The Dream of Sharing

This essay argues that the central motifs of debt and contractuality in Timothy Mo's Sour Sweet (1982) are explanatory of the characters' sense of social belonging. The novel is approached from an angle where the behaviour and the interpersonal relations of young Chinese immigrants in London reflect their uncertain positions in the available, economic and not strictly economic, exchange mechanisms. The paper demonstrates how these individuals attempt to overcome their isolation by entering into various transactions and how their sense of unrelatedness is abused and manipulated out of economic interests. The theoretical framework of the paper hinges on the economic anthropological insights of Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Karl Polanyi.