Michelle Obama: The Light Podcast - Kevin Kwans Crazy Rich History

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

Bestselling author of Crazy Rich Asians, Kevin Kwan, reflects on his “Huck Finn-style” childhood in Singapore. He shares the real-life inspirations behind Crazy Rich Asians (including a memory from director Jon Chu’s own life that made it into the film) and regales Michele with some truly extraordinary family stories. Plus, he shares a delicious cross-cultural recipe for curry puffs! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This podcast is brought to you by our friends at Alloy Health. This is a woman who was, she was actually a career woman. You know, she started teaching piano at age 19 after she got her broad certification from the Royal School of Music, right? She started teaching at 19. And by this point, she was almost 50. So she had three decades of a career in Singapore, having been a concert piano. as having trained generations of young musicians. And here she is in Houston, Texas, having never done housework in her entire life,

having never cooked anything but made, making spaghetti bolognese once in her life. And even her friends, you know, said, oh, my God, you're never going to survive. Hello, hello, welcome back to your mama's kitchen. This is a place where we explore how we are shaped as adults by the kitchens that we grew up in as kids, not just the meals, but all the stuff that happened there, the laughter, the sibling rivalry, the music on the radio, the things that you saw out the kitchen window. I'm Michelle Norris. And my guest today is Kevin Kwan. He's the author behind the wildly best-selling book, Crazy Rich Asians. Many of you know that that book had its own hit film

adaptation that rocked Hollywood and was a beacon for Asian representation on screen. He's written several books, all of them bestsellers, that explore, the Asian Gilded Age and High Society. And they include China-rich girlfriend, rich people problems, sex and vanity, and lies and weddings. They are all international bestsellers. They have been translated into more than 40 languages. Kevin spent much of his childhood here in the U.S., but he was born in Singapore. And it turns out that the life that he and his family led were in some ways an inspiration for that avalanche of bestselling books. And we're going to talk about that today and so much more. Kevin, thank you for being with us.

It's such a pleasure and an honor to be here. I have been looking forward to this conversation. I have been following you on Instagram so I know that you love food. You like to spend time in the kitchen yourself. Here at your mama's kitchen, that's the first question we always start with. Tell me about your mama's kitchen. And I want to ask you about two different kitchens, the kitchen in Singapore that you were in until you were 11 and moved to the U.S. If we can start there, the house you grew up in, which sounds like,

it was large and filled with antiques and intergenerational, so filled with people also. So if you could sort of walk me through, you know, you're outside playing, you come inside, it's time for dinner and you walk through the foyer and whatever room you walk through to get back to the kitchen and where the food was being made, what would I see and what would I smell as I got closer to the kitchen and what would it look like when I finally got there? I mean, what a great place to start, taking me all the way back to Singapore. And, you know, what I always like to say was a really huck-thin childhood. I mean, I, it was kind of this last beautiful era of Singapore where we were really island kids. I was an island boy. I grew up barefoot, right? Or in flip-flops. That's so interesting, because you think of Singapore now as a bright, shining city full of skyscrapers. Yeah. I mean, there was that part, too. But, you know, we lived in a house on top of a hill that had beautiful panoramic views of the island.

And it was a house that my grandparents built. And it was large, but it wasn't large in the way that Beverly Hills McMansions are large now, right? It was large for a purpose because a whole family lived there. You know, at the time it was built, my grandparents had four children, right? And then there was an extended family, there was staff. So every room had its purpose. Put it this way, right? Every room really was meant for different things, different usages in life. And so that's the world I sort of grew up in. And I would be playing out with my friends, we had a little bicycle gang, you know. We'd go around a little neighborhood. But every night at 7 p.m. one of our maids would sound the dinner gong, and it was an old-fashioned. It looked like a little mini xylophone.

And had a beautiful little, you know. Would she play it like a song or their notes? What did that sound like? Do you remember the sequence? It was like, dong, dong, dong, dong, dong, dong, don't. You know, just she'd play this very simple little melody. And you just knew, okay, it's time to come home. Wash your hands, you know, make yourself a little neat and tidy.

And then it's time for dinner with the whole family, you know, and that would be my parents, my brothers, my grandparents, my aunt, and then whoever was visiting for the evening, we often had visitors. Big dining room? Big dining room, you know, big round table that my grandmother presided over. And then, of course, there's the kitchen, right? And I was like the kitchen boy. I loved going into the kitchen to see what was up.

And the kitchen was just off the dining room. It was a big rectangular room. And there was also a big communal dining table there, too, a more informal dining table where we would have breakfasts and lunches. So, you know, I grew up literally in the kitchen every morning having breakfast. But I would also, I'd love to see what, you know, our amazing cook was doing. And it was always a bustling hive of activity because it was such a food-centered home, but so much of the food back then, you know, took days and days to prepare, right? So things were always being prepped and prepared. Um, you know, I remember, for example,

there's a lovely coconut jam that we make in Singapore called Kaya. And it's this, just amazing, you know, thick, almost caramel-like coconut jam. And I loved it. And I remember one day, you know, sort of pleading the cook to make some for me. I was craving it. And she was kind of grumpy. And I didn't understand why, right? But she acquiesced, you know, I was very indulged. And then I saw that it took them two days to make this. Oh, you had to cook it down. I mean, they had to get the coconuts and grate them and then puree them and then, you know, reduce it over a double boiler. Oh.

