "Crazy Rich Asians," a busy, fizzy movie winnowed from Kevin Kwan's sprawling, dishy novel, sets up a series of clashes - between tradition and individualism, between the heart's desire and familial duty, between insane wealth and prudent upward mobility - that are resolved with more laughter than tears. There are squalls of intrigue and a melodramatic cloudburst or two, but nothing that threatens to spoil the festivities.

The venue is fabulous - if there is any part of Singapore that is less than dazzlingly picturesque, we don't see it here - the music is great, and the food includes homemade dumplings, street-stall delicacies and lavish banquet dishes. But the key to this party is surely the guest list. It has been noted that this is the first Hollywood movie in a long time with a mostly Asian and Asian-American cast, and if anything this observation understates the diversity of the performers onscreen, in terms of both their origins and their pop-cultural affiliations. They include Michelle Yeoh, one of the great international movie stars of the past quarter-century; Ken Jeong, a staple of naughty American comedy for almost as long; and Awkwafina, a hip-hop artist, actress and web celebrity of more recent vintage.

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A preview of the film.

[ Why did it take so long to see a cast like this?]

That's only a small sampling. Mr. Kwan's book, a best-seller that has spawned two sequels since it was published in 2013, runs to more than 500 pages and includes footnotes, genealogical charts and a telephone directory's worth of names. Its digressions and tangents would easily fill up a television season or two, and the movie, directed by Jon M. Chu, can feel a bit rushed and cramped. There's too much and also not enough.

Still, it's hard not to have fun, though not always for poor Rachel. After a pleasant excursion with the soon-to-be newlyweds, Nick's boyhood friend Colin (Chris Pang) and his fiancée, Araminta (Sonoya Mizuno), the family drama and the peripheral silliness kick into high gear. Rachel meets an ex-girlfriend of Nick's, Amanda (Jing Lusi), who is less of an ally than she seems. More simpatico is Astrid (Gemma Chan), Nick's ultraglamorous cousin, whose marital troubles provide the most developed secondary plot. Her husband, Michael (Pierre Png), is, like Rachel, an outsider; his insecurity about his wife's money and status turns their marriage into a potential cautionary tale.

From left, Michelle Yeoh, Henry Golding and Ms. Wu in the film. Credit... Sanja Bucko/Warner Bros.

A more serious intimation of trouble arrives every time Nick's mother, Eleanor (Ms. Yeoh), looks in Rachel's direction. (His father is away on a business trip.) Her judgment seems severe and unfair, but she also possesses an undeniable grandeur, a seriousness about family, power and her own identity that is noble as well as cruel. While there is never any real doubt that "Crazy Rich Asians" will come down on the side of free choice and true love, it does pay lip service to the gravity and durability of other values.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time. It is an unabashed celebration of luxury and money, with hints of class conflict that have more to do with aspiration than envy or anger, set in an Asia miraculously free of history or politics. Comic relief is provided by Peik Lin Goh (Awkwafina), Rachel's nutty friend, and her nutty parents (Mr. Jeong and Koh Chieng Mun), whose nouveau riche tackiness stands in contrast to the aristocratic hauteur of the Young family. Not everyone in that clan is as regal as Eleanor or as blandly agreeable as her son. There are a gaggle of funny aunties and a witty gay cousin (Nico Santos), who is no less amusing for being a rather tiresome stereotype.

You could also view that character as a self-conscious throwback - part of the film's sly and appealing old-fashionedness. Without betraying any overt nostalgia, "Crazy Rich Asians" casts a fond eye backward as well as Eastward, conjuring a world defined by hierarchies and prescribed roles in a way that evokes classic novels and films. Its keenest romantic impulse has less to do with Nick and Rachel's rather pedestrian love story than with the allure of endless luxury and dynastic authority. Which I guess is pretty modern after all.

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Review: 'Crazy Rich Asians' Is a Party With a First-Rate Guest List (Published 2018)

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Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share. Crazy Rich Asians Directed by Jon M. Chu Comedy, Romance PG-13 2 hours As of the moment as an Instagram feed, "Crazy Rich Asians" revisits Jane Austen's timeless universal truth about a man in possession of a fortune being in want of a wife.

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Crazy Rich Asians is a satirical 2013 romantic comedy novel by Kevin Kwan. Kwan stated that his intention in writing the novel was to “introduce a contemporary Asia to a North American audience”.[1] He claimed the novel was loosely based on his own childhood in Singapore.[2] The novel became a bestseller and was followed by two sequels, China Rich Girlfriend in 2015 and Rich People Problems in 2017. A film adaptation of the novel was released on August 15, 2018.

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Jon M. Chu built his reputation in Hollywood by directing two dance-themed 'Step Up' features and blockbusters like 'G.I. Joe: Retaliation,' before helming the groundbreaking 'Crazy Rich Asians.'

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Crazy Rich Asians (Crazy Rich Asians, #1)

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Crazy Rich Asians has 136,887 ratings and 14,975 reviews. Christine said: I am Asian, I lived in Singapore, and I am not crazy rich - but I certainly hea...

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Crazy Rich Asians (2018) ⭐ 6.9 | Comedy, Drama, Romance