Abstract
When the notion of “finance” reentered ordinary Chinese people's lives since the “Reform and Opening Up,” how were “finance and economics” (caijing) perceived and felt? This essay focuses on the mainland critics’ reviews of the “finance-themed” novels by the Hong Kong entrepreneur-cum-writer Leung Fung Yee (b. 1949) and discusses how “Leung fever” (1992 – 93) provided a medium for a collective imagination of the financial age. Leung's fiction introduced “sensuous and lively” financial knowledge particularly attractive to a financially uneducated mainland readership who nonetheless desired to engage in adventurous economic activities. This essay is situated in the intersection of finance and literary practice and highlights the ways these critics’ interpretations of Leung's novels helped instruct readers in how to feel, experience, and survive the financial age and legitimize the new economic behaviors in everyday life. This new age was first and foremost experienced as an “erotic-speculative sensation” in which an erotic adventure was experienced similar to the financial behavior of speculation. The mainland critics envisioned the figure of “the neoliberal labor heroine,” one who creatively utilizes the intervals to maximize productive value and who performs “presentist worldly wisdom” to strategically navigate life and achieve optimal outputs and success in a disorienting world.
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