You know, for, and I remember just being so impatient going, when's it going to be ready, when's it going to be ready? But in the act of that, also having this new awareness that things take time, you know, good things take time. And it's also so labor intensive to do this. You know, I remember seeing our cook, you know, literally fanning the flames. you know, underneath the double boiler, because for some reason they did it in the courtyard over an open flame. Over an open flame. Yeah.

Wow. So it was really beautifully antiquated in a way in this old, old enamel double boiler, but it got us an amazing flavor, right? So I had a new appreciation for what it took them to create even the simplest foods that I would, you know, so take for granted. So I want you to describe the kitchen. You said it was a rectangular space. Singapore had a strong colonial aesthetic.

And so were you in a kitchen that was an Asian kitchen or did it look like an English country kitchen? Because you could find both in a grand mansion in Singapore. Yeah. It was definitely more because the house was designed, I believe, in the 40s or, late 40s. It was more of an international modern style. So it was a bungalow. It was a white bungalow, streamlined, maybe with even Art Deco influences. So the kitchen, everything was very streamlined. And so there were many stoves, but there was a big main stove where the walk took center stage, because most of the cooking took place, you know, in the walk.

Multi-burner stove, I imagine. Exactly. Yeah. So that's my memory of it. But it was run very much like an English house, you know, with the colonial influence. And the other feature of the kitchen was on the other wall was this huge contraption that it was one of these old-fashioned room indicators. kind of like they had in Downton Abbey, right?

So in every room of the house, there was a push button where you could push and it would tell, you know, the servants which room needed something, needed attention.

And it, you know, in downtown abbey, it's a bell system, like a bell rings and you see a little placard. Here it was almost like one of these old-fashioned And airport, you know, kind of those flip things that will flip a number. Oh, yes, like a ticker tape kind of thing. Yeah. So a number would appear.

Exactly. In this big giant box, you know. And so that was at the back of the kitchen room. What was your number for your room? Do you remember? I think we were number four. Uh-huh. I actually don't know.

When you blowing that up as a kid, were you like pushing that button all the time? No. No, not really. I don't think we used it much because we were running around, right, and just doing whatever we wanted. It was, I think, something more that my grandparents used. Okay. Yeah, it just, it never occurred to us to push the button. We would just yell if we needed something. You described yourself as a kitchen kid. What did that mean? Were you allowed to actually help or were you allowed, basically to observe? I was occasionally allowed to help,

but it was mainly observation. I remember once helping to sort out the rice. I remember once there was a big pan of rice, and I guess they would get these big bags of rice where you would

sort out the grains because there were some grains that were more translucent, and that was the glutinous rice. and that it all came in the same bag. So someone's job was to sort out the rice from my memory. You know, this is all coming back right now the first time in 40-something years, Michelle.

How convenient for us. This is interesting. Did you want the glutinous rice or were those, that's the stuff you didn't want? What was the pecking order there? You wanted the, I think, the normal rice to make normal, you know, fluffy white rice. And the glutinous rice was for glutinous rice dishes, right?

There was another beautiful dish that we made. That's, you know, we called it growing up. We called it Zong, which is a Cantonese word. But it's like, it's a rice packet, right? It's like a rice dumpling. That's kind of pyramid-shaped. And the beautiful thing about these rice dumplings was it was a ritual that was seasonal. And it involves all the interconnected families.

that were sort of part of our extended family. At some point every year, they would begin harvesting these leaves, these long, I think they were leaves from a bamboo plant. And so someone would come over. They would begin hacking down these leaves. Maybe they were banana leaves. Banana leaves would make sense.

Yeah. And then they would, I'm sorry for my ignorance. I really should have. better prepared for this. But then they would, you know, they would soak the leaves in these big pails of water, dry the leaves, and the leaves were what held these glutinous rice dumplings. Then all the different cooks from the different households, you know, my grand uncle, another aunt had a cook. They'd all come over, and they'd spend days and days making these huge vats of rice, you know, different rice dumplings filled with different ingredients.

Some of them were savory, had, you know, lovely pork or chicken, and, you know, some had sweet red bean. Some were cloutness rice balls that you would eat with honey, you know, or treacle, golden syrup. Lyle's golden syrup over. So, you know, but they would make thousands of these dumplings and wrap them up in these banana leaves into these lovely pyramid-shaped dumplings. and then they would go into these giant steamers and they would do these outdoors in the garage. And I just remember it was a whole week of all these people coming together. What was the occasion for this?

I think it coincided with some lunar festival. It wasn't a New Year thing. Because New Year had different foods. Every season, every holiday had different foods. It's just a beautiful tradition. It's spelled Z-H-O-N-G for people listening. Yeah. Is that correct?

