{"id":4124,"date":"2020-08-30T09:52:48","date_gmt":"2020-08-30T09:52:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/living.chanintr.com\/?post_type=journal&p=4124"},"modified":"2022-01-04T07:24:34","modified_gmt":"2022-01-04T07:24:34","slug":"sex-and-vanity","status":"publish","type":"journal","link":"https:\/\/www.chanintr.com\/pages\/journal\/sex-and-vanity\/","title":{"rendered":"Sex & Vanity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Text by Shane Suvikapakornkul<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An old-fashioned romance, \u201cSex and Vanity<\/a>\u201d spares no reserve with the old-money names\u2014Churchill, Barclays, Styvesant Fish\u2014only in this latest Kevin Kwan<\/a> novel, one was prefixed by an extra foreign syllable. Lucie Tang Churchill, our young hapa billennial, was in a perfect Capri villa crush with a Berkeley- educated Zao boy with a surfer accent, to the disapproval of her cousin who thought her \u201cother gene\u201d gravitated the natural selection. Things got more complicated several years after when Lucie was engaged, only to find a resurfaced Zao and mom to test her future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If there are rules on \u201chow to read a classic today,\u201d they should apply here\u2014a clash in money and class, East and West, culture and manners, the social media traps and mishaps, all these made good modern comedy. Yet, the \u201ctoday\u201d part must be read deeper into layers of the thoughts of the older Tangs and Zaos. Each one of them seems to have a hidden past to be explored, and we are not yet told how. \u201cSex and Vanity\u201d is a tribute to \u201cA Room With a View\u201d, and to Kwan\u2019s Italy, and he is said to explore his two other favorite cities for this new trilogy, London and New York, so we may uncover more of their lives later on, though it is only our guess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

In his best-selling \u201cCrazy Rich Asians<\/a>\u201d, Kwan dealt us with a Chinese American woman coming to terms with her unkind Asian past. In \u201cSex and Vanity\u201d, we are thrown into what could be the ultimate colonial-era fantasy\u2014an Asian union with the uber-rich white upper-crust old money. There is nothing wrong there, and Kwan paints it with the smart details layering the canvas. The today\u2019s biracial billennials would have to take this fantasy forward, to make it their own, because their privileged world remains, seemingly unaffected, while the rest of us watch the world\u2019s future unfolds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSex and Vanity\u201d<\/em>: A Novel is available at HARDCOVER: The Art Book Shop at Open House Central Embassy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":4160,"template":"","filed_under":[],"class_list":["post-4124","journal","type-journal","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nSex & Vanity | Chanintr Living Journal<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Kevin Kwan's old-fashioned romance "Sex & Vanity" portrays the ultimate colonial-era fantasy \u2014 an Asian union with the uber-rich white upper-crust old money.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.chanintr.com\/pages\/journal\/sex-and-vanity\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Sex & Vanity | Chanintr Living Journal\" \/>\n<meta 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