| Sumario: | Period fiction, which chronicles the happenings and activities in a protagonist's new life after being teleported or reborn to China's socialist past, is an intriguing new genre of historical fantasy on the Chinese web. This article demonstrates how period fiction remediates period imagination popularized by new period dramas about the PRC history on mainstream television. To escape into the socialist era through writing and reading period fiction is reminiscent of the nostalgic fashion in the 1990s. But more than reviving the socialist nostalgia, period fiction is tinted with a retrotopian undertone, which not just longs to return to the past but also retreats to the self in the wake of the normalization of precarity and inequality in society. Through analyzing a list of top-rated women-oriented period fiction of the 1960s on Jinjiang Literature City, this article also illuminates how the emplotment of exception constructs the retrotopian fantasy for self-insert female protagonists. Mary Sues like Lin Ranran in Records of Providing Gourmet Food for Family in the 1960s by Tangsu are exempt from historical sufferings, as the history of scarcity and starvation is revamped for their wish fulfillment. Paradoxically, historical hunger is revealed and revisited, albeit in a superficial manner, only to anticipate and amplify the pleasure of being (ful)filled. Mary Sues are aggrandized and awarded for their exceptional capacity and fortune to feed the hunger. The postfeminist embrace of women's domestic roles of cooking and caretaking runs counter to the propagation of state feminism in the socialist era that aims to free women from the confines of the domestic sphere.
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