Yes. In case, you know, you at the end of this episode want to run to the Google and or run to a cookbook of sorts to learn more about the food or the tradition. But it sounds like it's just beautiful that your family and their extended staffs coming together, everybody having a role to play. Everyone had a role to play. And then the dumplings were always divvied up between the families. Right. So it was really this, it linked the families in a very special way. And I think also, you know, as I got older and began to really sort of realize what was happening,

so many of these people that had been on staff, you know, had been on staff for decades and decades and decades with these families. And they knew each other and they were friends. And this was their time to get together and trade gossip. You know what I mean? And so, you know, I've even remember sometimes when we would go over to an uncle's house for a party, my nanny would come along. You know, my nanny was one of these old, we called them the old-fashioned black and white amaz. You know, there was a certain group of women from southern China called the black and white amas, and they only dressed in a uniform of black and white silk. and they took a vow of chastity at, you know, age 16 or whatever, and they, you know, move from China to

Singapore, and they were in service to a family for their lives, really. You know, they were paid, right? Of course, you know, it was, but this was kind of the pledge they made, and they joined a family. And so she was very much a part of our family. You know, she raised my aunt, as a baby. And then she raised me and my two brothers. And she very happily decided to retire, you know, in her early 80s. You know, she made the choice of retiring and going back to China. A rich woman, you know, because she'd saved all her money for decades and decades and decades. And she went back, she built a big house. She got a satellite dish for her village. And she became the queen of her village and I think played poker for the next.

15 years of her life. That sounds like another book. I'm fascinated by that story. But I digress, but I remember, you know, she came along with us to one of these family parties because she just wanted to come to that house to gossip of her friends in that household.

This reminds me of the scene in Crazy Rich Asian, in the book and the film, where they're coming together and they're all, I don't know if they were making rice dumplings or as long at that point, but they were, there was a dumpling ritual Yes. And it was a test at that point.

Was that an inspiration for what you wound up writing in the book and then you wound up in the film as well? So that scene was never in my book. That's a very interesting little detail that you point out. That scene was actually inspired from a memory that the director John Chu had of his family, gathering around the table, making dumplings. Like, that's a very specific memory from his childhood that we worked into the movie.

And were you okay with that? Because it aligned with what you recalled as well. It, you know, aligned with what we needed to do for the movie and that we needed to create a sense of family and have a moment where the family could come together and demonstrate the connections to Rachel Chu, number one. And I loved it that it was also a memory that John could bring into the movie, you know. It's as much his, is mine, right? So I loved him having this very personal moment there. And also, I do remember these rituals, you know, where we would gather around food. So it worked on so many levels, you know, but it wasn't an exact memory from my childhood or from my books, because the women in my family back then, they didn't touch food. Right? So that's the other side of the coin where I, as a kid, was allowed to wander through the kitchen, right, and poke around and see what was going on.

My mother never entered the kitchen. I, you know, it was, I wouldn't say forbidden, but it's just nothing, something she wouldn't think of doing. Someone else did that. Someone else took care of that. The cook had her job, right? And she was, you know, that was her kingdom, right? And I remember actually one of my, one of the clearest childhood memories I have is of my mother once cooking in that kitchen.

And it was so unheard of that everyone gathered around to watch this happen. Right? Because I think she'd been to a party and she had tried this new exotic dish. And she was always trying to find a way for her kids to eat vegetables. We hated eating out regis, right? So she got this recipe and started making this dish by herself. And I just remember watching her and watching all the adults gather. Like my grandparents came downstairs because they've never seen my mom in the kitchen before cooking. And the maids were looking horrified.

The cook was very disapprovingly going, what are you doing in my kitchen? And you know what my mom was making? What? Spaghetti, bolognese. Oh, you're kidding. Yeah. That was something new and exotic. It was new and exotic.

And, you know, this spaghetti had, you know, a lot of chopped up onions and green peppers and tomatoes, you know, like so the, you know, so and carrots, I think. Mixed in with the ground beef, of course, right? And, of course, you know, it was yummy and, you know, we were hooked for life. but that was the first time I'd ever seen my mom cook in a kitchen. What a wonderful memory. She must have been so proud of herself. She truly was, yeah. But that was the only time she was allowed in the kitchen in my memory in Singapore.

You know, and all that changed when we moved. Before we get to the move, because this is a transition point to talk about the move, but it might be helpful to sort of scale back a little bit to learn a little bit about your family, which is, you know, your family was extraordinary. aristocratic family, businessmen, owner of one of the first banks in Singapore. Can you sort of give us a little bit of a family tree? Yeah, that was my great-grandfather. So my great-grandfather was a merchant and a banker.

And, you know, he had moved, he was a magistrate and a businessman back in China. And he had moved, I think, in the late 19th century, early turn of the century to Singapore. where he had restaged his businesses. So his daughter was my grandmother. And so she really grew up in that world, right? That was kind of this world of imperial splendor. You know, she would talk. She had so many memories of her childhood.

