Chapter 3 investigates the frequent accidents caused by American military vehicles, the most common trigger of everyday tensions, as well as GIs’ turbulent relationships with rickshaw pullers. Following frequent accidents caused by drunk driving, speeding, and negligence, the Jeep turned from an object of enchantment, being a symbol of Allied prestige and a cultural spectacle and popular commodity, into a military tool of intimidation, danger, and harassment, threatening the existing order of the Chinese society and nation. As the two sides fought over speed limits, economic compensation, moral responsibilities, and legal justice, the Jeep–GI duality, embroiled in local street politics with rickshaw pullers, became the ultimate symbol of prolonged American occupation trampling Chinese sovereignty.

Chapter 4 examines American soldiers’ actual and perceived sexual relations with Chinese women, the most sensitive subject that triggered the strongest anti-American sentiment. While Chinese conservatives, out of racial and sexual anxieties, maligned women who consorted with GIs, liberals and self-identified “Jeep girls” ingeniously invoked the language of modernity and patriotism. However, in the wake of the Peking rape incident, the once lively debate over modernity was quickly silenced as nationwide protests raged against American imperialism.

Chapter 2 explores American servicemen’s everyday lives through their sensory encounters with China. While largely maintaining a privileged lifestyle separate from Chinese society, they also forged intimate connections with local populations by exchanging goods, service, language, and culture, an encounter that both followed and contradicted official policies and popular representations. As tourists, consumers, cultural messengers, and diplomats in the field, their encounters with China were characterized by fascination and contempt, enchantment and alienation. While their sensorial experiences and narratives were conditioned by preexisting Orientalist beliefs and racist prejudices, GIs’ cultural identities were reshaped by daily interactions involving new sights, smells, tastes, sounds, and touches.

The epilogue explores the enduring legacies of this historical encounter between American soldiers and Chinese civilians. In the People’s Republic of China, the recurring persona of the Chinese victim facing American brutality, further popularized through propaganda during the Korean War, continues to influence popular Chinese anti-American nationalism. In the United States, while the occupation of China remains a largely forgotten history, practices in China created important precedents and patterns for US military involvement with other nations in the following decades. As tensions between the two nations reach new heights today, the legacy of this “lost era” continues to be contested through divergent historical accounts from both countries, shaped by radically changing geopolitical concerns. The shadow of the American occupation remains long and haunting.

The introduction provides historical and theoretical framings for this book. It situates the American military presence in postwar China within two interconnected contexts of China’s civil war confrontations and America’s global occupation. It engages with existing historiographies by locating China in the American empire and locating America in Communist propaganda. Through the micro-lens of the everyday, it also analyzes the actual and critical links between grassroots frictions and Sino-US relations.

Chapter 5 analyzes the everyday impact of American goods on Chinese lives and views of America. Massive quantities of industrial products such as instant coffee, Coca-Cola, canned food, penicillin, and DDT poured into postwar China through American aid and war surplus sales, creating new and the only direct experience many had of America. This growing consumption engendered Chinese fears of capitalism crushing domestic industries and US materialism corrupting Chinese morality. Meanwhile, American military’s stringent “halt or shoot” policy, implemented to protect US properties from theft and black marketing, led to frequent killings of civilians. The policy gave rise to the deadliest type of grassroots encounters, resulting in legal disputes and political crises.

Chapter 1 examines the the US military operations in China within the volatile context of the civil war and the emerging Cold War. As the US forces accepted the Japanese surrender, clashed with Communist forces in sporadic skirmishes, and adjudicated trials of Japanese criminals in China independent of the Nationalist Government, they staged an American victory, might, and justice to both enemies and allies. The tactic of “show of force” was used in a “peaceful” mission to ensure submission and deference. However, its diverse, ambiguous, and at times contradictory objectives created significant military and political challenges. Ultimately, occupying China became a mission impossible.

Lukács engaged in a series of exchanges with his contemporaries on the Left, including Bloch and Brecht, in which he defended realism as the only valid form of the novel, and they promoted modernism. This debate helps us to see the value and the limitations of the realist form and the need for other forms of fictional narrative. The representation of the future under climate change would seem to be something beyond realism’s grasp because such a radically different world is by definition far outside the quotidian. And yet, climate change is itself a reality that fiction would seem to be obliged to address. in The Great Derangement (2016), Amitav Ghosh tries to explain why fiction has failed to address the problem of climate change, and he blames the novel as a form. Ghosh wants fiction that embodies a posthumanist perspective, but the novel form is dependent on human agency. A variety of novels address climate change, and most combine realism with other narrative modes. Realism is needed in order to make these novels persuasive, though it is unlikely, given the current reach of print fiction, that a climate novel will have the inpact that Uncle Tom’s Cabin once did.

The standard trajectory of realism, modernism, and postmodernism represents a misunderstanding of the novel’s history. The innovations of modernism and postmodernism have not rendered realism obsolete, as the vast majority of novelists continued to produce in the realist mode. John Updike in his criticism explicitly placed himself in the realist tradition of American fiction he traced to William Dean Howells, and Updike’s connection to realism was widely recognized. But the Rabbit novels do not merely continue the older fictional conventions of realism. Rather, they make use of modernist techniques, such as stream of consciousness narration, and they describe aspects of life absent from earlier realism. They regard mass culture as a significant element of the world they represent, and provide an alternative to the theory of mass culture proposed by Horkheimer and Adorno. In the first two of thesde, Rabbit Run and Rabbit Redux, music is a significant part of this. What Updike’s novels suggest is not just a new way of telling a story, but that there was a new reality as electronic mass media took up an increasing amount of attention.

August Wilson’s Century Cycle, which consists of ten plays written between 1984 with Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and 2005’s Radio Golf, with each of the ten plays taking place in a different decade of the twentieth century, must be understood as essentially realist. Not only is Wilson’s general motive for his project—to represent African American experience during the twentieth century—clearly realist, but each play is in dialogue and staging in keeping with the theatrical realism going back to Ibsen and Chekov, and informing the American dramatic tradition of O’Neill, Miller, Hansberry, and many others. The Century Cycle, however, takes this realism in a profoundly new direction in the representation of the African American experience over the course of the twentieth century. The Cycle has as much in common with nineteenth-century novels as it does with these theatrical predecessors. Wilson wants to represent the complexity of social life and its contradictions over the span of 100 years by giving us ten dramatic moments. Yet Wilson’s realism is complicated by his inclusion of fantastical elements within otherwise entirely plausible dramas. I show that realism prevails despite such elements as ghosts and a 300 year-old woman.

Film theorists rewrote the history of cinema by claiming that standard Hollywood products, long regarded as patently unreal, escapist entertainment, were realist. The chapter shows how and why they were wrong, and it argues that there are significant inherent limitations that the medium of the commercial fiction film places on any attempt at realism, especially the standard theatrical running time. In order to do this, I focus on the films of Howard Hawks, whose films have been said to best illustrate what Robert Ray calls Hollywood’s invisible style. Hawks was used to illustrate classic Hollywood’s supposed illusionistic realism, which it was claimed allowed movies to disseminate all manner of ideological mischief. But one only need to pay attention to the films themselves to see that they don’t claim to be realist. Indeed, Hawks’s films often seem to be hermetically sealed off from ordinary life, ignoring the details of social relations in which realist narratives are grounded. In this he entirely typical of Hollywood film then and now. Finally, I look at Italian neorealism, the films of John Sayles, and other films that are more properly understood as realist.