This was just before I left America to live in Japan for two years, and I knew then that I wanted to see Shanghai.īallard’s descriptions of growing up in pre-war Shanghai as the son of a wealthy British textile manager sound like a fairy tale with country clubs, elaborate expatriate costume parties, and as Jim the young boy says, “there was opulence.” Meanwhile, the Japanese have the city surrounded and a siege mentality has taken hold of its Chinese and Western residents alike. I first learned of Ballard’s story through Steven Spielberg’s wonderful film of the same name, which I watched when it came out in 1989. Ballard tells us how he survived his adolescent years alone in an internment camp under the Japanese occupation of Shanghai during World War II. Must try and go there some time.In his autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun J.G.
I seem to have been reading a fair bit about Shanghai recently, including the first good Tintin book, set a few years earlier. Long, long ago, I saw the Spielberg film of the book (and have almost completely forgotten it), and much more recently I read the author's autobiography which covers much of the same ground (with the important difference that he actually spent his period of internment with his parents rather than separated from them). The descriptions are vivid and visceral, and the human interactions in desperate circumstances all too plausible.
It's brutal and awful, yet the protagonist's innocence gives the whole narrative a vivid foundation, slightly distanced from the awful world of the adults, yet focused on important details like how many maggots you can eat to remain healthy. NwhyteThis is a tremendous novel, based of course on real life, about the experiences of a boy surviving Shanghai during the Japanese occupation if the Second World War.
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