Empire of the Sun - J. G. Ballard [149]
Lunghua Camp, in the open countryside to the south of Shanghai, occupied the site of a Chinese teacher-training college. Classrooms became dormitories, wooden barrack huts housed the unmarried women, and the staff bungalows served as the quarters for the guards and commandant.
The Lunghua district, with its countless creeks and canals, was notorious as a mosquito-infested area, and soon the first cases of malaria broke out. In the humid summer heat everyone moved in a dull, sweaty daze. Our food, for the first year, consisted of grey sweet potatoes, boiled rice, a coarse brown bread and occasional dice-sized pieces of gristly meat. Rooms and corridors were a jumble of suitcases and trunks, and sheets hanging over lines of string soon converted the open dormitories into a maze of tiny cubicles. Once the 2000 internees had settled in, life in Lunghua was dominated by the overheated summers and freezing winters, by stench, noise and boredom.
I was enthralled. Like most British children in pre-war Shanghai, I had met few adult males other than my father’s friends. Within a few weeks, as I roamed around the camp, chess set under my arm, I was soon on good terms with dozens of men. Architects, lawyers, engineers and plant managers, they were bored enough to play a game of chess and dispense a little cynical wisdom to an impressionable young ear.
As a family of four, the Ballards were assigned one of the forty small rooms in G block, so cramped that during the day my father propped his mattress against the wall and set up a card-table from which we could eat our meals. I had been brought up by servants and was fascinated to find myself living, eating and sleeping within an arm’s reach of my parents, like the impoverished Chinese families I had seen during my cycle rides around the Shanghai slums.
‘As a family of four, the Ballards were assigned one of the forty small rooms. My parents must have found their talkative and hyperactive son an immense trial, and were glad to see me anywhere other than their poky room.’
But my parents must have found their talkative and hyperactive son an immense trial, and were glad to see me anywhere other than their poky room. I roved around the camp, sitting in on bridge and poker games, curious to know how people were adapting to internment. Many of the British in Shanghai had been intoxicated for years, moving through the day from office to lunch to dinner and nightclub in a haze of dry martinis. Sober for the first time, they lost weight and began to read, rekindled old interests and organized drama societies and lecture evenings.
In retrospect, I realize that internment helped people to discover unknown sides to themselves. They conserved their emotions, and kept a careful inventory of hopes and feelings. I often found that taciturn or quick-tempered people could be surprisingly generous, and that some of the missionaries who had devoted their lives to the Chinese peasantry could show a curious strain of selfishness.
A few chronic idlers refused to work, but most people buckled down to their assigned tasks. The internees ran the camp, cooking the rations and maintaining the septic tanks and water supply. A school opened for the children, a blessed relief for their parents and a valuable punitive weapon for the Japanese. After an escape attempt or any infringement of the rules they would close the school and impose a day-long curfew, forcing the parents to cope with their bored and restless offspring.
Still intrigued by the Japanese, I soon met some of the guards. Hanging around their bungalows, I realized that they were also imprisoned in Lunghua. The younger soldiers invited me into their bare and unfurnished rooms. They strapped me into their kendo armour and taught me to fence, a whirl of wooden swords that usually sent me back to G block dazed, head ringing from a dozen blows.
They were friendly