Crazy Rich Asians: Towards an Ornamental Feminist Account of Wealth and Desire

ABSTRACT Wealth is often seen as an object of desire. That is, it is what desire desires and it comes to represent desire. The accumulation of wealth is commonly considered excessive and coming at the cost of environmental and corporeal needs. Such an account of wealth follows an either/or logic that produces a set of oppositional terms such as nature or culture, desire or need, wealth or necessity, luxury or survival. This article explores questions of wealth and desire via the 2018 film Crazy Rich Asians. It uses the lens of ornament to zoom in on how the film depicts the relationship between the natural and the artificial, winning and losing, and subject and object. It proposes a feminist ornamental approach to wealth and desire that reworks the either/or logic and the oppositional terms that undergird it. It argues that this approach allows for an analysis of the relation between race, gender, nature, style, wealth and desire beyond one of commodification or recognition, ownership or dispossession.


Introduction
Shortly upon arriving at my parents' home in China, my mum takes out a jewellery box from a drawer in a wardrobe.
'Put this around your neck', my mother hands me a necklacea wire cord necklace with a jade stone circle pendant.
'It is a good piece of jade stone', my father says, 'it will bring you good fortune'.'Put the stone under your shirt.It is more important that it is close to your skin than showing it', my mother instructs me.
The jade stone is one of the most important adornments in China that is seen to have the power to draw good fortune and wealth to the person who wears it.However, it is said that for its magic power to realise, the jade should be kept close to the skin and out of sight.The skin-stone interface is seen as a conduit of sorts where the embodied essence of the wearer animates the stone, that draws in an animating force, which in turn makes the wearer a wealth-desiring and wealth-attracting subject. 1 Where are desire and wealth located?In beginning with this anecdote, I wish to ask about the location of and the relation between the subject and the object of desire and wealth.
Wealth is often seen as an object of desire.That is, it is what desire desires and it comes to represent desire.The accumulation of wealth is commonly considered excessive and coming at the cost of environmental and corporeal needs.Such an account of wealth follows an either/or logic that produces a set of oppositional terms such as nature or culture, desire or need, wealth or necessity, luxury or survival.For example, this logic informs what Franklin Obeng-Oboom observes as a 'separatist' -'we-humans-againstthe-environment-and-animals ' (2022, 11) approach to the process of commodification, exploitation, and appropriation of nature.As Obeng-Oboomnotes that, despite its aim to challenge, such an approach reproduces understandings of nature and its relation to human practices in Eurocentric terms that tend, for example, to 'conflate land and capital' (Obeng-Odoom 2022, 9-10).
The either/or logic also informs the elision of social and cultural practices in analysis of the co-production of nature and economy.Even in accounts where social and cultural questions are mentioned, the primary concern is how they function to sustain and naturalise capitalist mode of production, appropriation, and accumulation (see, for example, Moore 2016).In a similar vein, desire is routinely relegated to the sphere of the psychological, the subjective, the cultural, understood of as outside and separate from the natural and the objective.As S. Charusheela succinctly points out, Aspects of desires … such as desires for social justice or environmental sustainability, can enter [the economic] as the need to address externalities, as infrastructural issues of law and health care and sewage due to 'market failure' … Emotions such as grief, regret, or anger have little to no space in the analysis … Deep and powerful wells of 'base' desires such as Fanonian envy and fantasies of vengeance, of resentment at insult or murderous fury from collective memories of loss, do not have a place in the story.(2015, xviii) Importantly, feminist and queer theorists challenge the evacuation of desire from the sphere of economy by attending to how desire is produced in intersectional heteronormative sexual structuring that is materialised in specific institutional and socio-economic settings (see, for example, Dhawan et al. 2015).The multiplicity of desire traverses and makes untenable the strict boundary installed between desire and need, imagined and real, non-material and material, which leads to a politics of either/or, such as the debate between recognition and redistribution.While these strands of work provide important insights into the multiple relations between desire and economy, it seems to me that their theorisations remain tethered to, even as they problematise, the either/or logic.For example, in the place of either desire or need, either wealth or scarcity, either nature or culture, much feminist and queer theorisations have opted for their intersection which leaves unaddressed what constitutes their separation in the first place.
