FEBRUARY 22, 2016 ISSUE
The Golden Generation
Why China’s super-rich send their children abroad.
BY JIAYANG FAN
A reality show, “Ultra Rich Asian Girls of Vancouver,” chronicles the lives of Weymi Cho (left) and a group of friends.
CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY ANGIE SMITH FOR THE NEW YORKER
On a crisp Sunday morning in November, Weymi Cho picked me up at my hotel, in downtown Vancouver, in her new car, a white Maserati GranTurismo with a red leather interior. She had slept only two hours the night before. A new karaoke machine had been installed in her apartment, a four-million-dollar condo with a view of the city’s harbor, and she and some friends had spent the night singing and drinking Veuve Clicquot. Weymi is twenty years old and slim, with large eyes and waist-length hair that cascaded, on this occasion, over a silk Dior blouse. She has a reserved, almost aristocratic air. It was a little past ten, and we were going shopping.
Holt Renfrew, Vancouver’s equivalent of Barneys, is one of Weymi’s customary weekend haunts, though she is aware of its limitations. “It doesn’t compare to Vegas, where there is obviously a better selection,” she explained as we drove there. Weymi speaks English with a subtle but noticeable accent, and was relieved when I switched to Mandarin. Her speech was punctuated by European brand names, which functioned as a kind of currency. A maid’s monthly wages, she said, were probably the price of a pair of Roger Vivier satin pumps. A night out can cost half a suède Birkin bag. On Weymi’s last birthday, in March, she’d spent more than two Fendi totes—around four thousand dollars—on drinks in less than an hour.
In the store, Weymi spotted a former classmate from a Vancouver fashion institute, who was now working as a salesgirl there. She talked about the attitude of Chinese customers. “They treat this place like a supermarket,” she said. “A three-thousand-dollar outfit is like a carton of milk.” Another salesgirl joined in and lamented that such profligacy negated any sense of exclusivity. Weymi agreed. “I can’t even look at Chanel bags anymore,” she said at one point. “Everyone and their auntie now has a boy bag.”
Weymi moved to Vancouver at the age of fourteen, to attend boarding school. Her family owns a successful semiconductor business in Taiwan, where she grew up, but her parents are from the mainland. She and her sister attended an international school, which prepared them for studies abroad, and she spent summers travelling in America or Australia. “My dad always wanted our English to be strong,” she told me. “The plan was always to send us out West.”
The West is the plan for many of China’s new rich. In the past decade, they have swept into cities like New York, London, and Los Angeles, snapping up real estate and provoking anxieties about inequality and globalized wealth. Rich Chinese have become a fixture in the public imagination, the way rich Russians were in the nineteen-nineties and rich people from the Gulf states were in the decades before that. The Chinese presence in Vancouver is particularly pronounced, thanks to the city’s position on the Pacific Rim, its pleasant climate, and its easy pace of life. China’s newly minted millionaires see the city as a haven in which to place not only their money but, increasingly, their offspring, who come there to get an education, to start businesses, and to socialize.
The children of wealthy Chinese are known as fuerdai, which means “rich second generation.” In a culture where poverty and thrift were long the norm, their extravagances have become notorious. Last year, the son of China’s richest man posted pictures online of his dog wearing two gold-plated Apple Watches, one on each front paw. On Web forums, citizens complain that fuerdai are “flaunting what they haven’t earned” and that “their grotesque displays are a poison to the work ethic of Chinese society.” President Xi Jinping has spoken of the need to “guide the younger generation of private-enterprise owners to think where their money comes from and live a positive life,” and the government recently held an educational retreat for seventy children of billionaires, who were given a crash course in traditional Chinese values and social responsibility.
Yet fuerdai continue to fascinate. Some of the most popular Chinese TV dramas in recent years—such as “Noble Bride: Regretless Love” and “Ice and Fire of Youth”—have plots centering on fuerdai, whose love lives enhance or endanger the family fortune. There is also a fuerdai reality show: “Ultra Rich Asian Girls of Vancouver,” in which Weymi features.
