The Rich Are Still Different from You and Me...

Kevin Kwan's books about the rich and famous in China, Singapore and environs are compulsive reading, I find. The first one Crazy Rich Asians I picked up because I liked Singapore a lot the couple of times I visited. I continued reading because it really is a remake of a Jane Austen novel, like Pride and Prejudice where the major intrigue is about marrying off rich young men and somewhat poorer women. The background is how the wealthy lived in early 19th century Britain: here it is the recent wealth of the Asian Tigers.

The richest people in  China Rich Girlfriend , the second of the trilogy, are mainland Chinese who are worth billions and billions. We don't learn anything about how they got their money: that's lost in the mist of what happened in the last 30 years of the 20th century as China changed its way of doing business. What we see is extravagance and nary a thought for ordinary folk. Rachel Chu, who functions as the Austenian heroine, provides some semblance of a moral compass, but otherwise the novel is enough to make one wonder what happened to the Revolution, any revolution...

I thought of that this morning as I found this story in the New York Times: "Admissions Scandal: When ‘Hard Work’ (Plus $6.5 Million) Helps Get You Into Stanford" https://www.nytimes.com/…/yusi-molly-zhao-china-stanford.ht… truth is right up here with fiction.
The photo, BTW, is of construction in Shanghai 12 years ago, as the city was being rebuilt.