And, you know, those were truly, that was the crazy rich generation. We were not. She lived on a vast property, vast lands, you know, and, you know, sort of had this very, very rarefied life. And then she married a doctor, my grandfather, you know, who had moved from Hong Kong in an arranged marriage and married her. And it was one of these marriages that actually worked out beautifully, you know, They were very much in love and very, very dedicated and devoted to one another. And he was, he was a good man. And I think because of her financial security, he was really able to devote so much of his medical practice to being a humanitarian doctor. Right. He purposely kept his clinic in the old part of Chinatown in Singapore. He really wanted to be of service to the elderly Chinese immigrants. He could speak Mandarin. We could not. My father could not, but he still

had the memory of old China. He was very scholarly, and so he wanted to be that bridge between generations. And so much of his work, I think, was giving free medical services. And I think that's eventually what got him noticed, and I did by the queen, you know, because of his years of dedicated humanitarian work. You just mentioned that your grandfather was knighted by the queen, which I think requires just a little bit more. A few words about that. That must be an incredible point of pride in your family. It is. I mean, we were, you know, we were very proud of him. I mean, it happened way before I was born, but, you know, I remember as a child, you know, seeing the framed certificates and all that, you know, with the queen's signature

in the house. Interestingly enough, he was such a modest man. And he really truly was such a true healer and humanitarian. He initially tried to refuse the knighthood.

That's the family lore, you know, because he was like, what is this? I don't want it. I don't care. You know. And then he was told, while you can't actually refuse the queen,

you know, she will do what she wants, and if she's going to bestow, you know, a knighthood on you, you're going to have to deal with it. Right. So, of course, you know, he graciously acquiesced. That's the real story. But he never, you know, he never sort of made a big deal out of it. He, you know, he never went by Sir Arthur or anything like that.

Like, he always was Dr. Arthur Kwan. You know, that was what he was most proud of. first and foremost. He must have been incredibly respected in Singapore. He was. He really was. Beloved, I think, more than anything else, you know. And that was my memory of him. You know, always a man who was of such astounding integrity and character, you know,

and just kindness, just pure kindness. I love that you added that rejoinder because I noted that he probably was respected, but you said he was beloved. And I think that's so important because a lot of people are beloved, excuse me, a lot of people are respected, but sometimes that's based in fear. Sometimes that's based in, you know,

from putting them on such a pedestal because they are so powerful that they're almost otherworldly. To say someone as beloved means that they're accessible, it just means something completely different. So thank you for making that distinction. Thank you for letting me. Yeah.

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You know, my grandmother, I think she'd always held this position in society, you know, that was kind of unassailable, right? And she was truly kind of this very brook-a-like character, right? She was extremely regal, very reserved, and from everything I know of her, very accomplished in her own right. She was the first in her generation to, well, first of all, she was the first in her generation not to have bound feet. Right? Wow. If you can even imagine that, you know, she, her mother, you know, it was a mark of gentility, right, in aristocracy for well-born Chinese women to have their feet bound.

And it rendered them helpless, basically. There are people who are listening to this who might not understand what that means, so maybe we should explain this. starting from an early age, they would bind their feet so that they remained tiny and, I guess, cute looking, right? It was an idea of femininity. It was the idea of femininity and gentility and beauty. Like, you know, well-born women have tiny, bound feet, you know, and they would be intricately bound, and they would wear these little, silk shoes, right, almost like ballet slippers, but their feet were tiny. And that was the standard to which people aspired to. But my grandmother, you know, she recalls being horrified,

right, by the thought of this and by seeing what would happen every night when they unbound her mother's feet and had to clean it, right? You know, her maids would do cleaning ritual and soaking it in warm water and basically, you know, your feet become deformed. Yeah. Right? Your toes get broken. It's a disability, truly, right? And it's a barbaric practice, really.

And you have a certain degree of immobility. You can't really walk. And that was the point. You know, we're too privileged to even walk. We're carried everywhere, you know, or we walk in little dainty steps. And, you know, I mean, of course, it had been a tradition for thousands of years, but it ended with my grandmother. And so she was a rebel from the very start, right, and refused to have her feet bound and convinced

my great-grandfather to, you know, so let her skip this archaic cruel ritual. And so that happened. And then she also went to school. you know, she was the first woman of her long line of, you know, people in her family to be educated. You know, she got the equivalent of her high school degree. There's a photograph, I think, of the first graduating class of the non-young girl school in Singapore. And she's front row center in that photograph holding her diploma. Yeah.

Right. And so she, you know, and I was told that she was head of the class. always the most accomplished, you know, scholarly, but also the best artist, the best embroider, the best needlepoint, the best, everything. She was always the best. And certainly from looking at photographs of her, she was the best dressed, no question. I mean, she was just elegance personified, but also had such a beautiful flair for fashion in her day. And then she married my grandfather. And years later, you know, I learned that a lot of her volunteer work had to do with family planning. Really? And, and helping women, you know, with family planning issues.

Which would have been controversial. In its day, yeah. So in her own quiet way, she was formidable a hit of her time, right? But I think all that put a lot of pressure

on my dad, number one, right? And he was sent abroad in his early teens. I think he was 13 years old.

