The ad copy for the colorful men’s dress shirts sold by the Chinese fashion label Masa Maso invites the shopper to recall the lesson of the “The Amazing Gai-Ci-Bi”—or, as it’s known in the West, “The Great Gatsby.” “Don’t forget,” the ads warn, “that as soon as the protagonist, Gatsby, obtained fame and fortune, he went out and bought beautiful, brightly colored shirts that transformed his image in Daisy’s eyes. It’s true: put on a flower-print shirt, and it will show you the door to a whole new world!”

The new film version of “The Great Gatsby,” in theatres on May 10th, has yet to hit the bootleg vendors on the streets of Beijing, but the world it will conjure—of self-invention and stupendous wealth, of hidden pasts and imagined futures—could hardly find a more fitting audience than in China in the opening years of the twenty-first century.

Perhaps no work of fiction has returned to me more often over the past eight years in China than F. Scott Fitzgerald’s slippery tale of James Gatz of North Dakota, who thrust himself into a new world in desperate, doomed pursuit of love and ambition—a life in which the “dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.” I’ve stood in Shanghai, bathed in the lights of a new skyline, and thought of Gatsby’s glimpse of New York, with “the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps.” And at times it’s been hard to think of anything but Fitzgerald’s “universe of ineffable gaudiness”—upon seeing, for instance, the Korean boutique in Beijing with the English name “PRICH: Pride & Rich.”

But to Chinese readers, who have read Gatsby (in translation or in English) for decades, the story has acquired new layers of relevance in recent years, as the initial rush of China’s boom has given way to a more complex economic phase. When Chinese readers talk about Gatsby today, some see a cautionary tale of materialism run amok; others point to the potential danger in the gap between riches and power; and still others recognize the dawning realization that that one may never grasp the dream he so desires. “After Gatsby was gone, no one cared,” a Chinese blogger named Xiao Peng wrote not long ago. “Not his business partners or his friends or his guests. Once everything became clear, Gatsby’s life evaporated like smoke.”

Another young Chinese writer took stock of Gatsby’s environment—“Mobsters running wild, farmers leaving their land rushing toward the big cities on the East Coast, farming life declining … . Money inscribing itself on morality”—and realized, as he put it, that “these are all the very things China is facing today.”

In China, people have also embraced the findings of the Great Gatsby Curve, a concept developed by the labor economist Miles Corak which demonstrates that countries with high income inequality tend to have high social immobility as well. China now has some of the highest income inequality in the world—so high that the government stopped reporting it for a while—and it has some of the lowest levels of mobility, worse than Brazil but better than Peru. This bodes poorly for the children of the underclass, and a Chinese article about the Gatsby Curve observed glumly, “Dragons beget dragons … . The sons of rats will only dig holes … . Birth determines class.”

But it’s not all existential angst. For some, understanding what Gatsby represents has become a status symbol of a different kind—a recognition that there is life after PRICH. An anonymous essay that circulated widely in China not long ago drew some recognizable archetypes, including the member of the new young Chinese white-collar class, the men and women who

…sip cappuccino, date online, have a DINK family, take subways and taxis, fly economy, stay in nice hotels, go to pubs, make long phone calls, listen to blues, work overtime, go out at night, celebrate Christmas, have one-night-stands … . “The Great Gatsby” and “Pride and Prejudice” are on their nightstands. They are drawn, above all, by love, manners, culture, art, and experience.

The essay went on to compare that class to the newly termed black-collar class of corrupt officials and their business associations: “Their clothes are black. Their cars are black. Their income is hidden. Their life is hidden. Their work is hidden. Everything about them is hidden—like a man wearing black standing in the dark.”

In China these days, it can sometimes feel as if the direction of the country hinges in part on which of those classes prevails. And, in a sense, they are the two worlds that Gatsby inhabited. He tried to unify them and he failed. And that may be the part of the novel that is the most difficult for Chinese strivers to accept. My friend Lu Han spent several years teaching “Gatsby” to newly arrived Chinese migrants at a Mandarin-speaking school in New York City. She told me today that her students were always maddened by Fitzgerald’s ending.

“They were migrants from Fujian and Guangdong,” she told me. They had fought and scraped to get there. “They found it crazy, in a way, to do all of that in the name of a woman. And in the end, he had nothing. They couldn’t accept that it was all in vain.”

Photograph courtesy of Warner Bros.