Facing the World in Contemporary Singapore Fiction

The Literature Major hosted Dr Angelia Poon for a talk where she shared her thoughts on the challenges of managing Chinese dynastic inheritance in a globalized world, as explored in Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians and Kirstin Chen’s Soy Sauce for Beginners, exploring the intersection of cosmopolitanism and global capitalism in Singapore through the lens of Chinese family wealth. She portrayed through the novels, the challenges of managing Chinese dynastic inheritance in a globalized world where privilege and neoliberal rationality do not always coincide, and to establish cosmopolitanism as normative but strive to reconcile this with older cultural narratives of individualist success and familial belonging.