It’s difficult to square Kevin Kwan, modern master of high romp, with the dark and brooding personality he claims as his default setting. “I’m actually a very melancholy, serious person,” he says seriously. Sitting at his kitchen table on a video call, bright Los Angeles light blinking through the blinds, Kwan is keen to draw a firm line between the parodic glamour of his blockbuster novels and the “very tense, mordant introvert” he sees himself as in real life.
“It was such a surprise to my friends that I wrote Crazy Rich Asians,” he says. “They couldn’t believe this was the book I was writing because it’s not in my natural voice which, in terms of writing, is very surgical, very precise, very minimal, very devastating, you know?”
Only knowing Kwan from the fun and flamboyance of his bestselling Crazy Rich trilogy and now, the delicious silliness of his forthcoming comedy of manners, Sex and Vanity, this seems one hell of a performance to maintain as a writer. “Yes, I really don’t know who wrote these books, [they] really came out of leftfield,” he insists. “They’re just not a part of my usual line of thinking.” Yet the decadence is so acutely observed, and the characters often such knowing send-ups of the very rich, he must have drawn his style from some real world experience?
“I mean, everything is inspired by things I’ve seen, or experiences I’ve been part of in a roundabout way,” he admits. “Of course, I amplify it and add that gloss and veneer.” Kwan relents: “Oh, I guess it was locked in there somewhere … and it had to come out!” he says, laughing.
Despite Kwan’s insistence that his own life is very low key and “boring”, he is a commercial phenomenon. The author of an internationally bestselling trilogy that, to date, has sold more than 1.5m copies worldwide, his star was already high when the film adaptation of Crazy Rich Asians was released in 2018. The pressure of making a film with an all east-Asian cast was huge; there had been nothing like it since Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club some 25 years earlier.
“We felt this major responsibility not to fail,” says Kwan. “It was, like, if this movie bombs, there will never be another Asian movie done for 50 years.” Hollywood pumped $30m (£24m) into the project: it became the highest grossing romantic comedy in more than a decade and took an astonishing $238.5m (£192m) at the box office worldwide.
Kwan comes from old money in Singapore; his great grandfather was a founding director of the country’s oldest bank. His grandfather became the country’s first western-trained ophthalmologist and was knighted by the Queen. He has intimately observed the worlds his novels inhabit and satirise – the nouveau riche, the international jetsetters, the excesses of the ultra-high net worths and the glorification of thrift by the upper classes.
“I grew up in a house that, to me, was crumbling. Everything was old and scuffed and I didn’t realise that as a child ... you just want new and shiny things, but I was living in a bedroom that was full of antique furniture! [Old money families] are very proud of their chipped ceramic bowls and stools that are half broken, there’s such a charm to that I think. It’s a reverse snobbery.”
The family moved to Texas when Kwan was 11 and, after graduating from the University of Houston with a creative writing degree, he left for New York to study at art school. Kwan spent his first working summer in the city interning at two different magazines while beholden to the whims of an eccentric landlord who moved him from “a tiny closet next to a boiler room” to the landlord’s own apartment.
“He had given up his bedroom to me but he’d taken out the doorknobs and the lock to the bathroom, so every night I slept in his enormous bed and would push the highboy against the door so he couldn’t come in,” Kwan giggles. “It’s such a Manhattan story, but I was 22, it was crazy busy and he eventually brought me to a new apartment and it was beautiful. More than anything I could expect.”
Kwan stayed for the next 20 years, living in a classic prewar building in Greenwich Village with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez as neighbours. He quietly infiltrated bohemian and Waspy circles, summered in the Hamptons, and became familiar with the “old New York establishment world”, which he found “so similar to the old guard in Singapore”.
“That was my dream. Back in high school I was reading all the Beats, and I wanted to be in Caffé Reggio and I wanted to sort of, you know, really experience that world of New York in the 50s and 60s.”
And so Kwan took notes. He collected stories and experiences, characters and anecdotes about lives lived fabulously and the impenetrable codes of social conduct among the very well off. Eventually, he wove that world into a book affectionately sending up the east Asian elite. He never imagined what would follow.
“I had realistic ideas of what publishing is, because in my other life I worked as a publishing consultant,” he says. “Most of the books I’d worked on would have 3,000 print runs, we would have a little party, drink some champagne with your friends, maybe get a little blurb of a review somewhere and it’s over.”
