Leaving China: Media, Migration and Transnational Imagination. By Wanning Sun. [Lanham, Boulder, London, Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. 243 pp. $24.95. ISBN 0-7425-1797-7.

Abstract

Leaving China is, in part, a study of the televisual and filmic representation of Chinese emigration. The book is partly autobiographical, since it draws on the author's own lived experience as a China-born scholar established abroad. The author, born in the PRC, is now based in Australia, but as the list of acknowledgements indicates, she is imbricated in a global network of China-related academics. The other strand of Wanning Sun's research is imaginary travel and virtual migration: the Chinese spectator's consumption of a filmed elsewhere – especially the elsewhere inhabited by émigré Chinese.This is a book about recent migration from the PRC and Chinese perceptions of emigration. Leaving China does not attempt to address the history of the older diaspora of the 19th and 20th centuries, for instance, the now forgotten communities whose story is told in the Chinese-Australian writer Brian Castro's book Birds of Passage (Allen & Unwin, 1983). In the parts of the book that focus on lived migratory experience, Sun is concerned more with people like herself, her generation, and her class.