March 5, 2026

The Crazy Rich Asians film, which premiered in August 2018, was a watershed moment for the representation of Asian stories in Hollywood. Based on the bestselling 2013 novel by Singaporean author Kevin Kwan, the film adaptation quickly became a global phenomenon, marking a shift in the landscape of mainstream cinema, where Asian stories and voices were traditionally underrepresented or relegated to harmful stereotypes. While the film garnered immense success and attention, it also faced scrutiny for its portrayal of Asian characters. 

In “Colliding Asias — Crazy Rich Asians as Novel, Film, Adaptation, and Singapore”, a chapter in The Routledge Companion to Global Literary Adaptation in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2023), Dr Edna Lim (NUS English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies) examines Crazy Rich Asians as a film adaption in its own right, rather than its relationship with the novel. Through what she terms as the “collision of Asias”, Lim examines the intersection of different Asian identities and perspectives in the Crazy Rich Asians film, and how the film constitutes a wholly different performance of the Crazy Rich Asians story.  

Crazy Rich Asians has elicited a range of incongruous responses, with some lauding it as a breakthrough Hollywood production featuring an all-Asian cast while others argue that it prioritised mainstream Hollywood tropes over opportunities for cultural commentary. For example, the film has been accused for its lack of authenticity in representing Singapore, Singaporeans and other “mainland” Asians. However, in her article, Lim contends that the Asian experience is exceedingly diverse and heterogeneous, making it challenging for the film to represent all the aspects of an “Asian” identity. 

While the novel’s characters are predominantly Singaporeans, the film features pan-Asian actors such as Ken Jeong and Michelle Yeoh, who are more closely aligned with Hollywood and the West. Additionally, unlike the narration in the novel which follows multiple characters and perspectives, the film centres its storytelling around the experiences of the main character, Rachel. This aligns with Hollywood’s convention of a single protagonist which consequently minimises the roles played by other characters in the film. 

Notably, the film diverges from the novel in its language use. Unlike the novel where Singlish is used to demarcate characters as Singaporean regardless of their background, and to poke fun of the British accents used by “elite” class as snobbish and ostentatious, the film’s director, Jon M. Chu, made a deliberate choice to minimise the use of Singlish. In the film, the lack of Singlish and use of Standard English in a range of accents like British, American, and Australian, is central to its performance of Singapore as a distinctly international and globalised Singapore populated with Westernised pan-Asians. As such, the use of language further differentiates the film adaptation from its source, underscoring Chu’s vision to present a more globally accessible narrative.  

Overall, Dr Lim’s exploration of Crazy Rich Asians as a film adaptation sheds light on the complexities of the representation of diverse Asian identities in mainstream cinema. 

Read the chapter here.