Empire of the Sun
Authors: J. G. Ballard
Tags: #World War; 1939-1945 - China - Shanghai, #War Stories, #World War; 1939-1945, #Shanghai, #Bildungsromans, #Shanghai (China), #Fiction, #Romance, #Boys, #China, #Historical, #War & Military, #General, #Media Tie-In
The Perennial Collection
Empire of the Sun
J. G. Ballard
London, New York, Toronto and Sydney
Empire of the Sun
draws on my experiences in Shanghai, China, during the Second World War, and in Lunghua C.A.C. (Civilian Assembly Centre) where I was interned from 1942-45. For the most part this novel is based on events I observed during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai and within the camp at Lunghua.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor took place on Sunday morning, 7 December 1941, but as a result of time differences across the Pacific Date Line it was then already the morning of Monday, 8 December in Shanghai.
J. G. Ballard
Table of Contents
1 The Eve of Pearl Harbor
2 Beggars and Acrobats
3 The Abandoned Aerodrome
4 The Attack on the Petrel
5 Escape from the Hospital
6 The Youth with the Knife
7 The Drained Swimming-Pool
8 Picnic Time
9 An End to Kindness
10 The Stranded Freighter
11 Frank and Basie
12 Dance Music
13 The Open-Air Cinema
14 American Aircraft
15 On their Way to the Camps
16 The Water Ration
17 A Landscape of Airfields
18 Vagrants
19 The Runway
20 Lunghua Camp
21 The Cubicle
22 The University of Life
23 The Air Raid
24 The Hospital
25 The Cemetery Garden
26 The Lunghua Sophomores
27 The Execution
28 An Escape
29 The March to Nantao
30 The Olympic Stadium
31 The Empire of the Sun
32 The Eurasian
33 The Kamikaze Pilot
34 The Refrigerator in the Sky
35 Lieutenant Price
36 The Flies
37 A Reserved Room
38 The Road to Shanghai
39 The Bandits
40 The Fallen Airmen
41 Rescue Mission
42 The Terrible City
About the author
An Investigative Spirit
LIFE at a Glance
A Writing Life
TOP TEN BOOKS
About the Book
The End of My War
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Wars came early to Shanghai, overtaking each other like the tides that raced up the Yangtze and returned to this gaudy city all the coffins cast adrift from the funeral piers of the Chinese Bund.
Jim had begun to dream of wars. At night the same silent films seemed to flicker against the wall of his bedroom in Amherst Avenue, and transformed his sleeping mind into a deserted newsreel theatre. During the winter of 1941 everyone in Shanghai was showing war films. Fragments of his dreams followed Jim around the city; in the foyers of department stores and hotels the images of Dunkirk and Tobruk, Barbarossa and the Rape of Nanking sprang loose from his crowded head.
To Jim’s dismay, even the Dean of Shanghai Cathedral had equipped himself with an antique projector. After morning service on Sunday, 7 December, the eve of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the choirboys were stopped before they could leave for home and were marched down to the crypt. Still wearing their cassocks, they sat in a row of deck-chairs requisitioned from the Shanghai Yacht Club and watched a year-old
March of Time.
Thinking of his unsettled dreams, and puzzled by their missing sound-track, Jim tugged at his ruffed collar. The organ voluntary drummed like a headache through the cement roof and the screen trembled with the familiar images of tank battles and aerial dogfights. Jim was eager to prepare for the fancy-dress Christmas party being held that afternoon by Dr Lockwood, the vice-chairman of the British Residents’ Association. There would be the drive through the Japanese lines to Hungjao, and then Chinese conjurors, fireworks and yet more newsreels, but Jim had his own reasons for wanting to go to Dr Lockwood’s party.
Outside the vestry doors the Chinese chauffeurs waited by their Packards and Buicks, arguing in a fretful way with each other. Bored by the film, which he had seen a dozen times, Jim listened as Yang, his father’s driver, badgered the Australian verger. However, watching the newsreels had become every expatriate Briton’s patriotic duty, like the fund-raising raffles at the country club. The dances and garden parties, the countless bottles of Scotch consumed in aid of the war effort (like all children, Jim was intrigued by alcohol but vaguely disapproved of it) had soon produced enough money to buy a Spitfire – probably one of those, Jim speculated, that had been shot down on its first flight, the pilot fainting in the reek of Johnnie Walker.
Usually Jim devoured the newsreels, part of the propaganda effort mounted by the British Embassy to counter the German and Italian war films being screened in the public theatres and Axis clubs of Shanghai. Sometimes the Pathé newsreels from England gave him the impression that, despite their unbroken series of defeats, the British people were thoroughly enjoying the war. The
March of Time
films were more sombre, in a way that appealed to Jim. Suffocating in his tight cassock, he watched a burning Hurricane fall from a sky of Dornier bombers towards a children’s book landscape of English meadows that he had never known. The
Graf Spee
lay scuttled in the River Plate, a river as melancholy as the Yangtze, and smoke clouds rose from a shabby city in eastern Europe, that black planet from which Vera Frankel, his seventeen-year-old governess, had escaped on a refugee ship six months earlier.
Jim was glad when the newsreel was over. He and his fellow-choristers tottered into the strange daylight towards their chauffeurs. His closest friend, Patrick Maxted, had sailed with his mother from Shanghai for the safety of the British fortress at Singapore, and Jim felt that he had to watch the films for Patrick, and even for the White Russian women selling their jewellery on the cathedral steps and the Chinese beggars resting among the gravestones.
The commentator’s voice still boomed inside his head as he rode home through the crowded Shanghai streets in his parents’ Packard. Yang, the fast-talking chauffeur, had once worked as an extra in a locally made film starring Chiang Ching, the actress who had abandoned her career to join the communist leader Mao Tse-Tung. Yang enjoyed impressing his eleven-year-old passenger with tall tales of film stunts and trick effects. But today Yang ignored Jim, banishing him to the back seat. He punched the Packard’s powerful horn, carrying on his duel with the aggressive rickshaw coolies who tried to crowd the foreign cars off the Bubbling Well Road. Lowering the window, Yang lashed with his leather riding crop at the thoughtless pedestrians, the sauntering bar-girls with American handbags, the old amahs bent double under bamboo yokes strung with headless chickens.