Why Empire of the Sun was Important

Since JG Ballard’s death recently I’ve heard a lot of people on the radio, in print and in casual conversations praise Ballard’s Empire of the Sun. Perhaps the conversations are not that surprising as I’m in Shanghai so obviously the novel has a certain resonance for people here interested in the history of the pre-revolutionary Shanghailanders. So I’ll throw in my twopenny worth for what’s its worth.

Personally I’ve never actually thought Empire of the Sun was a great book – at least not within Ballard’s overall cannon which contains several more important and greater works notably Crash (1973) and his other dystopian novels of the British new wave (a wave he largely created).

In this sense Empire is an aberration rather than the norm in terms of Ballard’s work. A "novel",

though obviously based on Ballard’s own experiences, rather than an autobiography and not intended as a a reliable historical text. Indeed Ballard never claimed it should be used as such (when other internees disputed his book he had to point this out repeatedly to peopel who refused to see the word "novel" on the cover) and insisted the words ‘A Novel’ appeared on the cover. Of course Spielberg’s film (and it’s hard to imagine the Hollywood engendered Spielberg liking anything else of Ballard’s – surely he would have been put off by the "adultness" and remorseless downbeat nature of his fiction) further removed the book from any reality with the rather annoying insertion of several scenes not in the book that seem to add nothing except a certain late twentieth century political correctness Spielberg is of course noted for.

So if it’s not exactly a great book why is it important? It seems to me that Ballard’s stark dystopian literature, his nervousness of the culture of consumption and general social vacuity are best understood

through the prism of his wartime experiences. That’s why reading Empire (and his decidedly less commonly read, but arguably more revealing, follow up The Kindness of Women, published in 1991) is important – not to learn anything about Shanghai (which you won’t unless you know absolutely nothing about the place and time, in which case sue your history teachers) or particularly Ballard’s experiences or feelings at the time (Jim is not him he was always keen to point out and says little about the situation either personally or politically) but to better understand the roots of Ballard’s incredibly important fiction that he wrote after he returned to England.

I think Ballard himself saw Empire this way. In one of his last interviews with the BBC he discussed his youthful experiences. Ballard accepted that of course his fiction would have been totally different if he had not undergone the unpleasantness of inte rnment in Shanghai and of course it had changed and shaped him to a great extent. Ballard’s fiction often challenges the assumptions of the security of daily life we generally have and, of course, at a young age Ballard saw those illusions shattered completely.

In Shanghai Ballard learnt the essential surrealism of life – he remembers walking the previously neat and prosperous streets and seeing cars on their roofs (the bomb that fell outside the Cathay Hotel left), apartment buildings shattered to reveal their innards of 20 living rooms and 20 private lives that weren't meant to be on public display and of course dead bodies littering the pavement (both the starved and the bombed). Ballard believed that the war had made him nervous of bland reassurances that everything was all right and that when anyone told him everything was “all right”, it was invariably anything but. As he said, ‘reality is a stage set that can be swept aside, as I saw as a boy in Shanghai.’

Clearly that loss of one privileged life for another dystopian one is key as was (and noted in The Kindness of Women) the unexpected death of Ballard’s wife at a young age that left him a widower with three children to care for) proved to him the transient and temporary nature of everyday seemingly constant reality.

What else did he take from his Shanghai days? I think an instinctive distrust of uncircumscribed and rampant capitalism (though he was far from a revolutionary socialist) and a certain sense that anarchy can break out in a moment and things, however seemingly permanent, can be smashed to smithereens in the blink of eye (or the fall of a Japanese bomb on Shanghai Railway Station 1937 as left). I think he also learnt to appreciate the ridiculous lengths people go to protect themselves from perceived threats real and false,to insulate themselves. This comes out in numerous Ballard novels where people retreat behind walls they think can protect them - think of the horrendous gated communities of his 2000 novel Super-Cannes. Of course Ballard saw walls around everyone's properties in Shanghai in the 1930s - another tradition that continues today as everyone puts up walls, hires guards and puts bars on their windows to protect them from...what? Ultimately Ballard knew that once inside such supposedly secure and isolated places you then went basically nuts, became paranoid and broke down.

Interestingly I think one of the most important things he took from Shanghai that became a recurrent theme for him - the human struggle within a consumerist landscape – ended in 1937 but has come back to haunt the city as the post-1949 powers that be encourage consumption over spirituality and shopping as the great ideology-religion-culture to end all others and to negate opposition or disgruntlement with one's lot in life.

