![]() Rachel’s aptitude for mahjong is a silent riposte to Eleanor. Here’s Chu and Lim’s anatomy of the scene. “She’s walking away with an understanding of how unique her dual culture is.” “When Rachel walks away from the table, she is now fully who she’s supposed to be, and she doesn’t need Eleanor’s approval, she doesn’t need that ring. Unbeknownst to Rachel until later, this sacrifice is enough to change Eleanor’s mind about her – but in the moment, it doesn’t matter. And when Nick eventually marries someone Eleanor deems worthy, she says with quiet intensity, “it will be because of me. A poor, raised-by-a-single-mother, low class, immigrant nobody.” With that devastating kicker, she walks away from the table, revealing that she had a winning hand all along and chose not to play it. Rachel is not bluffing she’s truly prepared to walk away from this relationship, though the pain it causes her is clear. She’s making a sacrifice, and in that way showing that Eleanor’s assumptions about her couldn’t be further from the truth” The card sort of represents Nick – he’s proposed to her, and she could take him and win, but she’s not going to do that. “The game becomes an analogy for their struggle and their conflict over Nick. “Rachel holds a card that both she and Eleanor need to win, and she discards it,” Lim explains. Though Chu and co-screenwriter Adele Lim know that Western viewers may not understand the specifics of what goes on in the game, the larger meaning is clear. But don’t worry, I turned him down.” Literally and figuratively, she holds the winning card – and chooses not to play it for Nick’s sake, thus skewering Eleanor’s assumption that all Americans think about is their own happiness. He said he’d walk away from his family and you for good. The beats of the game mirror the real-life conflict: as Rachel picks up the tile that both she and Eleanor need in order to win, she reveals: “Nick proposed to me yesterday. It’s also revealed during the course of the scene that Rachel has turned down Nick’s proposal, despite loving him desperately, because she doesn’t want to cause a rift between him and his family. “The mahjong scene is the moment when the dragon finally comes out.”ĭuring the game, Rachel has a winning hand but deliberately does not play it, instead sacrificing a crucial tile to allow Eleanor to win instead. “The film is really Rachel’s journey of going to Asia and finding the dragon within, and becoming stronger and more self-assured in her own identity,” Chu continues. Instead, it’s about Rachel reconciling the two sides of her own cultural identity as an Asian-American woman: an identity which has been harshly judged by Eleanor throughout the film. “The movie should be able to end after the mahjong scene, because it’s not about getting the guy,” Chu says. ![]() It’s a mesmerizing set piece that does not appear in Kevin Kwan’s book, but which director Jon M Chu calls the most important in the movie. But the true ending of Rachel’s story comes a couple of scenes earlier, as she confronts Nick’s fearsome mother Eleanor (an impeccably restrained Michelle Yeoh) over a game of mahjong. Having turned down her boyfriend’s proposal to avoid causing a rift in his tight-knit Singaporean family, Rachel (Constance Wu) is leaving on a jet plane, only for Nick (Henry Golding) to chase her all the way through the airport and get down on one knee. ![]() Photo: Warner Bros.Ĭrazy Rich Asians wraps up on a textbook rom-com happy ending that’s no less ravishing for being familiar.
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