Meet the New Asian Superrich

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Imagine China/CorbisSome seven years ago, shortly after moving from New York City, where I’d lived for more than a decade, back to my hometown of Hong Kong, I was invited to Sunday races at the Jockey Club, a swank, glass-enclosed aerie overlooking the racetrack, where punters drink beer and bet on horses. I was seated next to a dapper Chinese man who had just returned from London. I asked if he had gone for work or pleasure. – Continue Reading Below”To have lunch with the Queen, actually,” he deadpanned.I played along: „So what’d she serve?”At some point during his description of his and the Queen’s shared obsession with horse breeding, I realized he wasn’t joking. (He gallantly chose to ignore my gauche attempt at humor.) I’d been away from Hong Kong too long.Cut to last week: I’m at a dinner party, admiring my friend’s elaborate Balenciaga gold knuckle-dusters, a ring for each finger. „They were too tight,” she says, „so my helpers have been stretching them out all day.” By this time, I’ve lived here long enough to know she isn’t kidding.When people ask if I live in China, I always hesitate before answering. A former British colony, Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997, but it is still governed by different laws than the mainland; people here have many more freedoms and rights, not to mention duty-free shopping, which explains why mainlanders line up in Hong Kong to buy their head-to-toe Dior and Chanel—and why, when I go into a boutique here, the saleswomen always address me first in hopeful Mandarin, as opposed to the local Cantonese. (Never mind that I’m actually Korean.) Hong Kong has long been the city mouse to China’s country mouse. Now the pendulum is swinging the other way.When mainland China shifted to a more market-driven economy late in the twentieth century, wealth creation went from almost zero to supersonic in a matter of decades. People in industries from manufacturing to property development to retail suddenly got stupendously rich, and a new class of superrich emerged. A decade ago there were no Chinese billionaires on the annual Forbes list. In 2013, there are 122.Overnight, a rabid consumer culture appeared where once there had been none: According to a survey by McKinsey & Company, China is already the biggest market for luxury goods in the world, and by 2015 Chinese consumers will account for a third of all luxury purchases. That’s one out of every three designer handbags, pairs of shoes, and dresses sold globally. In sharp contrast to the infamous state-run Friendship emporiums—the store for the privileged, back in the day—where the rare tourist (I was one, back in the ’80s) could pick through a grim array of Chinese crafts and basic imports such as peanut butter, today there are 41 Louis Vuitton stores on the mainland. – Continue Reading BelowThere is little old money in mainland China. It’s mostly brand-spanking new. For the mainland rich, the ultimate status symbol is a home in Hong Kong, which, according to Savills World Research, is the highest-priced real estate market on the planet; with ultraluxury residential property averaging $11,000 per square foot, 5,000 square feet will run you $55 million. (By comparison, Manhattanites in this elite category have it relatively cheap, at not quite $4,000 per square foot.)Meanwhile, though China’s poverty rate has dropped dramatically, 13 percent of the population—170 million people—continue to live close to the $1.25-a-day international poverty line. The country has the second-largest number of poor in the world, after India.Though of course the phenomenon is more complex than a phrase like „Asian superrich” could begin to sum up (for starters, Asia comprises 48 countries, from Kazakhstan to Indonesia, each with its own culture and economy), with wealth so visible, so rapidly accumulated, and so unevenly distributed, it’s no wonder there seems to be a news story every week about this burgeoning class. Thus when galleys of three new novels about Asia and by Asian writers (one already published, two out imminently) crossed my desk, I can’t say I was surprised by their titles: Five Star Billionaire, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, and Crazy Rich Asians. – Continue Reading Below – Continue Reading BelowMalaysian writer Tash Aw’s absorbing Five Star Billionaire paints a sobering—and deeply cynical—picture of modern life in Shanghai. Five Malaysian Chinese find themselves chasing the mainland dream: getting rich. Among them is Phoebe, a blank slate of a girl who lives in grinding poverty, but whose greatest wish is to own a Louis Vuitton bag.How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, the excellent third novel by Mohsin Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist), charts the rise and fall of a bottled-water entrepreneur in an unnamed city that may or may not be Lahore, Pakistan. Structured like a self-help tome, with chapter titles such as „Don’t Fall in Love” and „Befriend a Bureaucrat” (amazingly, Five Star Billionaire is patterned on a similar how-to-book conceit), the story follows the businessman’s ascent from humble beginnings to a life of troubled opulence that includes bodyguards and violence.Tony Law/Redux – Continue Reading BelowWhile these two authors, both former Booker Prize nominees, are writing serious literary fiction, Singaporean Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians is the enjoyable flip side—a juicy, close anthropological read of Singapore high society and its social and mating rituals, which are not unlike those I see in Hong Kong. Kwan’s people are a species who have been ensconced in privilege for many generations, who, as he writes, make „Upper East Side girls look like Mennonites,” and are about as far from Aw and Hamid’s striving immigrants as can be imagined. Kwan tells the story of Rachel Chu, a pretty ABC (American-born Chinese) academic who falls in love with a scion of an established