According to the fourteenth-century Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta, “Nowhere in the world are there to be found people richer than the Chinese.” The quotation appears as the epigraph to Kevin Kwan's 2013 bestseller Crazy Rich Asians, where it marks the central irony of Kwan's narrative project (Kwan 13). Though the novel aims at offering Anglo-American audiences a window on the habits and culture of the contemporary Chinese diaspora, an essential part of the experience Kwan seeks to capture is his subjects' pervasive awareness of the orientalist gaze and its effects. The point of the epigraph, then, is that the Battuta passage emblematizes “Western” assumptions about Asian plenitude far more than it offers its reader reliable or substantive information about the cultures its author believes himself to be describing. For this reason the Battuta passage could serve with equal ease as an epigraph for Eugenia Zuroski's A Taste...

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