EMPIRE OF NO SUN

Empire of No Sun is a tour de force of comic irony and street-level humanity. Philip Cunningham drops us into a single extraordinary day on the Shanghai Bund during the filming of Spielberg's Empire of the Sun. We see the spectacle of Hollywoods comes to Shanghai through the eyes of Shau Di, an unauthorized extra living entirely by his wits. The result is one of the sharpest portraits of China under late socialism ever put to fiction. Cunningham knows this world from the inside, and it shows: the prose crackles with authenticity, the dialogue cuts, and Shau Di — dapper, hungry, incorrigible, and utterly alive — is one of the most original characters in recent American writing about China. Funny, melancholy, and politically acute, this is a story about invisibility, dignity, and what it means to be an extra in someone else's version of your own city.