>Empire of the Sun.
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>That's the book that woke me up.
Here's some "Empire revisited" from Ballard's autobiography that came out last year:
From The Sunday Times January 20, 2008
JG Ballard reminisces on his boyhood years in Miracles of Life
The author JG Ballard, whose boyhood years in a Japanese prison camp inspired his most famous book and film, explains why it was one of the best times of his life
To return to Shanghai, for the first time since I was a boy, was a strange experience for me. Memories were waiting for me everywhere, like old friends at an arrivals gate, each carrying a piece of cardboard bearing my name. I looked down from my room on the 17th floor of the Hilton and could see at a glance that there were two Shanghais – the skyscraper city newer than yesterday and at street level the old Shanghai that I had cycled around as a boy.
I slipped out of the hotel and began to walk the street. The pavements were already crowded with food vendors, porters steering new photocopiers into office entrances, smartly dressed young secretaries shaking their heads at a plump and sweating 60-year-old European out on some dishevelled errand.
And I was on an errand, though I had yet to grasp the true nature of my assignment. I was looking for my younger self, the boy in a Cathedral school cap and blazer who had played hide-and-seek with his friends half a century earlier. I soon found him, hurrying with me along the Bubbling Well Road, smiling at the puzzled typists and trying to hide the sweat that drenched my shirt.
The Ballard home in the former Amherst Avenue was still standing, though in a state of extreme dilapidation. It served as the library of a state electronics institute and metal book-racks had replaced the furniture on all three floors. Nothing, otherwise, had changed and I noticed that the same lavatory seat was in my bathroom. But the house was a ghost and had spent almost half a century eroding its memories of an English family that had occupied it but left without a trace.
The same was true of Lunghua, the internment camp where I spent some of my happiest years. It was now the Shanghai high school. The children were away on holiday and all the rooms were locked except for the former Ballard room, now a kind of rubbish store. A clutter of refuse, like discarded memories, lay in sacks between the wooden bed frames, where my mother had read Pride and Prejudice for the 10th time and I had slept and dreamt. I WAS born in Shanghai on November 15, 1930 after a difficult delivery that my mother, who was slightly built and slim-hipped, liked to describe to me in later years, as if this revealed something about the larger thoughtlessness of the world.
Shanghai was one of the largest cities in the world, 90% Chinese and 100% Americanised. Bizarre advertising displays – the honour guard of 50 Chinese hunchbacks outside the premiere of The Hunchback of Notre Dame sticks in my mind – were part of the everyday reality of the city, though I sometimes wonder if everyday reality was the one element missing.
It was not a British colony, as most people imagine; but it was home to about 50,000 nonChinese who lived mostly in the International Settlement and the adjoining French Concession. It was celebrated as the “wickedest city in the world”, though as a child I knew nothing about the thousands of bars and brothels. Unlimited venture capitalism rode in gaudy style down streets lined with beggars showing off their sores and wounds.
Every day the trucks of the Shanghai municipal council roamed the streets collecting the hundreds of bodies of destitute Chinese who had starved to death. Partying, cholera and smallpox somehow coexisted with a small English boy’s excited trips in the family Buick to the country club swimming pool.
Every drive through Shanghai I would see something strange and mysterious but treat it as normal – the prosperous Chinese businessmen pausing to savour a thimble of blood tapped from the neck of a vicious goose tethered to a telephone pole; young Chinese gangsters in American suits beating up a shopkeeper; beggars fighting over their pitches; a vast firework display celebrating a new night-club while armoured cars of the Shanghai police drove into a screaming mob of rioting factory workers; the army of prostitutes in fur coats outside the Park hotel, “waiting for friends” as Vera, my White Russian nanny, told me. Open sewers fed into the stinking Whangpoo River and the whole city reeked of dirt, disease and a miasma of cooking fat from the thousands of Chinese food vendors. Anything was possible and everything could be bought and sold.
At the same time there was a strictly formal side to Shanghai life – wedding receptions at the French club, race meetings at the Shanghai racecourse and patriotic gatherings at the British embassy on the Bund. My mother was a popular figure at the country club. She was once voted the best-dressed woman in Shanghai, but I’m not sure if she took that as a compliment or whether she really enjoyed her years there. I suspect that my father, with his belief in modern science as mankind’s saviour, enjoyed Shanghai far more. He had been sent out from Lancashire at the age of 27 to run a textile mill.
When I was six, an old beggar sat down at the foot of our drive. I looked at him from the rear seat of our Buick, a thin, ancient man dressed in rags, undernourished all his life and now taking his last breaths. He rattled a Craven A cigarette tin at passers-by, but no one gave him anything. After a few days he was visibly weaker and I asked my mother if No 2 Coolie (we had 10 Chinese servants and knew none of them by name) would take the old man a little food. She eventually gave in and said that Coolie would take the old man a bowl of soup. The next day it snowed and the old man was covered with a white quilt. I remember telling myself he would feel warmer under this soft eider-down. He stayed under his quilt for several days and then he was gone.
