Feeling the South: Cold War Sentimentalism in Hong Kong’s Thirty Cents Novels

Amid Hong Kong’s Cold War street-literary culture, inexpensive romances known as “thirty cents novels” (三毫子小說) became crucial sites of affective production. This chapter proposes a new reading of Hong Kong’s “thirty cents novels,” interpreting them as affective infrastructures that contributed to the formation of transregional cultural imaginaries during the Cold War period in Asia. What role did these novels play in shaping cultural imaginaries during the Cold War? During the postwar decades of the 1950s and 1960s, small-scale publishers such as Rainbow (虹霓), Universal (環球), and Wenfeng (文風) contributed significantly to the production of popular texts that reached readers across Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. Often dismissed as pulp, they nonetheless embedded ideological scripts through sentimental plots and exoticized Nanyang settings. Drawing on affect theory, Sara Ahmed’s emotional orientation, Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism,” Brian Massumi’s affective potentiality, and Elaine Scarry’s analysis of pain, this study demonstrates how these novels instructed readers in what to desire, renounce, or fear. Their cross-border circulation created a nonnational emotional commons, illuminating how popular fiction mediated Cold War sentiment through everyday attachments.