This article takes inspiration from and contributes to these strands of work by not simply asking when desire enters the sphere of economy, or how economy and desire become entangled.Rather, it engages with the either/or logic that is realised and confounded by the how, the what and the where of the relation between wealth and desire.It is curious that despite their attention to the multiplicity of desire, the question of wealth and its relation to desire is often unproblematically reduced to one of individual greed and private riches.As I will show, far from being self-evident, the location of wealth was intensely debated in for example the field of political economy, which has significant implications for how value and the relation between human and nature are understood.
This article develops a feminist ornamental approach to wealth and desire that more radically reworks the either/or logic.It does so not by countering separation with relation, but by recasting the question of wealth and desire through the lens of ornament, understood of as the interplay between visible and invisible and between reflection, extension, and action.In so doing, it confuses even as it identifies the location of wealth and desire, and the relation between their subject and object.It proceeds as follows.First, I make explicit various identifications of the location of wealth and desire.The point here is not to provide an extensive analysis of the debates and theorisations, but to zoom in on how the relation between nature and culture, and its underpinning either/or logic is configured in these narratives.Second, I introduce the feminist ornamental approach that takes inspiration from Anne Anlin Cheng's theorisation of ornamentalism as well as David Graeber's conception of wealth and desire.Third, I analyse the movie Crazy Rich Asians through the lens of the ornamental.I end this article by suggesting that in so far that the ornament refuses and confuses the divide between subject and object, 'immaterial realms of imaginative cultural production' and 'material culture and history' (Cheng 2018, xiii), it provides important perspectives for understanding the political of feminist politics of racialised and gendered differences and their implications for questions of wealth and desire.

Wealth and Desire
The location of wealth and its relation to desire are key to the debates about capital and nature.For example, in the essay titled 'The paradox of wealth: Capitalism and ecological destruction', John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark note the seldomly discussed debate about 'the distinction between wealth and value (use value and exchange value)' (2009,1).As Foster and Clark write, 'From the beginning, wealth, as opposed to mere riches, was associated in classical political economy with what John Locke called 'intrinsic value', and what later political economists were to call 'use value' ' (2009, 2).On this account, wealth is located in the natural and the public, as opposed to value, understood of as exchange value, that is located in the private.This wealth/value distinction is key to the thesis of Lauderdale Paradox, which posits that: increases in scarcity in such formerly abundant but necessary elements of life as air, water, and food would, if exchange values were then attached to them, enhance individual private riches, and indeed the riches of the country … but only at the expense of common wealth.(Foster and Clark 2009, 1-2) Importantly, defined as the usefulness of nature, the concept of wealth provides the framework and vocabulary for making visible, and in so doing challenging, the destructive mode of accumulation and expansion under capitalism.This led political economists such as John Stuart Mill to reject the concept of wealth as use value for economic analysis and to redefine wealth as 'all useful and agreeable things, which possess exchangeable value' (Mill quoted in Foster and Clark 2009, 2).According to this view, given that nature is free, it does not need to be exchanged, and therefore cannot constitute wealth.
Marx puts forth one of the most important critiques of wealth.In bringing together the problem of the paradox of wealth and the metabolic riftthe destruction of the sustainable and metabolic relation between human beings and the soil, Marx makes visible the simultaneous exploitation of labour and nature.For Marx, wealth 'appears as an "immense collection of commodities"' (1976, 125; emphasis added).The word 'appears' is significant as it decouples wealth and commodity by underscoring their non-identity.That is, wealth, understood of as the material aspect of the product of labour exceeds although often being rendered as its economic form, that is, commodity.As Kohei Saito (2023) notes, for Marx, wealth/Reichtum connotes a much broader understanding of richness than monetary wealth.Marx's following contemplation is instructive here: In fact, however, when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc. created through universal exchange?The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity's own nature?The absolute working out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick?(1973,488) Marx's theorisation of wealth encompasses a wide range of desire that effectively calls into question the limitation imposed by capitalist system of valuation.However, it also ultimately hinges upon a sense of limit, understood of as the limit of natural resources that conditions and constraints 'the desire to live' (Butler 2019, 15; emphasis in the original).The understanding of desire as a persistent (human) life interest, as Jane Elliot (2018) notes, speaks of a binary either/or logic of life that produces asymmetrical relations to thriving.In leaving unquestioned what constitutes limit and scarcity, the binary life logic suggests that 'there is only one approach to the problem of material and organic finitude' (Elliot 2018, 184).It is often used to justify mechanisms of othering that render certain bodies disposable. 2 In view of this, I suggest that a more radical feminist approach to wealth and desire needs to rerouteneither simply accepting nor refusingthe either/ or logic, and the nature/culture, desire/limit narratives that it informs.As I show next, the ornamentthe feminised, racialised and ornamented objects, bodies and gesturesthat is often portrayed as simultaneously 'a figure of civilizational value and a disposable object of decadence' (Cheng 2018, xii) offers up new ways of approaching questions of wealth and desire.