He was sent to Australia to a boarding school and then to secondary school and then college. You know, he went to University of Sydney.

And he spent a good, at least 10 years away, more than 10 years. So his formative years from 13 to like 23, 25 were in Australia. So imagine having that life. Did that change him in some way when he came back to Singapore? It sounds like a collision of cultures when he returned. Yeah, I think profoundly

because he, you know, he would spend the summers working at, you know, at a ranch in the outback. I have his photo albums. You see these amazing photographs of him, you know, out in the Australian countryside on motorcycles. You know what I mean? at the beach. And it's always interesting because there's these beautiful class photos, right? And they look like these old Princeton varsity rowing team photos. You see all these men in double-breasted jackets and ties sitting in very neat rows, you know, and there's the professor in the front row and all these, you know, young men.

And then there's my dad, the one Chinese Singaporean man in literally, you know, hundreds of classmates who were all, you know, Aussie and Caucasian. And that was the stark reality of it. But he never once told me, never once that he mentioned it was ever an issue or a problem, right? I mean, these were his friends. He adjusted well to Australia. And I think it was probably quite a shock for him to have to come back to, you know, Singapore in his mid-20s. What were the expectations for him when he returned to Singapore? I mean, he's the firstborn son, right?

He's the namesake. So I think the expectations were that he married. an appropriate woman and continue the line and give my grandparents lots of grandkids right and just and also be that dutiful son

right that moves home with mom and dad and takes care of them as they begin to age and you know and all that right and that's what he did so how did he meet your mom church. Okay, because your grandparents were in an arranged marriage, and so I was wondering if that tradition

continued. It stopped with their generation. He went to, you know, Wesley Methodist Church in Singapore, and my mother also went there. She was the daughter of a Methodist minister, actually. That's a whole other story. But, you know, they met, I think, Methodist Youth Fellowship and courted for five years. met, married, had kids, had kids, lived happily in Singapore, lived happily in Singapore, and then decided to move, of all places, to Texas.

Houston, Texas, yeah. Was he looking for that sort of outback experience that he had in Australia and hoping to find it in the biggest state in the United States? I think that was very much part of, you know, the lure of moving. I think he, at the heart of it, really loved that lifestyle, right? And love the Western lifestyle. And I think also for him being here represented having a personal freedom, right? Because when you move back in your 20s to your parents' house and stay there for the next 25, years. That's a commitment, but it's also in its own way, I think, very emotionally

stultifying. It could feel like a cage. Yeah. Because it's not your house. You know, it's your mama's house. And she's calling all the shots, right? She's still very much the queen of the palace. And so I think in many ways it was very challenging for my parents to have a life and to raise their kids, you know, under this microscopic scrutiny, you know, of the mother and the mother-in-law, you know, but also society in Singapore was also, you know, it's, you know, what I write about, it's such a small little hot house of intrigue and gossip and social machinations. and whatnot, right? And it's funny, these are the things that fascinate me. These are the things that make my way into my novels. But I think for my dad, you know, he could have cared less.

And he very much took after my grandfather. The humanitarian. Yeah. But beyond that, just a man with no pretensions at all. you know and I think he didn't really like what he was seeing in the way that society was changing and how the island was becoming crazy rich right and it was all about money suddenly and not about values you know or and I think he's a tiny island with more millionaires than any other in the world for its size.

Do you think that he moved in some way for you and your siblings? He did. I think he also saw that my older brothers, at least, were sort of struggling in the educational system. Because we were, you know, even within these families, we were a very unusual family in the sense that we were these colonial, we were sort of these colonial Singaporean Chinese. right? And that meant what? It meant that we were...

Society order. We were English educated. You know, we only spoke English at home. He only spoke English, right? My grandfather spoke of this clipped British accent, right? Because he had been educated in Scotland, University of Edinburgh. And in the 70s, when Singapore gained its independence, actually, you know, that happened in the 60s, but they slowly changed the education system where they wanted every student to master English, but also Mandarin Chinese. And for families that were multilingual, that was easy, right? If you grow up phonetically hearing Mandarin spoken, you learn it pretty easily.

But when you grow up in a household where you don't hear it at all, it's like learning any very, very challenging, you know, language. And I think my brothers really struggled with that. So much of their lives, so much of my life in Singapore was the tutor, the Chinese tutor, you know, teaching us, drilling us, you know, and we were flanking miserably. And a very, should be said, very competitive education system. Singapore is one of the best education systems in the world, but it's very competitive. And students are sorted very early. And once you are sorted in those categories, it's hard to move out of that category. Yeah. And beginning with grade one, you know, how you do in first grade sets the tone for what class you get into second grade,

right? So, you know, if you were in 1A, you want to go to 2A and not 2B, for example. You know, so it's the stratification begins very, very early. Um, And I think my brothers were, you know, struggling a bit with that. So they wanted something different for you. And of all the places, he opened up a map, I guess, and chose Texas. Well, he had connections to Texas. You know, and if you remember, Houston back in the late 70s, early 80s, was a boomtown. Oh, totally. Yes.

