The shenanigans of the 0.001%

A decade ago, Singaporean-born writer Kevin Kwan dazzled the world with the Asian chick lit-romcom novel “Crazy Rich Asians,” which became a hit movie starring Michelle Yeoh as the strict Chinese matriarch and featuring Kris Aquino as a high-born princess. Sprinkled with details of designer bags and gowns (Kwan studied in the Parsons School of Design in New York), the book also contains accounts of excess, titillating us mortals with a glimpse of how the 0.001 percent live.

In his latest book “Lies and Weddings,” Kwan pushes exaggerations to the max. This time, the Chinese matriarch (an ex-fashion model from Hong Kong who married a British earl) is more over the top, and so are the excesses. I will not go into the plot here, because the facts in the novel trump any made-up bits.

In an interview with Channel News Asia, Kwan says he has traveled to all the places featured in his books. In one wedding, guests in Mauna Kea, Hawaii mingle not on the beach but in an ice palace high above the clouds; while in another wedding, guests toast the couple while aloft in hot-air balloons over Marrakech, Morocco. In a particularly gruesome scene, drunken revelers lick hallucinogenic Sonoran Desert toads in a screening room in Bel Air, Beverly Hills.

The shock-drops can be exhausting, but I read Kwan for his sharp satire. Take PTWD (“post-traumatic wealth disorder”), described thus by a spoiled brat (sadly, raised by Filipino yayas) whose father punished him by making him fly commercial from Geneva to Manila: “I seriously thought about killing myself on that flight. I had never ever flown an airline in my life, and the b*** f*** put me in business class. Have you any idea what hell that was? How is anyone supposed to fly for fourteen hours straight without a proper bedroom?”

His supermodel hang-on replied: “My children had PTWD when we had to move into Brentwood after the Malibu fire destroyed our compound. They just could not cope with the shame. And everything about that house depressed them—the pool, the tennis court, the giant outdoor trampoline. That’s when my daughter tried to get a face tattoo and my son started cutting himself.”

On Flu Game Air Jordans, worn by Michael Jordan in the 1997 NBA Finals when he was suffering from the flu but still beat the Utah Jazz: “These are the actual pair he wore, [said a Persian scion] … Look, there’s even the snot stain where he sneezed in the shoe. He was changing out of them in the middle of the game when he had a sneezing fit. It was televised and I have video documentation of that sneeze.”

On the obsession with youth in Beverly Hills: “The rich kids all dress like old men, and the old men dress like kids. The women all get so many fillers they look like ventriloquist dummies, while the men dress like they’re sixteen and get hair transplants. That’s why you see so many baseball caps, they’re all hiding their scars until their hair fully grows back. It’s also a power thing. The sloppier you look, the more important you are.”

On technology tycoons, this humblebrag: “I am ex-Meta, ex-McKinsey, ex-Tesla, ex-Twitter, and I was on a panel with the bride at the Milken conference.” Davos is already passe.

On the perils cryptocurrency culture, there’s a celebrity enclave “filled with the type of houses where one guy who gets rich on crypto will buy the place, four of his buddies will move in, and they’ll party five nights a week and spend a hundred K a month and within two years the guy will go bankrupt and be forced to sell the house at a loss.”

However, the observation that made me laugh out loud rings true, especially to us here:

Why do Filipino helpers address the masters of the house as “sir”? “Neither of them was actually knighted by a royal monarch,” Kwan explains. “‘Sir’ is simply a courtesy title commonly used by Filipinos, so if you need a little ego boost, book a trip to the Philippines.”

Queena N. Lee-Chua is with the board of directors of Ateneo’s Family Business Center. Get her book “All in the Family Business” at Lazada or Shopee, or the ebook at Amazon, Google Play, Apple iBooks. Contact the author at blessbook.chua@gmail.com.