Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Crazy Rich Asians, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Wealth and Absurdity
Marriage and Money
Family vs. Individuality
Chinese vs. Western Culture
Summary
Analysis
When Rachel wakes up in the morning, Nick is on the phone. She’s feeling uneasy because, after last night, it feels like Nick has been leading a double life. To be clear, Rachel isn’t totally new to wealth—when Kerry got her real estate license, they moved to the Bay Area. Rachel attended Stanford and Northwestern, met “trust-fund types” and people like Peik Lin, and is now a professor in expensive New York. Still, what she’s seen in Singapore doesn’t compare. And in New York, Nick lives in a cramped studio, seems to own nothing of real value (she doesn’t know how much his custom blazers cost), and only splurges on produce and concert tickets. But he’s also always had a “certain quality,” and now it makes sense: he grew up rich, with nothing to prove, at Tyersall Park. Rachel has all summer to learn about his life.
The implication here is that Rachel thought she knew what wealth looked like before coming to Singapore. Before Singapore, wealth looked like Peik Lin and, in some ways, like Rachel herself (she grew up in a relatively affluent area and attended prestigious and expensive colleges). Wealth on Nick’s family’s scale, though, is totally different. Still, though Rachel understands obvious displays of wealth—like Tyersall Park—others are still a mystery to her, such as Nick’s custom blazers. Fashion, once again, proves a language that Rachel doesn’t yet know how to speak.
Themes
Nick hangs up and climbs into bed with Rachel. He tells her how proud he is of her for last night and assures her that everyone loved her, even Ah Ma—she’s not snooty, she’s just shy. And she’d like him and Rachel to stay with her next week. Rachel is privately not convinced that everyone loved her, but she decides not to worry about it.
Rachel isn’t willing to discount everything Oliver told her last night. On some level, she accepts that the “opposition” is plotting against her. But she also seems to be trying to take Nick at his word that his family is a family like any other—and how much damage, she seems to reason, can a normal family do to her?
Themes
Rachel and Nick decide to order room service, and Rachel shares how Peik Lin’s family reacted to hearing she’s going to Colin Khoo’s wedding—every paper in the country is apparently writing about the wedding. Nick scoffs but then says that he’s worried about how Colin is handling such a big event. He then apologizes, as Bernard Tai is planning a massive bachelor party and he needs to go. But he was just on the phone with Araminta, and she’d like Rachel to come to her bachelorette. Rachel thinks it’d be weird, since she barely knows Araminta, but she agrees to think about it.
Nick genuinely has no concept of how important and famous he and his friends are. The wedding, in his mind, isn’t important because Colin is famous. It’s important because Colin is his friend and because Colin is struggling. This speaks to Nick’s down-to-earth nature, but it also suggests he may misjudge things going forward. Rachel seems to expect Araminta’s bachelorette to be intimate and not a great place for a newcomer. But Rachel isn’t fully versed in this ultrawealthy world, so she may encounter something totally different.
Themes