The Ornament and the In/Visible
In the previous section, I noted that in displacing the location of wealth from intrinsic value to exchange value, nineteenth-century political economists such as John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith rendered irrelevant the materiality of nature for the scholarly field of political economy.What has perhaps been less commented upon is the way in which the figure of ornament was used in to advance a theory of wealth as a representation and metaphor for desire, understood of as abstract, speculative, and social.For example, both Mill and Smith argue that desire for 'the appearance of large expenditure' (Mill quoted in Herbert 1991, 76; emphasis added) testifies to the social, rather than material, nature of wealth.That is, what is desired is not so much the intrinsic value in things, but how they come to represent wealth, whose value is fictitious and whose form is contingent and hence limitless.For Smith, the ornament exemplifies this sense of desire.As he writes, 'The desire for food is limited … but the desire of the conveniences and ornaments of building, dress, equipage, and household furniture, seems to have no limit or certain boundary' (Smith quoted in Herbert 1991, 104).
But what animates this desire 'toward whatever symbolic objects the culture may mark as desirable' (Herber 1991, 103)?How does the representation of wealth, located in the realm of the social, the cultural, and the psychological translate into 'personal consequence' (Mill quoted in Herbert 1991, 76) that can be material and physical?What is the magic power of these desired objects such as ornament that enable 'so strong association between personal consequence and the sign of wealth' (Herbert 1991, 76)?And how do the unnecessary and fictitious objects of desire that are used to exhibit for example individual economic privilege and class positions, ground and realise the necessity and universality of unsatiable desire, which, according to Smith, is human nature?
The ornament is an ambiguous category that often signifies material wealth as well as the insignificant and shallow, whose glimmering appearance hides or distorts true value and beauty.From a different perspective, and recall the anecdote of wearing the jade stone, the ornament is also considered a prosthetic possibility that animates the wearer.It reflects and extends 'one's self or person into some thing outside one' body' (Graeber 2001, 272) and acts on it.The dynamic implication of action, reflection and extension confuses and enacts the location of power, understood as the power to act and to be acted upon.Moreover, as words such as reflection, and mirroring indicate, these movement takes shape through the visual registry of visible and invisible.As Graeber writes, The very perception of one's own image implies the existence of an unseen agent who is seeing it … Looking at a thing … is always looking at a mere fraction of a thing, the viewer is always at least vaguely aware that there is something further underneath.(2001,106) It follows then, the ornament is often seen as embodying and making visible 'a hidden power' (Graeber 2001, 106), which is 'identified with their owners' ability to act upon the world' (111).It is not surprising then that ornamentation practices originate from the desire to access and replicate power beyond the human.
For example, commenting on the usage of beads and silver chains in the Malagasy sorona ritual, Graeber writes, Wearing them operated in the same way as any display of wealth: it is a persuasive acteven if, in this case, the object of persuasion was an abstract and invisible power … Once proven effective … these same object … should become identified with the powers that had answered the appeal, and so be hidden away.They became ody, with the power to draw wealth to the bearer on a regular basis.(2001,113) Why is hiding necessary?If the ornament is simply visible, it betrays the objectness of the holder, whose desire is made possible and animated by the ornament.If the ornament is merely invisible, it cannot extend the holder's capacity to act on the world.In both cases, the holder loses their desiring and wealth-generating capacity.It follows then that the practice of making in/visible is what conditions desire and wealth.It is important to underscore that this process is shaped by the material specificity of ornament, and the socio-economic context in which it is located.To elaborate on this point, I turn to Cheng's theorisation of ornamentalism, which approaches racialised and gendered bodies through 'synthetic inventions and ornamentations' (Cheng 2018, 17-18).On this account, ornament is understood in terms of 'ornamental gestures' that 'speak through the minute, the sartorial, the prosthetic, and the decorative' (Cheng 2018, 18).Cheng's analysis thus provides insights into the intimate association between ornament bodies and things, such as between Chinese porcelain that Asiatic femininity.