It was these experiences that shaped Ballard’s incredible fiction and therefore why reading Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women remains important. The interesting thing to ponder is quite how Ballard partly predicted the descent of Shanghai into a consumerist driven dystopia where briefs fads for fusion cuisine and competitive shopping replace thought and experience? There can be few more “Ballardian” spots on earth than the vacuous self styled “elite” crowds gathering on the balcony of 3 on the Bund, the oddly philistine speculators of Shanghai’s art scene or the injunction of the local government that to shop is patriotic; to question dissent – in this sense Ballard did come full circle whether he thought about modern Shanghai or not.

Remembering JG Ballard - Lunghua Airfield

As someone who hates gyms in all their incarnations and all forms of organised “games” I do still accept that I need some exercise. Walking, or occasionally a swim, suffices. Walking is also educational and instructive unlike time spent in a gym as well as having the added bonuses of seeing things (other than CCTV9 or CNN, neither of which interest me in the slightest) and of being able to wear normal clothes rather than the ridiculous outfits I see people “heading for the gym” wearing. Therefore an interest in psychogeography, I think, is the answer.

For those not au fait with psychogeography it’s basically a strategy for exploring cities in such a way that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape. Perhaps Will Self is the most famous practitioner of the discipline at the moment – walking to Heathrow while of course the novelist Ian Sinclair experienced the outer rim of London anew by walking the M25. I’ve decided to coin the term psychohistoricalgeography and so my Saturday…

This weekend I was struck with the idea of two things – the need for fresh air and wanting to commemorate the sad passing of JG Ballard in some way. Actually I live just round the corner from Ballard’s old family home on Shanghai’s former Amherst Avenue and do occasionally eat in the restaurant that now inhabits the former Ballard residence – not much good but a nice house. Architecture trumps cuisine anyday, and anyway James Fallows’ on his excellent blog has already posted photos of the interior and exterior of the former residence.

So here was my solution – Ballard, as everyone knows from Empire of the Sun, was interned in the Lunghua (Loonghwa) Civilian Assembly Centre on the outskirts of Shanghai and which abutted the Lunghua Airfield and was close to the Lunghua Pagoda – all are shown in the film and described in the book. He was interned in 1943 with his parents and younger sister, spending over two years, the remainder of World War Two, in the camp. His family lived in a small area in G block, a two-story residence for 40 families. He attended school in the camp, the teachers being inmates from a number of professions. I’m not sure if JG himself had to walk to the Camp but many internees did – I did the walk on a breezy, sunny Saturday morning without a suitcase containing my most precious belongings and without any Japanese guards shouting at me to hurry up. I’m also a reasonably fit 42. Many of the internees were much older, unwell and had to make the walk in either far colder or far hotter weather depending on when they were interned.

So I walked from Ballard’s childhood home on Amherst Avenue to Lunghua Airfield, or what’s left of it. This is not an overly long walk – tales about 90 minutes at most out from the former Western Roads Settlement (where Ballard’s family house was and not the French Concession as so often written) along the old Siccawei Road (now Huashan Road) through Siccawei itself (now the Xujiahui shopping district) out past the sports stadium, past the Lunghua Revolutionary Martyrs memorial and to the Lunghua Pagoda (which is these days adjacent to a Tesco supermarket for those that like to make points about that sort of contrast). Continue slightly further along and you’ll reach the rather grand edifice of the old modernist-style air terminal, with its sweeping observation deck and control tower still reasonably intact. Inside are a reasonable Shanghainese restaurant where I lunched and a KTV joint.

In the film, if I remember correctly, you see the Japanese planes fly over the terminal building with the Pagoda (which is obviously still a major tourist attraction) in the background sans Tesco. There is still some original tiling left in the building and it does rather have the aura of old time air travel. The area is a striking image in the book and also in the film – and if you get into the right psychohistoricalgeographist mindset still quite atmospheric.

Here’s remembering the great JG once again

A Few Posts on Keelung III – The Monument to Prince Kitashirakawa

Before moving on to other things a couple of posts about a recent trip to Keelung in Taiwan to get out of the way. Today the small monument to the Japanese Prince Kitashirakawa. It’s hidden just slightly back from the road that runs around the base of the old Ershawan Fort.

Kitshirakawa (1847-1895) was the 2nd head of a collateral branch of the Japanese imperial family and a professional soldier who had been trained in Germany. After the outbreak of the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, he was transferred to the elite IJA 1st Division and participated in the Taiwan Expedition of 1874. During the invasion, he contracted malaria and died outside of Tainan. This meant that Prince Kitashirakawa was the first member of the Japanese imperial family known to have died outside of Japan, and the first (in modern times) to have died in war.

The monument itself was erected in 1933 by the Japanese to commemorate their “conquest of Taiwan”. It has been restored now and has some pretty complete guides placed alongside to explain its history. It seems (understandably perhaps being in an obscure location and being Japanese) rarely visited now but remains in a small garden. To be honest I stumbled across it walking from the French Cemetery mentioned the other day back into town.

