I wasn't initially planning to read China Rich Girlfriend. Late last year I read - and enjoyed - Kevin Kwan's hit Crazy Rich Asians, but still felt like one volume was enough. I was looking for a fun, light, fairly mindless read for a recent trip, though, and my mind kept drifting back to Kwan's characters and, as luck would have it, CRG was available at the library.
China Rich Girlfriend is a sequel to Crazy Rich Asians, but set a couple of years later, with virtually none of the action in Singapore. These facts work to its advantage, as does the fact that Kwan does not devote precious pages to retelling the previous story (one of my chief complaints with Once a Midwife, for example.) He rightly puts the responsibility on the reader to know the backstory. If anything, Kwan rounds out his characters more in this second book, particularly by focusing on storylines other than those revolving around Nick and Rachel, whose wedding opens the book. (My favorite was probably the Bernard and Kitty storyline, which is sheer madness, but amused me all the same.)
Although the premise of the book and its title is that there is Crazy Rich and then there's China Rich, I think a more accurate delineation is not around the value of the fortune, but the ways is which money is flaunted...or how one perceives others to be flaunting it. Toward the end, Kwan even slips in a bit of sly social commentary on the state of wealth in a China where the uber-rich build "green" havens for themselves, while owning the factories that spew the pollution unto others. This would, presumably, be in contrast to Singapore, where the environment is a national priority and the safety net is very, very real.
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