ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a close reading of the interpersonal relationships in two bestsellers by post-1980s writers, Guo Jingming’s Tiny Times and Zhang Jiajia’s I Belonged to You. Tiny Times embraces female aggressiveness, self-governance and cross-class sisterhood as a way for young women to survive in a society of entrenched economic and gender inequality. By contrast, I Belonged to You fashions a defiantly sensitive and sentimental manhood and reinvents the cult of sentiment (qing) as an emotional shelter for the young middle-class who feel alienated in the cut-throat competition of authoritarian capitalism. The chapter argues that by critically engaging with the writings of the post-1980s, we could gain a more nuanced understanding of the psychic life of the generations born in post-socialist China.