Singapore Chinese family. Rachel goes for an eye-opening visit to Singapore, Bali, and Malaysia, but the story line is decidedly secondary to the setting—all Bombardier jets, private islands, and nosebleeding sophistication. There’s nothing so obvious as monogrammed It Bags here, just knowing aperçus to Raf Simons gowns and Ingo Maurer dome lights.Kwan’s satirical portrayal rings so true, I fear he’ll need to bring a bodyguard next time he lands at Changi Airport. He gets the idiosyncratic details right: the market-savvy wives who day-trade and invest in property; the parsimonious practicality (I’ve seen many a well-off society gal in coach on a short-haul flight. „I can spend the extra $1,000 on a pair of shoes!” they explain); the encyclopedic fashion knowledge; the Bible-study get-togethers; the way the whole milieu is interrelated by blood or marriage. And he does a particularly good job of illustrating the divide, predictable enough, between mainland wealth and establishment 
money—an uneasy tension that is very real. In old-money parlance, mainland, when used as an adjective, has come to mean „crass,” „in bad taste.” Not our kind, dear. – Continue Reading Below – Continue Reading BelowEach wave of new wealth has its attendant media hysteria. Remember the Japanese, buying up Rockefeller Center and iconic Van Goghs? The sheiks of the Middle East, renting out entire hotel floors for their entourages, blowing millions at Harrods? The Russians, with their head-to-toe Versace and taste for London trophy properties? And let’s not forget Americans—for so long, the epitome of vulgar excess, whether it was nineteenth-century heiresses storming Europe in search of titles or twentieth-century Texas oil barons in ten-gallon hats schmoozing with starlets. New money, it seems dvu-nds.de , is endlessly fascinating and easily typed—how unrefined they are! How odd!And China’s new wealth offers no shortage of bizarre front-page fodder. In Hong Kong, the local papers are full of headlines that read like The Onion: There’s the one about the mainland customer who inquired about installing a microwave inside a Bentley so that he could enjoy his beloved instant noodles on the road. There’s tomboy heiress Zhang Jiale, whose feed on Weibo (the Asian Twitter) recently went viral, thanks to posts of herself boarding private jets or buried beneath a mountain of Gucci and Prada shopping bags. And there are the colorful excesses of politicos: When The New York Times revealed that Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s family, including his 90-year-old mother, had accumulated assets valued at more than $2.7 billion, the local blogosphere exploded.Observed, closer to home: the children’s party at a house staffed by what must have been 20 servants; the kid who raised half a million dollars on her read-for-charity bookathon; the matching his-and-hers Rolls-Royces; the neighbor who has three drivers for his six cars. Also, the family I saw recently at a restaurant with a servant (or „helper,” as they’re known here) for each of their three kids. One servant was tasked with holding up an iPad so that her eight-year-old charge could eat while watching his movie free of glare. – Continue Reading BelowBut for every one of these clownish caricatures, there’s a more cultivated consumer pooh-poohing such naked displays and keeping her head down. We too have our modest billionaires: China’s richest man, Zong Qinghou, once made $8 a month selling soda and Popsicles to schoolchildren from a stall; now, having made $21.6 billion in the beverage business dvu-nds.de , he sometimes sleeps in the office and recently noted of his simple, made-in-China outfit, „I don’t need expensive clothing.” And of course, the smartest rich people are always the ones you’ve never heard of. Over dinner one night, I met a Chinese oenophile with a professorial mien who had an exhaustive knowledge of every grape harvest in every region of France over the past 20 years. Our fellow guests hinted at the vastness and quality of his wine cellar. Nouveau? Maybe, but far from a novice.Living in Hong Kong, my friends and I sometimes giggle at the outlandish stories that come our way. But we’re all implicated just by living in a place where, for better or worse, to have full-time, live-in help costs $500 a month. None of us have done a load of laundry or pushed a vacuum in quite some time. I recently got an e-mail asking if I needed a houseboy.So the question remains: Is this all just one big evolutionary cycle in which societies rise up and evolve, then rapidly devolve? Does the rapid ascent of the $30,000 handbag spell some sort of apocalyptic, karmic doom? Or a societal dynastic pattern in which Asian superwealth will end up where America is now—divided and waiting for the revolution—or where France has gone, with its proposed 75 percent tax on the rich?I found an answer of sorts, as I often do, in a book—in this case, Lucy Lethbridge’s delightful and comprehensive history, Servants, due out this fall. In it, she takes us back to an archaic British society so wealthy and dependent on servants that the famously intellectual Lord Curzon once threw a log through the window because he had no idea how to open such a contraption, and where Virginia Woolf’s father wondered why he should bother to install hot-water plumbing when two servant girls could just as easily carry pails up and down the stairs. This was a world, now familiar to Downton Abbey fans, in which newspapers were ironed and coins boiled, all so that the upper class could lead a sanitized and seamless existence, oblivious to the scurrying lower classes downstairs. What brought an end to this arcane and ossified class system? World War I and its long aftermath—which, as Lethbridge sees it, is still playing out. For where are out-of-work British butlers being hired today? Mainland China.Liked this story? Get it first when you subscribe to ELLE magazine.

Meet the New Asian Superrich

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