According to Cheng, the oriental/ornamental woman emerged as an inhuman human figure that is 'decorative, disposable toy for leisure ' (2018, 135) in the nineteenth century.It morphs into and expresses other ornamental objects such as the Chinese porcelain.The Chinese porcelain played an important role in the early global imperial trade.Due to its durable and elastic quality that lends it glossiness, Chinese porcelain was known as the white gold and seen to embody 'the magic of material transformation' (Cheng 2018, 94) in the eighteenth century.As Cheng explains, 'The seemingly trite association of Asiatic female skin with porcelain … thus in fact carries this profound and layered history of ornamentalist transformation, affecting the merging of flesh and matter, persons and things' (2018,94).Importantly, Cheng's theorisation of ornament makes visible how the material specificity of ornament, in this case, the synthetic quality of the Chinese porcelain, shapes the relation between desire and wealth, subject and object in racialised and gendered ways.
The question of material and contextual specificity is crucial, as how and what is seen as desirable is never fixed but is shaped, in the case of Chinese porcelain, according to the specific racial aesthetic of Asiatic femininity in the Western racial imagination.For example, Chinese porcelain lost its radiance as the white gold in the American imagination as the relation between Euro-America and China began to deteriorate in the eighteenth century.As Cheng writes, the Chinese porcelain instead connoted 'tacky crockery' (2018,94) and was compared to Chinese women's gymnastics team at the 1996 summer Olympics whose performances were cracked.Importantly, instead of reducing ornament to one of flattened description of dynamic relationality, Cheng makes visible the specific historical and material configuration of the imbrication between ornament bodies and things.
Moreover, and importantly, Cheng's analysis of material effects such as the shine complicates the spatial relation of action, reflection and extension, and the relation between subject and object of desire.For example, Cheng observes the spatial arrangements materialised by the headdress and bodily movements of the American-born Chinese performer Anna May Wong in Piccadilly.As Cheng notes, following and enhancing her bodily movement, the spiky shape and shimmering effect of the headdress turns Wong's into a 'circular antenna' that 'commands all things around her, centrifugally pulls objects, lights, and glances to her magnetic center' (2018, 81).Wong's ornamented performance extends and reflects the viewers so much so that it finally contains and arrests them.It rearranges the material effects of white desire by investing in it and pushing it to the extreme.It follows then that Wong's performance cannot be reduced to an account of commodity fetishism, where shine as a desired material effect protects the spectator from the knowledge of the threatening lack. 3The blinding and arresting effect of Wong's ornamented body articulates an alternative mode of life of the object that is indifferent to life defined by the desire of the subject.
Cheng calls this mode of life ornamental life that transforms the binary between life and death, animation and de-animation, by insisting on 'dynamic dying' (2018,104).This account of ornamental life importantly reworks the either/or logic which is significant for the study at hand.First, it offers up a new way to consider the relation between the real and the artificial, materiality and abstraction that is central to conceptions of wealth and desire.Second, it provides an alternative lens for analysing how the relation between wealth and desire is gendered and racialised beyond the either/or framing of feminist redistribution and recognition debate.Taking cues from Cheng's and Graeber's respective conceptions of ornament, I develop a feminist ornamental approach to wealth and desire.This approach does not simply include in the sphere of economy the narrative of desire as either lack or excess, where racialised and gendered bodies and things are either reduced to reified desired objects or subvert their commodification by claiming their status as desiring subjects.Instead, it allows for a more radical and magical transformation of the economic calculus, where the ornamented bodies and objects invest in and pushing to the extreme 'a desire for objectness in the dream of the human' (2018,18).As I will show next by closely analysing the film Crazy Rich Asians, wealth does not reside either in the material or cultural valuation of the desired object.It is its sociality, that is the simultaneous making visible and invisible the magic of desireits creative and wealth-generating capacityin, as and through dis/location and de/animation of the ornamented subjects and objects.