Kwan was still running his own design consultancy in 2013 when Crazy Rich Asians became a hit and his life changed forever. “It has been completely insane,” he says bluntly. “I felt, in the words of my friend the artist Judy Chicago, that my life exploded and I’m still trying to put it back together. I jumped on the rollercoaster, it’s been really chaotic for the last seven years.”
Two more books quickly followed. Offers from network television began flooding in. The film came out. Kwan moved – naturally – to a beautifully appointed, Spanish villa in Hollywood. He wrote a sitcom with a team of writers, Emperor of Malibu, starring Ken Jeong, that made it to the pilot stage for CBS. Then, in a break from that show last year, he pursued his lifelong ambition and wrote an homage to EM Forster’s A Room With A View.
With fastidious dedication, Kwan would write every day from 8.30am until 1pm, break for lunch and emails, and resume writing from 4pm to 8pm every evening. The book, Sex and Vanity, which was originally intended as a novella, was finished in four months.
“It was an escape, I wanted to do something really simple and fun with none of the baggage attached to the original trilogy. I just wanted to make a fun, summer, pulpy novel you read at the beach.”
Sex and Vanity scores highly on all intended fronts; the opening half, set in Capri, is bathed in sunshine and sexual tension. The novel reads like travel porn, listing the island’s best and lesser-known sights, places to eat, stay and drink. And then there is the story of Lucie Tang Churchill, a biracial New York princess from the Upper East Side, attending an eyewateringly extravagant wedding.
The reverence for luxury brands and polite manners makes for a wry collision, and Kwan is at pains to point out that while it may read like his life, it really is not. “I’ve been lucky enough to go to Capri almost every summer over the past decade, but my Capri is a much simpler, more rustic version of what you see in the book. Things would happen, strange stories I collected for the book, but it is a fantasy.”
While it is immensely gratifying for Kwan to have proven the universality of his stories, it does seem to have been more of a slog than necessary. “My books were international bestsellers translated into almost 40 languages. It was almost offensive when Hollywood said, ‘Oh, will this movie cross over? Beyond Asians, will other people see it?’ And well, JK Rowling was a crossover writer. She wrote books for the masses and they were massively successful around the world. So why am I different? Why do you think this is so much more of a risk?”
It’s a conversation that plays to the heart of anxieties in publishing at the moment. The failure to properly support writers who aren’t white was made public with the hashtag #publishingpaidme on Twitter a few weeks ago. To show the obvious racial disparity and bias, authors disclosed the figures of their advances made by publishing houses. The reading was bleak, with white writers earning much larger advances on average.
“That was really not a surprise at all!” Kwan laughs. “I have been luckier than most. I can’t say I’ve been treated badly by my publishers, but with the TV show for instance, it really showed me we are at the base camp of climbing a very modest mountain in terms of what needs to happen before more of these shows can exist.” Still, Kwan firmly believes that “as an Asian American, I’ve really had so many advantages that black people haven’t had in this country. I’ve been aware of that.”
The current reckoning around race following the murder of George Floyd is, he says, well overdue. “It’s an amazing thing to witness, quite frankly. There are a lot of difficult conversations happening that need to happen. I’ve been having a lot with Asians in Asia, who are calling me up worried. They think this – the looting and rioting – is terrible, and I explain it isn’t terrible, it’s about time, I’m absolutely in support of this. People in some countries are often comfortable with the order. I’m comfortable when things become chaotic. And here, now? This had to happen.”
Kwan is under no illusion that change will be slow – “it’s going to be baby steps” – but he is certain that the mood feels different this time on the streets and in the public discourse. “A dam has been broken. Systemic racism that exists in this country is now being looked at in a real way.”
The conversations carry on for Kwan, on the phone with family, or on his terrace with friends. The Covid-19 lockdown is the longest he has been forced to stay at home in a decade; he is taking social distancing seriously and says he is in no rush to head to the restaurants that are now beginning to reopen. There’s work to be done, anyway. Book promotion, TV jobs, and a pile of unread books waiting for his attention.
“I am a champion blurber,” Kwan says. “I will happily blurb for almost anyone.” When time allows, he reads endlessly to help offer book-cover quotes to support up-and-coming authors. “There have even been books that were literal homages to mine. And you know what? Fine. I don’t believe that anything is competition in any way – we all have our stories to tell and they’re all deserving.”