I still think of that old man, of a human being reduced to such a desperate end a few yards from where I slept in a warm bedroom surrounded by my expensive toys. But as a boy I was easily satisfied by a small act of kindness, a notional bowl of soup that I probably knew at the time was no more than a phrase on my mother’s lips. By the time I was 14 I had become as fatalistic about death, poverty and hunger as the Chinese. I knew that kindness alone would feed few mouths and save no lives. IN 1937 the street spectacle that so enthralled a small English boy was bathed in a far more chilling light. Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China. With their villages and rice fields destroyed by fighting, thousands of destitute peasants from the Yangtze basin flocked to Shanghai and fought to enter the International Settlement. They were viciously repelled by the Japanese soldiers and by the British-run police force. I saw many Chinese who had been bayoneted and lay on the ground among their bloodstained rice sacks. When I began long cycle rides around Shanghai, I was careful to avoid provoking the Japanese soldiers.
Friends of my parents lived in the countryside west of Shanghai. When we visited I would slip away, duck through a gap in the fence and run to an abandoned Chinese military airfield. Forgotten in the long grass was the shell of a Chinese fighter plane. I managed to climb into the cockpit and sit on the low metal seat, surrounded by the grimy controls. It was a magical experience, not because I could imagine the sounds of battle, machinegun fire and rushing air, but because I was alone with this stricken but mysterious craft, an intact dream of flight. Decades later this small airfield became the site of Shanghai international airport. When I stepped down the gangway of the Air-bus that brought me to Shanghai more than half a century later, I could almost sense the presence of a small boy still sitting in his Chinese fighter, unaware of the years that had flown past him.
THE Japanese air attack on Pearl Harbor, the American naval base near Honolulu, took place on the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941. In Shanghai, across the International Date Line, it was already Monday, December 8 and I was lying in bed reading when my father burst into my bedroom. He ordered me to get dressed and told me that Japan had declared war.
“But I have to go to school,” I protested. “Exams start today.”
He then uttered the greatest words a schoolboy can ever hear: “There’ll be no more school and no more exams.”
From that point the old Shanghai ceased to exist. The Japanese army aggressively enforced its presence throughout the Settlement and street executions of Chinese were common. All foreign cars were confiscated and my father bought a bicycle to take him to his office.
By March 1943, with the war in the Pacific turning against the Japanese, they decided to intern British and other allied nationals in Lunghua – my last real childhood home, where I would spend the next 2½ years. It resembled a half-ruined college campus. Families with small children were sent to G block, a two-storey building that held some 40 small rooms. I remember how my mother and father sat together on one of the beds with my younger sister, Margaret, staring at this tiny space, as small as the rooms in the servants’ quarters at Amherst Avenue.
My first impression was of how relaxed the internees seemed. I had known a Shanghai where the men wore suits and ties, but here they were dressed in cotton shorts and shirtsleeves. Many of the younger women, among them the rather formal mothers of boys at school, were in beachwear. On the observation roof of F block a group of music lovers listened to a classical symphony on a wind-up gramophone. On the steps of the assembly hall the Lunghua Players rehearsed a scene from The Pirates of Penzance. I enjoyed my years in Lunghua, made a huge number of friends of all ages (far more than I did in adult life) and on the whole felt buoyant and optimistic, even when the food rations fell to near zero, skin infections covered my legs, malnutrition had prolapsed my rectum and many of the adults had lost heart.
For the first time in my life I was extremely close to my parents. At home we had had our own bedrooms and bathrooms. I had never seen my parents naked or in bed together. Now I slept, ate, read, dressed and undressed within a few feet of them in the same small room. I revelled in this closeness. Lying in bed at night I could, if I wanted to, reach out and take my mother’s hand, though I never did.
In the early days when there was still electric power my mother would read late into the night, hidden inside her mosquito net. One night a Japanese officer burst in, drew his sword and slashed away the mosquito net above her head, thrashed the light bulb into fragments and vanished without a word. I remember the strange silence of people woken in the nearby rooms, listening to his footsteps as he disappeared into the night.
I think the years together in that very small room had a profound effect on me and the way I brought up my own children. Perhaps the reason why I have lived in the same house in Shepperton for nearly 50 years, and to the despair of everyone have always preferred make-do-and-mend to buying anew, even when I could easily afford it, is that my small and untidy house reminds me of our family room in Lunghua.
I made friendships of a kind with several young Japanese guards. When they were off duty they would allow me to sit in their hot tubs and then wear their kendo armour. After handing me a duelling sword, a fearsome weapon of long wooden segments loosely strung together, they would encourage me to fence with them. Each bout would last 20 seconds and involved me being repeatedly struck about the helmet and face mask, which I could scarcely see through, every dizzying blow being greeted with friendly cheers from the watching Japanese.
