Distancing the West or the Cultural Revolution: reading contemporary China’s modernization in desire/love in Jin Yucheng’s Blossoms

In this article, I look into the gendered ways in which the West, China and the East as fantasies-realities are negotiated by being brought close and distanced in everyday life in Jin Yucheng’s novel Blossoms 繁花 (2013) – particularly through inter-personal relationships of desire and love – in a historical period during which Chinese society changed from being dominated by an anti-Western ideology to adopting an ideological framework of (Western) modernization. The novel shows how classed and gendered individuals negotiate the distance differently between themselves and the West, seeking to either expand or constrict it, in accordance not only with historical contexts in which the dominant ideology positions itself differently in relation to the West, but also in accordance with their social positions and the degrees of power these positions give them with regard to choosing their desires and acting on them.