A Few Posts on Keelung I - The Keelung Harbour Integrated Administration Building

A Few Posts on Keelung II – The Cimetière Française de Kilung
A Few Posts on Keelung VI - Ershawan Fort

Today is World Book Day

In most of the world today is World Book Day. The date of April 23rd is apparently the selected date due to the (contested) fact that Shakespeare died on on April 23, 1616. Or if you like his birth which is widely assumed to have been on April 23, 1564 (and also happens to Nabokov’s birthday too). Interestingly Miguel de Cervantes also died on April 23rd. (actually their deaths were ten days apart as Spain had already switched to the Gregorian calendar in 1582, while England, ever the contrarian nation, didn’t switch to the Julian calendar until 1752.

And talking of British contrarianism - in the UK, birthplace obviously of Shakespeare, World Book Day is held on March 5th! I love being a Brit sometimes. You see there’s a clash as April 23 is already taken by England’s patron saint, St. George.

Anyway – World Book Day seems like a good idea to me whether in March or April or any month – so go buy a book. If you can’t think of one to buy look down the left hand column of this blog for possible inspiration!. In Taiwan the Japanese book chain Kinokuniya issued this rather nice card to celebrate the event.

Deviation Posting – Probably the Best Cast Ever – Probably the Worst Film Ever

Imagine this – a film with the following cast of amazing actors:

Kenneth Branagh

Bill Nighy

Tom Wilkinson

Terence Stamp

Eddie Izzard

Kevin McNally

Tom Hollander

Kenneth Cranham

David Bamber

Bernard Hill

And not forgetting the fantastic Dutch actress from Black Book - Carice van Houten

That is one of the best cast lists any film could have

But then they got Tom Cruise and make Valkyrie

Trains of the Kowloon-Canton Railway

While in Tai Po last weekend (see previous post) I couldn’t of course resist a trip to the (free!!) Hong Kong Railway Museum. The museum is home to the original Tai Po Market train station which was a stop on the Kowloon-Canton Railway that obviously ran from Guangzhou right down the harbour at Tsim Tsa Choi originally.

The station house is excellent with some old signalling gear, the train masters office and the old ticket booth with a display of old KCR tickets. The building is marvellous and typical of the old KCR stations. Inside are some nice exhibits including an old KCR poster (which I’d really like – very annoying they weren’t selling reprints) and some old black and white pictures of crowds at the station.

There’s also a few oddities like an old trolley (left) which looks fun. There’s an old puffer that ran on the line in the 1920s (middle), a more recent (1950s) diesel (right) and a couple of old carriages you can stroll through.

A nice fast visit. Strangely the place was mostly full of happy young newly weds having their wedding photos taken next to old diesel trains and in front of the current lines of the KCR train sweeping past from the border at Lo Wu down to Tsim Sha Choi East. Takes all sorts I suppose.

A Few Posts on Keelung II – The Cimetière Française de Kilung

One of the more interesting sites in Keelung is the Cimetière Française de Kilung. The French cemetery is a reminder of the Sino-French War of 1884 to 1885 (see my other posts on this war as related to Danshui) located on a plot hemmed in by apartment buildings near the ruins of the old Ershawan Fort.

Actually this is not the original French cemetery, which was moved from a seaside location in 1909. It is reasonably well maintained though, unlike the foreigners’ cemetery in Danshui, the site has not been designated a national relic, though is open to the public. Two obelisks stand at opposite ends of the plot - one in French is dedicated to soldiers and sailors; the other, in both French and Chinese, is dedicated to officers as well. Ranks and officers kept apart in death too it seems!

The total number of French soldiers and sailors buried in Keelung is unknown, though the most common figure cited in 600 French officers, soldiers, and sailors. Approximately 120 of them were killed in battle, while 150 died later of their wounds. The majority succumbed to malaria, cholera, dysentery, or other maladies. More than a fifth of the French force never returned home.

The French cemetery is the subject of a book by Christophe Rouil titled Formosa: Some Nearly-Forgotten Battles, (or at least Formose, des Batailles Presque Oubliées – I’m not sure if there’s an English version or not) which took the author a year and a half to research and write. Rouil notes that after World War II the cemetery fell into disrepair. In 1947, M. Bayens, a French diplomat based in Shanghai, reported to his superiors that the graveyard was in a terrible state. Rather than wait for instructions from Paris, he spent around US$100 of his own money (which was later reimbursed by France's foreign ministry) to have the cemetery fixed up.

To get there just follow the harbour road around the port past the hilly park that houses the Ershawan Fort and you’ll find it on the left hand side.

A Few Posts on Keelung I - The Keelung Harbour Integrated Administration Building

A Few Posts on Keelung III – The Monument to Prince Kitashirakawa

A Few Posts on Keelung VI - Ershawan Fort