They too were bored, only a few years older than me, and had little hope of seeing their families again soon, if ever. I knew they could be viciously brutal, especially when acting under the orders of their NCOs, but individually they were easy-going and likeable. Their military formality and never-surrender ethos were very impressive to a 13-year-old looking for heroes to worship.
In the last 18 months of the war our rations fell steeply. As we sat in our room one day, pushing what my mother called “the weevils” to the rim of our plates of congee (pulped rice), my father decided that from then on we should eat them – we needed the protein. They were small white slugs and perhaps were maggots, a word my mother preferred to avoid. I regularly counted them before tucking in lustily – a hundred or so was my usual score, forming a double perimeter around my plate.
Despite the food shortages, the bitterly cold winters and the uncertainties, I was happier in the camp than I was until my marriage and children. At the same time I felt slightly apart from my parents by the time the war ended. One reason for our estrangement was that their parenting became passive rather than active – they had none of the usual levers to pull, no presents or treats, no say in what we ate, no power over how we lived or ability to shape events.
There was never any friction or antagonism and they did their best to look after me and my sister; but there is no doubt that a gradual estrangement began there and it lasted to the end of their lives. THE first American air raids began in the summer of 1944. Squadrons of fighters, Mustangs and Lightnings, attacked nearby Lunghua airfield. Waves of B-29 bombers followed. I spent every spare moment watching the sky.
Then one day in early August 1945 we woke to find that the Japanese guards had gone. Had the war ended? It was several weeks before American forces arrived in strength. In the last days of August I was on the roof of F block when a B-29 flew towards the camp at a height of about 800ft. Its bomb doors were open and for a few seconds I assumed that we were about to be attacked. A line of canisters fell from the bomb bays, parachutes flared and the first American relief supplies floated towards us.
Each one was a cargo of treasure. There were tins of Spam and Klim, cartons of Lucky Strike cigarettes, cans of jam and huge bars of chocolate. I remember vividly the extraordinary taste of animal fat, sugar, jam and chocolate. The vast lazy planes that floated overhead were emissaries from another world. The camp came alive again as the internees found a new purpose in their lives. Everyone hoarded and guarded their new supplies, listening out for the sound of American engines. (Later, in England, I heard that many of the internees were still living in the camp six months after the war’s end, defending their caches of Spam, Klim and Lucky Strike.) Revived by Spam and chocolate, I decided – although still only 14 – to walk to Shanghai. Without telling my parents I stepped through the wire. Around me was a silent terrain of abandoned paddy fields and burial mounds, derelict canals and ghost villages.
After an hour I reached the railway line that circled the western perimeter of Shanghai. No trains were running and I walked along the embankment. As I approached a small station I could hear an odd singsong sound and saw that a group of Japanese soldiers was waiting on the platform. They were fully armed and sat on their ammunition boxes, picking their teeth while one of them tormented a young Chinese man in black trousers and a white shirt. The Japanese soldier had cut down lengths of telephone wire and had tied the Chinese to a telegraph pole, and was now slowly strangling him as the Chinese sang out in a singsong voice.
I drew level with the platform and was about to walk past it when the soldier with the telephone wire beckoned me towards him. He had seen the transparent celluloid belt that held up my frayed cotton shorts. It had been given to me by an American sailor interned in Lunghua and was a prized novelty that no Japanese was likely to have seen. I handed it to him. He flexed the colourless plastic and stared at me through it, laughing admiringly. Behind him the young Chinese was slowly suffocating to death, his urine spreading across the platform.
I waited in the sun, listening to the singsong voice as it grew weaker. Peace was supposed to have come to the mouth of the Yangtze; but I was old enough to know that this lost Japanese platoon was beyond the point where life and death meant anything at all. They were aware that their own lives would shortly end and that they were free to do anything they wanted and inflict any pain. Peace, I realised, was more threatening because the rules that sustained war, however evil, were suspended. The empty paddy fields and derelict villages confirmed that nothing mattered.
Ten minutes later, the Chinese was silent and I was able to walk away. The Japanese soldier had lost interest in me. Whistling to himself, the plastic belt around his neck, he stepped over the trussed body of the Chinese and rejoined his companions, waiting for the train that would never come. FOR a long time after we had been shipped “home” to England, I never talked about my internment in Lunghua even to my closest friends. The Shanghai years would never return and it unsettled me whenever I met friends of my parents and former internees who were detached from the present and living entirely within a cocoon of China memories.
In 1980, however, I found myself thinking of Shanghai again and I wrote my novel Empire of the Sun. Few novelists have waited so long to write about the most formative experiences of their lives and I am still puzzled why I allowed so many decades to slip by. Perhaps, as I have often reflected, it took me 20 years to forget Shanghai and 20 years to remember.
© JG Ballard 2008
Extracted from Miracles of Life by JG Ballard, to be published by Fourth Estate on February 4 at £14.99. Copies can be ordered for £13.49 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585