Right. And NASA, you know, was the center of the aerospace industry. It was the city of the future. So there was a lot of cancer research. there also. Exactly. So there was a lot going for Houston. And I think that really factored in his decision to like, this is, this is the future, you know.

And I remember because, you know, he didn't tell me until about a month before we were going to leave. Right. I was the happy kid. I was the kid that actually was doing well in school, you know. But, you know, by this point, he'd made the decision. And, you know, he was like, pack up a body. whatever you want to take. It's going on a ship. And then we're leaving in a month, you know. And I was initially really upset, right? Because I was at that age where I was really making, you know,

really making friends for the first time. Really, you know, you're, you know, you're sort of preteens, but you're part of this gang and, you know, you just, you're really, I was really coming into my own for the first time, you know. And then now you have to leave, right? But I, I remember him saying, he's like, you know, when we move to the States, you're going to love school because school will be fun. School will be fun for you. And I couldn't even wrap my head around that idea, right? But he was right. School was fun.

Yeah. And you took to Houston pretty easily. What about your family? because it would have been an incredible transition for them, not just a geographic transition, but in every possible way, the food, the climate, the culture, class issues, you know, walking into a space where everyone doesn't know you or doesn't know your family background. How did they handle the transition? So it's interesting.

I think every family member had a different transition, right? And speaking for myself, I think I was so lucky in many ways. 11 was the right age for me to move because I was old enough to have a memory, a very distinct memory of Singapore, right? And growing up in a culture where I was not in the minority, you know, I think that that consciousness of growing up not feeling like you are othered for the first decade of your life is something that that just remains with you. So I think by the time I came at age 11, I was naturally confident, number one, you know, I didn't see myself as a second class citizen or, you know, whatever. And the other advantage was I spoke English, right?

Which is something that most immigrants don't have, right? I'm not only fluent, I'm better at English than most of the kids in my grade at this point, you know. And so also the other advantage was Singapore was so multicultural and also so westernized. You know, my neighbors growing up, you know, was on one side, it was a British family, right? And so my playmates were these British kids. And on the other side, it was a kid from New Zealand, you know, and across the street, it was an Indian family. And that was the neighborhood gang, you know. It was very, very multicultural.

And so I grew up kind of colorblind in that way, right? And so the white kids were just my neighbors, right? So it wasn't, there wasn't a racial shock coming into an American middle school. Was that true for your parents, though? Did they have more of a shock? I think my dad did not, because let's not forget, you know, he grew up in Australia. Okay, but what about your mom who, you know, had cooked spaghetti bolognese once in her life? Once and now is in Houston and, you know, going to the grocery store and probably could looking for the family. So she had the hardest time of all. Right. This is a woman who was,

she was actually a career woman. You know, she started teaching piano at age 19 after she got her broad certification from the Royal School of Music, right? She started teaching at 19. And by this point, she was almost 50. So she had three decades of a career in Singapore. having been a concert pianist, having trained generations of young musicians, and here she is in Houston, Texas, having never done housework in her entire life, having never cooked anything but making spaghetti bolognese once in her life, and even her friends, you know, said, oh, my God, you're never going to survive. You will never survive this, right? they were mad at my dad.

Wait, why are you doing this to her? Yeah, why are you abusing your wife like this? You know, because it would be such a profound change in lifestyle for her, you know. So she, and I remember I was also, you know, the first year was tough because I also had to adjust, right, to this amazing new concept called housework. Right. You know, my dad would be like, go mow a lot. And here's lawnmower. Go out there and clean up the yard.

You know, there's household chores to do. And, you know, at first I couldn't understand why this was happening. But after a while, you realize, you know, there's no one else to do it. And all the other kids are doing chores too. Yeah. Exactly. This is just the new life, right? And so I was very adaptable and, you know, took a couple of months, but then you get with

the program, right? because you have no choice. Yeah. Did your mom feel that way also? I just got to get it with the program because what's the alternative? What's the alternative? And, you know, for a woman who started, who had never cooked at age 50, you know, to have to figure out a grocery store, figure out how to cook, she is now an amazing cook. Oh, I love to hear that.

Right. I was not sure where that was going to go. She's now an amazing cook. And now when she goes back to Singapore, she loves to show off for her friends. And they're in disbelief. You have a beautiful relationship with your parents. And I was reading about, in particular, your relationship with your father when he was diagnosed with cancer. You decided to go back and spend as much time as you could with him.

And you became his helper. And there were a lot of appointments. and you were the one who got him where he needed to go. It was a big group effort. You know, my brothers and I all took turns. You know, as you know, it takes a village. It's an army. And the whole family gets involved when you have to battle cancer, right?

And so we really felt immediately that we just needed to be a support system. And it's when you're walking a family member through something like that, there's also an opportunity to add a new dimension to your relationship when you're, you're not necessarily parenting them, but they're leaning on you now. Absolutely. For most people, pancreat cancer is almost an immediate death sentence, right? The mortality rate is between three to six months. And so we mobilized.

