It doesn't help the ultrasensible Rachel that everyone she encounters in the novel is extraordinarily rich or beautiful - usually both. Imagine Mean Girls rolled into the cult 1980s TV series Shanghai Tang and you'll get an idea of the epic scale of what poor Rachel is subjected to. What triggers this tsunami of soirees and dazzling weekends on private islands is not just the wedding of Nicholas' best friend, Colin Khoo, himself an heir to a huge old fortune, but the revelation of Nicholas' Chinese-American girlfriend, Rachel, whose appearance provokes more bullying and jealousy than the tiny island republic has ever seen. They're aflutter at the return to Singapore from New York of the supereligible, Oxford-educated Nicholas Young, heir to a massive fortune that symbolizes old South-East Asian money. The novel is built on an intricate web of shopping expeditions and gossipy lunches hosted by scheming ladies with boundless amounts of time and money. They're gathering in Singapore for the star-studded wedding of the two members of their set (note, for the time being, the lack of specificity in the term "Asian" - more about that later). This world of absurdly over-the-top wealth is the playground of the characters in Kevin Kwan's breathless, high-speed romp through the lives of a group of megarich Asians. From a castle modeled on Versailles in Changsha to billion-dollar penthouses in Bombay to the Marina Bay Sands casino in Singapore, with its seven celebrity-chef restaurants, the inescapable truth looms before us: We Asians are not just rich but also, frankly, somewhat crazy.
It's impossible to open the newspaper or turn on the TV these days without seeing some outrageous example of new Asian money.
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