Crazy Rich Asians
The 2018 blockbuster Crazy Rich Asians was the first rom-com centred on Asian and Asian American Characters in the U.S. The story focuses on the romance between Chinese American Economics professor Rachel Chu (played by Constance Wu) and Singaporean Nick Young (Henry Golding), the heir to the wealthiest biggest real estate developers in Singapore.Many have noted the ways in which the film challenges racialised and gendered representations of Asian and Asian Americans.It does so by for example making hyper-visible the wealth and power of the Young family and by portraying Rachel's intelligence and integrity in various decision making moments.As Nick's mother Eleanor Young (played by Michelle Yeoh) says, upon hearing that Rachel turned down Nick's first marriage proposal, 'So you chose for him'.According to Le and Kang, the film exposes and undoes the 'Orientalist stereotypes of Asian American women as exotic, submissive, and hypersexualized ' (2019, 525).However, the resistance to Orientalist tropes also reproduces violence by for example unproblematically evoking 'colonial imageries of Singapore and its indigenous inhabitants as uncivilised and backwards, devaluing them in comparison to the wealthy, sophisticated and British-educated Young family' (Sugino 2019, 4).
In these analyses, the question of wealth is approached in terms of how private riches are represented and who is featured or made invisible.For example, most characters portrayed in the film are ethnic Chinese who are ultrarich, although Malay and Indian make up a sizable percentage of Singapore's population.As Cuong N. Le and Miliann Kang observe, The most prominent appearance of non-Chinese characters are the dark-skinned guards at the Young family palace.In addition to portraying them as menacing, the movie misrepresents them as Sikhs wearing turbans, instead of showing the Gurkha contingent from Nepal who make up an elite security force in Singapore.(2019,527) My following reading of the film builds upon these important observations but approaches the question of the visibility and invisibility of wealth from a different perspective.That is, instead of analysing what is elided in the representation of wealth, understood as private riches, I tease out how the film mobilises ornament to raise questions about the location of and the relation between wealth and desire.As I see it, Crazy Rich Asians is not simply a 'postfeminist Cinderella' (Kung 2021) fairy-tale-like story about the self-realisation of Rachel, a comparatively lower class, second-generation Chinese American immigrant woman raised by a single mother.It challenges racialised and gendered configuration of wealth and desire, even as it reproduces new hierarchisations.My analysis is organised according to two themesnatural and artificial, winning and losing and subject and object.

Natural and Artificial
There has been much discussion about the film's utilisation of extravagant jewelleries and designer clothing to portray characters' wealth, personalities and desire.However, little has been said about how the film itself adopts an ornamental lens that sheds light on the fiction of the visible that provokes questions about whether and how wealth and desire can be seen, and where they can be identified and located.To illustrate this point, I closely read two instances where the film mobilises ornamental gestures to differentiate the wealth of Nick's family from others.In the first instance, Rachel's former classmate Peik Lin Goh (played by Awkwafina) drives Rachel to Nick's grandmother's mansion.Peik Lin is thrilled after learning that Rachel is dating Nick, the heir of the wealthiest family in Singapore, as Peik Lin says to Rachel 'they are the landlords of the most expensive city in the world'.The wealth of the family can easily be conveyed by the spectacular view of the mansion and its 200 million dollar worth of estate.However, the film does not stop at this obviousness, but to make wealth in/visible, in so doing asking where true wealth might be located and what it might consist of.
