So... here's the thing about CRA- the guy that wrote it only lived in Singapore till he was like 12 or something before his rich family moved to the States. That said, he wrote what he knew, which was about the kind of strange pathologies only the super-rich acquire, and along with that the culture shock of being an immigrant and the struggles on squaring that identity with your original identity back home (altho, obviously this plays less of a role in the book as Joel points out, since the book is more obviously centered around a class based Cinderella story).

What that means is that the picture he paints of Singapore is really really skewed- for one, it's 30 years out of date, and (as every Singaporean will tell you) Singapore is a lot more diverse than as portrayed in the film. In his defense, he only claims to be writing about the tiny slice of the population in the title (effectively, the 1%) and he does have some kinda/sorta interesting things to say about racism in the follow-up books with some of the secondary characters, but that's obviously not in the movie.

What the movie is, is a Liberal Immigrant Chinese power-fantasy- of a mythical homeland where Asians aren't the ones oppressed or subject to white power structures, but where they are the ones with all the power. It's a movie about being able to live in two worlds- of being able to inhabit a Western Liberal immigrant identity as a component of global capital, and of being able to use the supposed "superior" qualities of progressive liberalism to seamlessly leverage and transition back into a place of true belonging, to return to the homeland as a beacon of modernity against stodgy Conservatism (as embodied by Michelle Yeoh's character, who really deserved better).

There was nothing more infuriating than reading the discourse after the movie came out, where a lot of Asian diaspora who were celebrating the film for it's all Asian cast as a landmark cultural moment (and rightly so, I think, even tho such things do ring hollow under neo-liberalism) hijacked leftist terminology to defend/deflect against very real criticism from South East Asians who took umbrage with our portrayal in the movie. Which I think spoke to the underlying reason for the movies existence, and who it's really for- there's a reason the movie opens with a quote about China and it's awakening shaking the world, after all.

There are people who are aware about the film's (completely unintentional, I think) subtext, but they aren't the people who made and promoted the film, and they certainly aren't the people who liked the film and the books.

In the scene immediately after the Jeep scene, they show the male lead character and his friends visiting a hawker centre, to establish how they are just normal people with down-to-earth tastes despite their upper-class backgrounds.

But even then they can't completely hide their classism, because they just had to make sure that you know that these street hawker stalls are the only ones in the world that earn Michelin stars. Well you KNOW it's good since some European assholes tell you it is to virtue-signal about how their value judgments aren't about solely profits and prestige but about real culinary quality.

All the while, the male lead and his friends all speak in this super proper plummy Received Pronounciation. Yeah fucker we know you went to Eton and read PPE at Oxford and got called to the nonce bar, you really don't have to keep reminding us.

Also, most Singaporean hawker food is dogshit designed to scam clueless expats. I once got served a plate of chicken rice with GREEN rice.