J. Ballard - Empire of the Sun

‘Dr Ransome…!’ Jim spat the blood from his mouth and ran up the rotting steps. ‘You came back, Dr Ransome! It’s all right, everyone’s coming back! I’m going to get Mrs Vincent…!’

He stepped past Dr Ransome into the dark, but the physician’s hands gripped his shoulders.

‘Hold on, Jim…I thought you might be here.’ He removed his mask and pressed Jim’s head to his chest, inspecting the boy’s gums and ignoring the blood that stained the crisp fabric of his US Army shirt. ‘Your parents are waiting for you, Jim. Poor fellow, you’ll never believe the war is over.’

Two months later, on the eve of his departure for England, Jim remembered Dr Ransome’s words as he walked down the gangway of the SS Arrawa and stepped on to Chinese soil for the last time. Dressed in a silk shirt and tie, and a grey flannel suit from the Sincere Company’s department store, Jim waited politely for an elderly English couple to make their way down the wooden ramp. Below them was the Shanghai Bund, and all the clamour of the gaudy night. Thousands of Chinese filled the concourse, jostling among the trams and limousines, the jeeps and trucks of the US military, and a horde of rickshaws and pedicabs. Together they watched the British and American servicemen moving in and out of the hotels along the Bund. At the jetties beside the Arrawa, hidden below its stern and bows, American sailors came ashore from the cruiser moored in mid-river. As they stepped from their landing craft the Chinese surged forward, gangs of pickpockets and pedicab drivers, prostitutes and bar-touts, vendors hawking bottles of home-brew Johnny Walker, gold dealers and opium traders, the evening citizenry of Shanghai in all its black silk, fox fur and flash. The young American sailors pushed past the sampan men and shouting military police. They tried to stay together and fight off the crowd so eager to welcome them to China. But before they reached the first set of tram-tracks down the centre of the Bund they were swept away in a convoy of pedicabs, their arms around the bar-girls screaming obscenities at the sleek Chinese pimps in their pre-war Packards, down from the blocks in the back-alley garages of the Nanking Road.

Dominating this panorama of the Shanghai night were three cinema screens which had been set up on scaffolding along the Bund. In collaboration with the US Navy, the Nationalist general who was the military governor of the city had arranged this continuous screening of newsreels from the European and Pacific theatres, in order to give the population of Shanghai a glimpse of the world war that had recently ended.

Jim cleared the last step of the swaying gangway, and looking up at the trembling images, which were barely strong enough to hold their own against the neon signs and strip lighting on the hotel and nightclub façades. Fragments of their amplified sound-tracks boomed like guns over the roar of the traffic. He had begun the war watching the newsreels in the crypt of Shanghai Cathedral, and was now ending it below the same repetitive images — Russian machine-gunners advanced through the ruins of Stalingrad, US marines turned their flame-throwers on the Japanese defenders of a Pacific island, RAF fighters strafed an ammunition train in a German railyard. Promptly at ten-minute intervals, Chinese characters filled the screens, and vast Kuomintang armies saluted the victorious Generalissimo Chiang on his reviewing podium in Nanking. The only forces not to be celebrated were the Chinese communists, but they had been cleared out of Shanghai and the coastal cities. Whatever contribution their troops had made to the Allied victory had long been discounted, lost under the layers of newsreels that had imposed their own truth upon the war.

During the two months since his return to Amherst Avenue, Jim often visited the reopened cinemas in Shanghai. His parents recovered only slowly from their years of imprisonment in the camp at Soochow, and Jim had ample time to tour Shanghai. After calling at the White Russian dentist in the French Concession, he would order Yang to drive him in the Lincoln Zephyr to the Grand or the Cathay, those vast and cool palaces where he sat in the front row of the circle and watched yet another screening of Bataan and The Fighting Lady.

Yang was puzzled why Jim should want to see these films so many times. In turn Jim wondered how Yang himself had spent the years of the war — as a valet to a Chinese puppet general, as an interpreter for the Japanese, or as a Kuomintang agent working on the side for the communists? On the day of his parents’ arrival Yang had appeared with the limousine, promptly sold the car to Jim’s father and reenrolled himself as its chauffeur. Yang was already performing in small roles in two productions of the renascent Shanghai film studios. Jim suspected that while he sat through another double feature at the Cathay Theatre the car was being rented out as a film prop.

These Hollywood movies, like the newsreels projected above the crowds on the Bund, endlessly fascinated Jim. After the dental work to his jaw, and the healing of the wound in his palate, he soon began to put on weight. Alone at the dining-room table, he ate large meals by day, and at night slept peacefully in his bedroom on the top floor of the unreal house in Amherst Avenue, which had once been his home but now seemed as much an illusion as the sets of the Shanghai film studios.

During his days at Amherst Avenue he often thought of his cubicle in the Vincent’s room at the camp. At the end of October he ordered the unenthusiastic Yang to drive him to Lunghua. They set off through the western suburbs of Shanghai, and soon reached the first of the fortified checkpoints that guarded the entrances to the city. The Nationalist soldiers in their American tanks were turning back hundreds of destitute peasants, without rice or land to crop, trying to find refuge in Shanghai. Shanty towns of mud dwellings, walls reinforced with truck tyres and kerosene drums, covered the fields near the burnt-out Olympic stadium at Nantao. Smoke still rose from the stands, a beacon used by the American pilots flying across the China Sea from their bases in Japan and Okinawa.

As they drove along the perimeter road, Jim stared at Lunghua Airfield, now a dream of flight. Dozens of US Navy and Air Force planes sat on the grass, factory-new fighters and chromium-sheathed transport aircraft that seemed to be waiting delivery to a show-room window in the Nanking Road.

Jim expected to see Lunghua Camp deserted, but far from being abandoned the former prison was busy again, fresh barbed wire strung along its fences. Although the war had been over for nearly three months, more than a hundred British nationals were still living in the closely guarded compound. Entire families had taken over the former dormitories in E Block, in which they had built suites of rooms within walls of American ration cartons, parachute canisters and bales of unread Reader’s Digests. When Jim, searching for Basie’s cubicle, tried to pull one of the magazines from its makeshift wall he was brusquely warned away.

Leaving the inmates to their treasure, he signalled Yang to drive on to G Block. The Vincents’ room was now the quarters of a Chinese amah working for the British couple across the corridor. She refused to admit Jim, or open the door more than a crack, and he returned to the Lincoln and ordered Yang on a last circuit of the camp.

The hospital and the camp cemetery had vanished, and the site was an open tract of ash and cinders, from which a few charred joists protruded. The graves had been carefully levelled, as if a series of tennis courts was about to be laid. Jim walked through the empty drums of kerosene which had fuelled the fire. He gazed through the wire at the airfield, and at the concrete runway pointing to Lunghua Pagoda. Dense vegetation covered the wrecks of the Japanese aircraft. As he stood by the wire, tracing the course of the canal through the narrow valley, an American bomber swept across the camp. For a moment, reflected from the underside of its silver wings, a pale light raced like a wraith between the nettles and stunted willows.