The hiddenness of the mansion is testified by and contrasted against the hyper-visibility of Peik Lin's ornamental gestures.She sports blond hair, wearing a Stella McCartney silk pyjama set with dog prints, and drives a flashy pink Audi R8 that would cost 175,000 dollars.According to the film's hair stylist, Peik Lin is made to go blond to reflect not only her family's love for gold and for showing off their wealth, but also to provide contrast as everyone else in the film has black hair. 4Excited about seeing the Young's family mansion, she speeds by other cars on the road, complaining that they are too slow.And when instructed by the GPS to make a U-turn as the car enters a dark private road surrounded by trees, she quickly spirals into a state of panic, 'The GPS says there's like, nothing here.Like, literally nothing.'Peik Lin questions Rachel whether she has the right address, 'You copied and pasted it?Did you just copy and paste "jungle" and just kind of threw it in there.'Peik Lin's emotions become the affective testimony to the exceptionality of Young's family mansion.It is so other-worldly that its existence becomes questionable, which paradoxically also makes it the marker of true wealth.Peik Lin's excitement and panic also contrasts the calm manner of Rachel, who despite just learned how wealthy Nick's family is and is nervous about meeting them for the first time, appears composed.It could be argued that Peik Lin embodies and performs an ornament of the film.Her ornamental gestures ventriloquise the film's desire for redeeming Asian femininity by becoming the animated body that differentiates from, contours and extends Rachel's body and psyche (Figure 1).Peik Lin's and her family's performance constitutes the most comedic element of the film, characterised by cartoonish bodily movements that are mirrored and supplemented by their choice of ornaments.The colours and styles for Peik Lin's family are so loud and excessive that look and feel plastic.As Mary E. Vogt, the films' costume designer, explains, their clothing and style make them 'kind of like animé characters'.If it had rhinestones on it, they should be really big.We had lots of gold, lots of Versace, lots of Dior.If it was Dior, it said 'Dior' on it.Their family is like, 'What is the point of paying all this money if it doesn't say Dior?' 5 In a similar fashion as their dressing styles, Peik Lin's family utilises many ornaments with golden and shining surfaces to decorate their mansion.As Peik Lin's mother Neenah (played by Koh Chieng Mun) says to Rachel while welcoming her, 'We were inspired by the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles.' 'And Donald Trump's bathroom', Peik Lin adds.The shine, as I mentioned previously, can reflect the spectator so violently and indifferently that is blinding.It arrests and contains the spectator, who becomes an object and whose desire is suspended by its fascination with light.In the case here, Peik Lin's family are the mesmerised subject/object.They blindly follow the shine, and desire what the wealthy desires.Their ornaments have no depth or meaning, but surfaces that reflect light back onto each other, creating an empty hole of shine that consume them.
In contrast, the ornaments of Young's family realise their desire as a creative and wealth-generating capacity, paradoxically because their ornamentality is much less discernible.The Youngs wear clothes that have impeccable fit and humble colours that 'you might see in an old Chinese painting'. 6The fabric is lightweight but durable, the design delicate and daintynot unlike the Chinese porcelain.Hugging the body effortlessly, the clothes function as sartorial skin-and-body that is synthetic but no less real.They disappear as ornamental objectsthe add-ons, the excessive, the useless distractions from what is real and truly valuable, the things that people acquire to prove their wealth understood of the ability to afford expensive brands; only to reappear to cite, to animate, to reflect, to extend and to realise an embodied subject adorned with the power to create and draw wealth.The Young's family mansion utilises dark green elements that echoes the acres of rolling hills and gardens in which the mansion is located.One of the only ornaments that is made hyper-visible and offered explanation is a stuffed tiger that is placed facing the entrance. 7Nick explains to Rachel that it is shot by his great-grandfather when it ran into the house.'That is Mr. Marimau', as Nick explains to Rachel.'Astrid and I used to hide cigarettes under his paws.'The light tone of his description starkly contrasted the tiger's ferocious expression.
The tiger further testifies to the remoteness and natural environment of the mansion.Interestingly, its realness and naturalness simultaneously make it appear fictitious (if it can be accessed and seen at all).The stuffed tiger offers up two different senses of wealth than the market value of the estate.First, it suggests not only that Nick's family wealth has a long history, but it is true wealth because it is capable of sustaining its wealth-generating capacity.As Eleanor says what is exceptional about the wealth of Yang's family is its capacity to differentiate between the need to be rich in order to fulfil individual happiness, which is 'an illusion', and the desire and understanding 'to build things that last'.Second, it suggests that wealth conditions and is driven by desire, which concerns not simply the ability to buy objects of desire, but the power to access and be animated by a more-than-human force that conquers and manages the animality and wilderness within and without the human body.
It is perhaps not surprising then that gardens are featured prominently in the film to depict the wealth of Nick's and his close friends' families.For example, Nick's best friends' wedding venue incorporates elements such as meadow hill and water.According to the production designer, the director wanted to create an 'indoor Garden of Eden environment', 8 which mirrors Singapore's national slogan of making Singapore a garden.It is important to note that the figure of garden, and relatedly the notion of the exceptional status of the human condition defined by its desire to be animated by the divine and inhuman forces, and to de-animate the wilderness within and without, reproduce colonial and racialised tropes and imaginaries.Peik Lin's description testifies to the coloniality of and the fascination with 'Singaporean royalty' (Cheng 2018).As she tells Rachel, the Young family 'had money when they left China in the 1800s … They came to Singapore when there was nothing but jungle and pig farmers.There was a snake there, eating an apple … And they built all of this' (Figure 2).
