Empire of the Sun

Each of the following afternoons, Jim goes with Frank and Basie in their truck to the Chinese markets in the nearby area of Hongkew to haggle for food in exchange for cigarettes. Jim also realizes that Basie is trying to sell Jim to the Chinese street vendors, “like one of the chickens which the Chinese women carried beside them on the seats of trams” (80). However, no one is interested in buying him. In the evening, Jim tricks Frank and Basie into visiting his house in Amherst Avenue by telling them about the luxurious life he lived there, and all the potentially expensive items they could steal. Once there, though, as Jim had planned, they encounter off-duty Japanese soldiers who arrest them.

Following his arrest by the soldiers, Jim is held for a week in Shanghai Central Prison. He is placed in a “damp dormitory cell which he shared with a hundred Eurasian and British prisoners” (86). He is then transferred to a makeshift detention centre at what used to be Shanghai’s open-air cinema. Jim has a fever and realizes that the other 30 people held there are either ill or injured. He also sees that some of the other detainees are cheating out of his fair share of the rice-gruel they are given. This leads him to steal some of the ration of an old man. When a new group of prisoners arrive, Jim notices that a heavily bandaged sailor is Basie.

For three weeks, Jim helps the incapacitated Basie, fanning him and bringing him his rations. On the advice of Basie, Jim ingratiates himself with the woman in charge of cooking the food, Mrs Blackburn, by helping her chop the firewood and lighting the stove. In return, “Jim was rewarded with his first fair ration” (92). Jim and Basie also take the mess tins of dead or dying prisoners to get extra rations and keep themselves alive.

A truck arrives at the detention center with new prisoners. As a result, some of the existing detainees will be taken from the center to the prison camps. Jim hopes to be transferred so that he can find his parents; he believes they are in one of the camps. At first, Jim is not chosen to be transferred. However, when it becomes clear that the truck driver does not know the way to Woosung, his intended destination, Jim is able to get on the truck by indicating that he knows how to get there.

On their way to Woosung, the driver appears to be lost. Jim prevents the driver from heading back to the detention center by pointing to the train station which is close to Woosung. The driver then stops by the station and eats with some other Japanese soldiers there. Jim helps the Japanese build their fire for cooking and then approaches them to ask for water after they have eaten. In return, he is rewarded with a coke bottle full of water. The other prisoners expect Jim to share this, but he drinks it all for himself before a further ration of water is distributed.

After driving past various Japanese-controlled airfields, Jim and the rest of the party arrive outside the camp at Woosung. Jim is given responsibility for the food of the prisoners—nine sweet potatoes—by the Japanese sergeant there. Capitalizing on the opportunity, Jim secures the biggest potato for himself. He falls asleep looking at the stars, although “he was forced to admit that he could recognize none of the constellations” (117). Instead, the Japanese aircraft, despite their movement, represented the skies as its “only fixed points, a second zodiac above the broken land” (117).

The party moves on from Woosung to a new camp, with the rest of the prisoners on the truck floor sick and dying. The doctor that Jim has been speaking to, for example, has an infected wound on his face which has spread to his jaw, nose, and eye. When they arrive at the new camp, the leader of the British prisoners there does not want to admit Jim and the other detainees on the truck because of their diseased and destitute state. As such, they must move on yet again.

On their way to a new camp, the party heads past various abandoned battlefields and to Lunghua Airfield, five miles south of Shanghai. There, along with emaciated Chinese soldiers, they are forced to help build a runway from the surrounding stones. Watching the Chinese men being worked literally to death causes Jim to start having an emotional breakdown, as he realizes that this too will be his fate. This sense of despair at his reality is summed up when Jim, as the narrator says, “hoped that his parents were safe and dead” (130).