The show, filmed in Mandarin and English, is broadcast online and is watched avidly by Chinese people worldwide. It follows the lives of half a dozen young women in disorienting, whip-fast edits of bling and scornful gazes. The women spend wildly to prove their status, but affect disdain for the ostentation of others. Season 1 ends with a woman being accused of ghastly crimes—attempting to pass off fake Hermès bags and wearing non-designer attire. Season 2 picks up in L.A., where two of the women are scoping out luxury houses.
Contempt for the nouveau riche is hardly limited to China, but the Chinese version is distinctive. Thanks to the legacy of Communism, almost all wealth is new wealth. There are no old aristocracies to emulate, no templates for how to spend. I asked some of the women on “Ultra Rich Asian Girls” about being the objects of both envy and censure. “In Web forums about the show, people are always, like, Why do they have to show off like that?” Weymi said with a shrug. “I don’t think I’m showing off. I’m just living my life.”
After shopping, Weymi and I went to the filming of the show’s second-season finale, in an upscale Thai restaurant that had been cleared for the occasion. We arrived early, and I chatted with the show’s creator, Kevin K. Li. Kevin, who is thirty-seven, was born in Vancouver to a Cantonese-speaking family and has worked for various broadcast networks in the city. He told me that he had envisaged the show as a mashup of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” his favorite program growing up, and the “Real Housewives” franchise. He said, “I figured, if I wanted to know the kind of deluxe lives these kids led, so would people in Canada and the U.S. and Asia.”
Casting the show was easy. Kevin shot a short promotional video in which a friend of a friend displayed a collection of bags and rode around in a Lamborghini. “It just went viral after a local media outlet picked it up,” he told me. People began bombarding him with requests for interviews. “The subject of fuerdai was just ripe for the time. Everyone is curious and everyone has something to say.”
Gradually, other members of the cast arrived at the restaurant—a parade of Helmut Lang, Alexander McQueen, and rose-gold iPhones. There was Diana, an economics and Asian-studies major at the University of British Columbia, who is twenty-three and has lived in Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and Hong Kong. A friend of hers from the university, Chelsea, was the only married woman in the cast. She had recently had her first child but seemed remarkably slender, and wore a pink baby-doll dress so elaborately feathered that, in combination with her towering Gucci heels, it gave her the appearance of a tottering baby ostrich. Ray, a finance student at U.B.C., had brought her boyfriend, who is also a fuerdai. Pam, at twenty-six, was the oldest of the group and the most reflective. As the women waited for the filming to start, they inspected one another’s outfits and accessories in forensic detail, but there was warmth as well as competitiveness in their manner, as if a life of continual consumption had fostered a kind of intimacy.
In this episode, Kevin would be onscreen, leading a roundtable discussion of the women’s experiences during the season. Contention arose about whether an actual round table was desirable. Chelsea was concerned that it covered up too much of the clothes—“We could just be wearing p.j.s underneath”—but Kevin’s eye was on the composition. “I know what look you are going for,” he said, nodding sympathetically. “But we have six pairs of legs, and it’s just going to look messy.”
The episode began with a champagne toast, after which Kevin posed a series of softball questions: How did Diana’s experiment living on a low-income budget for one day go? (Not well.) How was house-hunting in L.A.? (Nice mansions but all in the wrong areas.) Kevin asked the women about the potential difficulties of dating outside their class. There was a slight pause before Diana ventured, “It can be hard. I’ve done it before and it’s just”—she took a second to smooth out her bangs—“just awkward and uncomfortable for everyone.”
It was one of the few discordant moments in the discussion, but off-camera exchanges were more revealing. At one point, Diana announced, to no one in particular, “I am going to fix my face.” She’d heard about a recent Korean innovation in plastic surgery called 3-D molding. It was noninvasive, and involved a variety of braces and other devices designed to give the face the oval shape valued in Asian culture.
Weymi chimed in, saying, “Last time, when I went to Korea with my parents and my sister, I wanted to do it but my parents wouldn’t let me.”
“It’s a high-tech thing,” Diana said nonchalantly. “And very natural. Recovery can take only eight months.”
When I asked why she would endure such a process so young, Diana looked at me with a perplexity that bordered on pity.
“For a more beautiful face, of course,” she said.
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