The film depicts various forms of wealth to contest the racialised and gendered stereotypes about Asians.But it also reproduces, rather than challenges the ascendency of whiteness, spoken through and as the hierarchy between the object -Peik Lin and her family who are arrested by the shining ornamentand the subject of wealth and desire -Nick's family who understands that true wealth is about making in/visible and sustaining the power of desire.It follows then that the relation between the new and old wealth still follows the logic of either/orwinning or losing, subject or object.As I show in the next section, the film challenges even as it adopts economic rationales such as choice and its consequences, thus allowing different approaches to wealth and desire.

Winning and Losing and Subject and Object
The film begins with the scene in which Rachel is teaching game story to her class by demonstrating a poker game with her teaching assistant Curtis.With a hand of bad cards, Rachel wins by bluffing.She says to the class, 'Our brains so hate the idea of losing something that's valuable to us.And we abandon our rational thoughts, and we make some really poor decisions.So, Curtis wasn't playing to win.He was playing not to lose'.However, this opposition between desire and rationality, winning and losing, real and fictitious wealth gets questioned throughout the film, not least through Rachel's standoffs with Nick's mother Eleanor.The tension is epitomised in the final scene where Rachel invites Eleanor to meet at a Mah-jong parlour frequented mostly by middle-aged people from working-class background.
Rachel picks a winning tilethe eight of bamboo that completes her hand.She knows that this is the winning tile for Eleanor too.Rachel tells Eleanor that she has turned down Nick's marriage proposal.At this time, she discards the tile, anticipating that Eleanor would pick it up and win.Eleanor responds as she picks up the tile, 'only fools fold a winning hand', without knowing that Rachel just let her have the tile that both of them need in order to win.'There's no winning', Rachel says, 'You made sure of that.Because if Nick chose me, he would lose his family.And if he chose his family, he might spend the rest of his life resenting you.' Rachel's choice contradicts her advice to her students in the opening scene.Instead of abandoning desire for rational thinking, Rachel realises that the opposition between desire and rationality, and between winning and losing, that undergird the logic of the game no longer holds.Rachel, Eleanor and Nick are all going to lose if what is truly desired is Nick's happiness which is social, intersubjective, and shaped by his relationship with others.
If in the first scene Rachel considers desire for what feels valuablethe casino tokens that one already has, much like the golden and shinning objects that fascinate, suspend, and arrest the desiring subjectas a distraction from what is truly valuabletaking a calculated risk that allows for the generation of more wealth, in this scene her desire constitutes the logical formula of her calculation.As I see it, Rachel's choice does not reproduce a self-sacrificing nor self-sufficient desiring subject, which posits desire as either lack or excess.Instead, the desired object -Nick's happiness and/as the Mah-jong tile eight of bamboois a dynamic sociality of agreements, negotiations and obligations that include everything.As Graeber explains, Such [desired] objects imply within their own structure all those principles of motion that shape the field in which they take on meaningin much the same way as, say, a household contains all the elementary forms of relation at play within a larger kinship system, even if at times in strangely inverted forms.(2001,259) This Mah-jong scene performs the extraordinary and dizzying play of mirrors that sartorially veils and unveils the constitution of the desiring subject by and as the ornamental object.For example, as Rachel says to Eleanor, I am not leaving because I am scared, or because I think I am not enough.Because maybe for the first time in my life, I know I am.I just love Nick so much I don't want him to lose him mum again.So I just wanted you know that one day, when he marries another lucky girl who is enough for you … that it was because of mea poor, raised by a single mother, low class, immigrant nobody.
At this time, Rachel reveals her hand, showing that absent presence of the eight of bambooan object that is desired by both Eleanor and her.In so doing, Rachel shows to Eleanor that she discarded the tile on purpose to let Eleanor win.With the same move, Rachel also embraces and refuses Eleanor's perception of her as simply an object of Nick's desire.