Spending that time with him was so precious. you know, because every day I was, I drove him downtown for his radiation treatments, you know, so we have two hours in the car back and forth. And I didn't want to be morbid, right? But there were so many stories I wanted to know about his childhood, you know, because I had just heard them anecdotally through the years. And I didn't even know if they were true, right? And it's, it's not something you really focused on. You know, you just hear these. stories now and then, but, you know, I had always heard, for example, that as a kid, he was always chauffured to school. He'd be chauffured. And then his nanny, or the chauffeur, someone, would carry his

briefcase into the classroom for him. That's how pampered he was, right? So I wanted to know if that was true. It was true. That did happen. Right. So all these little stories and then more, you know, and I wanted to know about his life in Australia, and I want to know about, you know, his memory of growing up in his grandfather's house, right? So he was born in the house of my great-grandfather, the banker. And, you know, I'd only seen it in photographs. So I wanted to know what was this place like. And, you know, my dad was an amazing artist.

So he took out a piece of paper and literally sketched out the entire plan of the house. This is the main house. These were the servants quarters. There was a fruit orchard, apparently. There was a tennis court. And he just, the driveway, like, he could sketch it out as if he was back there the day before. Which, of course, he would be able to as a child at home, right? But I didn't know intimately what it was like.

The other side of that story was when the Japanese invaded Singapore, you know, during World War II, you know, Japanese occupied Singapore for three years. And it was an extremely difficult time for most Singaporeans. A lot of them were sent away to concentration camps. A lot of them were done away with. but his family, I guess because of their social position, number one, but also because the Japanese general wanted to live in their house, he took over their house. So the Japanese general that had invaded Singapore took over the main house,

and my dad and his immediate family moved into a back house on the property during the Warriors. And the grounds became kind of like, you know, mission control. And a lot of troops were camped out literally on their lawns. Wow. So he grew up as a little kid, getting to know these Japanese soldiers. He even learned to speak a little bit of Japanese, right? Because they were in his yard, right? So so many of these little magical stories that I didn't know, you know, were revealed.

on these car rides in that sort of six-week period. And I'm seeing the through line for someone who then was, had a certain wanderlust and didn't want to be sort of boxed in mainly because, maybe because of what he saw as a young child, you know, to witness something like that, that kind of displacement completely. Would leave an imprint, pretty strong one. To live with kind of the terror of the invader and the head of the invaders literally in your house, it's got to do something to you, right? We never went there because my dad was also not an emotional person, so he would tell stories, but he was not want to really discuss his feelings, right?

but he saw it as being lucky, right? It could have been a lot worse for his family. A lot of people lost family members, lost their own lives, lost everything they had built up. Yeah. And my grandfather, my own grandfather was, you know, taken away, right? Because they were actually... What does taken away mean? They were executing all the able-bodied men.

able-bodied, educated men. So a whole generation of men were taken away and assassinated. And so he was taken up. You know, they came from one day early on. This is another family story, which has made its way into Kwa's Rich Asians, the novel, right? And he was in a line to be executed, except that whoever was in a way. in that regiment, the colonel or, you know, whoever was supervising it, recognized my grandfather as the doctor, you know, that had treated him, I believe. And he was like, oh, wait a minute,

this was my doctor. We're not going to kill him. So he saved his life from the firing squad, pulled him out, you know. And, you know, I think the trauma of what my grandmother to go through, like thinking you'd never see your husband again, right, and then him returning a few days later. I think all of that, all of that must have really also affected my dad. the novels that you write are rich and interesting, and your own family story is as rich and deep as interesting as anything that you have written. At the point when you were taking your father two hours back and forth,

that says something about just how big Houston is, that it would take that long to get downtown and back to your family home. Were you writing at that point? Were you starting to put the sort of architecture for these stories together, because you had gone to Parsons, you were working as a graphic designer, your life was headed in a completely different direction before you became an internationally renowned best-selling author. At that point, I had already authored two books,

which he lived to see, but they were non-fiction books, right? It's interesting how I, for so many decades, I think would just do anything to avoid my family, my heritage, my background. Why? Why? Why were you running or walling that off? It was more, I think, it was a means of self-preservation, number one. And I think it's a way to, I didn't want to be stereotyped, right? And I think it's something I think a lot of people from immigrant backgrounds go through as they assimilate into a new culture, right? You don't want to be that guy that opens a Chinese restaurant. You want to distinguish yourself in a world beyond your racial heritage.

You know, John Chu speaks to this as well, too, of how he had to make it in Hollywood. and do these movies that were not personal, that had nothing to do with his background, his family story, until he achieved a certain level of success as a filmmaker, you know, and that was when he allowed himself to even entertain the possibility of making a movie like Crazy Rich Asians,

which for him and for me, ironically, blew up our lives exponentially, you know, in the most incredible ways, right? So I had a whole career as a fine art photographer. You know, I was showing my work in museums, really. And even back then, you know, my work had nothing to do with my background, my heritage, Asia, any of that. But I think spending that time of my dad, re-invoking those memories of his childhood, my childhood, and then also really seeing just how precious life is, you know, and how short, really.

