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. you just want new and shiny things, but I was living in a bedroom that was full of antique furniture! are very proud of their chipped ceramic bowls and stools that are half broken, there’s such a charm to that I think. Everything was old and scuffed and I didn’t realise that as a child. “I grew up in a house that, to me, was crumbling. 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. His grandfather became the country’s first western-trained ophthalmologist and was knighted by the Queen. Kwan comes from old money in Singapore his great grandfather was a founding director of the country’s oldest bank. “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. “We felt this major responsibility not to fail,” says Kwan. 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.

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. Photograph: Allstar/Warner Brosĭespite Kwan’s insistence that his own life is very low key and “boring”, he is a commercial phenomenon. ‘I guess it was locked in there somewhere’… Crazy Rich Asians.

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