According to Eleanor, Rachel is what Nick desires but not what he needs.Eleanor does not trust Rachel.As she says, 'You are not our own kind.… You are a foreigner.American.And all Americans think about is their own happiness … It is an illusion.'In revealing that she is leaving Nick, Rachel responds to Eleanor's distrust by making visible that not only is she not valueless, but also, despite her 'poor, raised by a single mother, low class, immigrant nobody' background, she lacks nothing.In this encounter, Rachel occupies, refuses and in so doing transforms the ornamental object thingness.She turns the multiple and fractured lacks into the plenitude of wealth and desire, understood as the 'creative energies' (Graeber 2001, 259) defined not by what one owns, but the invisible sociality and dynamics of negotiation and agreement for which calculations of winning and losing are no longer relevant.'I know I am enough', as Rachel asserts calmly.'It is because of me', Rachel offering herself as the absent present ornamental object of desire.To paraphrase Cheng, 'She is "It" because she knows how to be "it" ' (2018, 84), that contains, reflects, extends, and acts the magic of desire and wealth that is the ultimate reality of sociality.
At first glance, Rachel's choice might seem to be the opposite of that of Astrid Young Teo (who is Nick's cousin played by Gemma Chan).Astrid is portrayed as a Goddess and has the best taste in clothing and accessories in Nick's family.In the scene where Astrid first appears, she catches everyone's attention as she walks into a luxury jewellery store.She casually buys a pair of Burmese pearl drop earrings that are said to be very special as they were 'worn by Queen Supayalat at her self-anointed coronation in 1878'.However, as the viewers soon find out, Astrid hides all her new expensive purchases, so as not to make her husband Michael Teo (played by Pierre Png), a former military specialist with a middle-class background, feel inferior.It might not come as a surprise that one of the first things that Astrid does after deciding to separate from her husband is to wear that pair of earrings.This scene is typically considered to signal that Astrid reclaims her agency and freedom.But as I see it, it provides interesting insights into the relation between the subject and the object of desire and wealth when seen through the lens of ornament, and when compared with Rachel's decision to leave Nick.
Astrid is the 'it girl' (Cheng 2018, 73) of Singapore, but hides her spark to reconcile the class difference in her marriage.According to this narrative provided by the film, the act of putting on that special pair of earrings could be read as a form of agency, where the ornament reflects and extends her capacity to act.From a different perspective, this scene of self-possession and self-recognition could also be read as a form of self-dispossession.Astrid claims her liberty and embraces her 'it girl' self, paradoxically through allowing herself to become the object animated by the invisible and ghostly power of royal desire and wealth, embodied by Queen Supayalat, the last queen of Burma who reigned in Mandalay between 1878 and 1885.As Astrid looks at her reflection in the mirror as she puts on the pair of pearl earrings, she performs the self-anointment of Supayalat.It follows then that both Astrid and Rachel become the it/It girl.Astrid claims her subject position by objectifying herself to the animating force of desire and wealth that the earrings make in/visible.Rachel embraces, insists on, even as she refuses, being the desired object which paradoxically articulates her subjecthood as a form of wealth.

Conclusion
Where do wealth and desire locate?As the various ornamental objects, bodies and gestureswearing the jade stone, Chinese porcelain, Asiatic female bodies, the tiger, golden decors, comedic affects, the mah-jong game, the pearl earrings -I have analysed in the article show, the relation between wealth and desire confounds the either/or logic that typically defines the parameter of locationits identity and difference.The rerouting of the question of wealth and desire through the process of making in/visible and the dynamic interplay of extension, reflection and action critique the politics of subjecthood and subversive agency that often inform analysis of race and gender.
As I have shown, the critique of wealth that shifts its location to use value from exchange value, and the incorporation of desire into the realm of economy, still draw on and reproduce the either/or logic, which is materialised along deeply gendered and racialised lines.The feminist ornamental approach to wealth and desire that I developed in this article reworks the either/or logic and the oppositional termsnature or culture, life or death, organic or inorganic, subject or object, win or loseit undergirds.It allows for an analysis of the relation between race, gender, nature, style, wealth and desire beyond one of commodification or recognition, ownership or dispossession.It recognises the contingency of the dynamic interplay of making in/visible, all the while attending to the historical and material specificities, hierarchies of social positioning, and embodied and affective practices that such dynamic is embedded in and shaped by.I suggest that feminist ornamental approach to wealth and desire offers up fresh insights into the imaginaries of race and gender that inform debates about value and equality.As Lisa Adkins argues, 'not only that the politics of redistribution need to be rethought in light of transformations of resources, but that these transformations necessarily open out novel objects that require feminist political attention and action ' (2015, 46).The ornament is one such object.