You just, you know, we don't know when we're going to die, right? And I had always had this plan of, you know, maybe when I'm 60 and I'm retired, I'll put pen to paper and start writing down these stories. but here I was with a guy, you know, who was facing his mortality up close every single day. And I said, you know what, I'm going to begin writing now. So I began writing, you know, when he was sick. What character did you start with? I started with Eleanor, the mother, and the Bible study, sitting around with her friends. friends, hearing the gossip, that her sons get a new girlfriend. That was the first chapter I wrote.

Yeah. And, you know, the rest is history. Indeed. People love those books. They pass them around. I imagine when you go to book signings, people are showing you books that have been much loved, much red dog-eared. Do people thank you also for telling a story that maybe we haven't seen enough of on the page? I do get that a lot. And then I also meet

readers of Asian descent, right? And some of them really, you know, really take the time to tell me their special stories. And it's just, you know. That's a special thing then you can do that. It's beyond.

Open a portal for people to share their histories because so many people don't. Yeah. But who would have thought that in telling these stories that are so personal and so, you know, I don't use the word exotic, but you know what I mean? You know, they're so specific to a time and a place in a culture in an island that's a dot on the equator that a woman in Palo Alto or in Seattle drawing up as an Asian American can feel seen.

Someone told me something that if you have a story on your heart or in your mind, you need to tell it because someone needs to hear it. That to hold on to stories can be an act of preservation, but it can be an act of generosity

to tell a story. And I think you have told stories that not just entertain people, but emboldened them to maybe look at their own histories and to help them feel seen and understood and valued. Yeah. Well, thank you for so eloquently

putting it into words. I was not expecting to get choked up. It's okay. It's all right. It happens, especially on this podcast where we're asking people about their history and their mama's kitchens and asking them to go down memory lane. We also asked them for recipes. And we might have to get a second recipe from you because, or at least I want to know more about the coconut jam, but the recipe that you reached into your family lore to share with us were these curry puffs. Curry puffs. I was wondering if there's another name for them, but curry puffs, which is puffs. pastry, filled with deliciousness, and I'd want to know more about the curry puff. When was it served? So, you know, it's just a quintessential Singaporean Malaysian snack food, right? They're almost like, you know, little empanadas, truly, right? Almost every culture has some version of a, whether it's a

canish or a samosa or, you know. A baked puff pastry filled with, in this case, curry beef, right? And I think it so is representative of the hybrid culture that Singapore became, right? Singapore was a crossroads of Indians, Malays, Chinese, British coming together, right? And so the curry puff to me signifies all of that. You've got this Indian curry filling in this almost British like puff pastry. You know, I haven't done all the research into the actual historical, you know, culinary sort of background of it, but it's a hybrid dish that is so popular in Singapore that it's served as a snack, but it's also served at high tea, right?

So when, you know, when you go to a good hotel in Singapore, they'll have a beautiful high tea dish that has the cucumber finger sandwiches and the scones, but also the curry-tops. tiered serving trade that will come to the table. On the sweets. And so, you know, it's ubiquitous there. But I think, you know, food really connects you back to your culture, right? And it's one of the few things that I really always remember my dad making. You know, I think he missed having curry puffs.

So he created his own recipe for them. I look forward to road testing this one. You and I are in touch. So I will let you know. Fantastic. Let me know how it tests out. Let you know how they turn out. I think a lot of people are going to try this one as well.

I have loved talking to you. We could go on and on. Same here. We have to have you back for part two because there are so many other questions I had, but I've taken a lot of your time. So I'm going to let you go. It's been a pleasure and a delight. Just having sharing time of you.

I wish we could do it over curry puffs, but we will do that. Maybe one day we will. You know, I will assume that we will find each. other at some point and get in the kitchen. We absolutely should. Well, I have loved this conversation. Thank you very much. Same here. Much love to you. Kevin, thank you so much for sharing so much of your rich, literally and figuratively family history with us. Now, before we let you go, if hearing Kevin's story inspired you to want to plan a trip to fly far, an experience, just a little bit of luxury, wherever you happen to go, make sure to check out Airbnb's luxury stay options,

I know that's how I like to travel, who doesn't like a little bit of luxury. As always, our inbox is open for you to record yourself and share with us some of your own Mama's recipes, maybe some memories from the kitchen that you grew up in, maybe some thoughts on some of the stories that you've heard on this show. Make sure to send us a voice memo or a video recording at YMK at highergroundproductions.com for a chance for your voice to be featured in a future episode or perhaps one of your videos to be featured on YouTube when we migrate there. And if you want to try making those curry puffs, be sure to check out the recipe at your mom's kitchen.com. You can find all the recipes from all the previous episodes. And Kevin went to such great lengths to make sure that you could follow that recipe.

So make sure that you go to the website and check it out. I have loved this conversation. Thanks for being with us. Please come back next week and the week after that because here at your mom's kitchen, we are always, always, always serving up something delicious. Until then, be bountiful.