Passages: J.G. Ballard

J.G. Ballard, author of Crash and numerous other works that fracture time and narrative, was born in Shangai in 1930 and spent time as a child in a Japanese-run internment camp. That experience informed his fine, tough novel Empire of the Sun, which is the springboard for the 1991 BBC Bookmark profile posted above. In his upcoming memoir, Miracles of Life, Ballard describes the city of his childhood:

Shanghai was one of the largest cities in the world, 90% Chinese and 100% Americanised. Bizarre advertising displays – the honour guard of 50 Chinese hunchbacks outside the premiere of The Hunchback of Notre Dame sticks in my mind – were part of the everyday reality of the city, though I sometimes wonder if everyday reality was the one element missing.

It was not a British colony, as most people imagine; but it was home to about 50,000 nonChinese who lived mostly in the International Settlement and the adjoining French Concession. It was celebrated as the “wickedest city in the world”, though as a child I knew nothing about the thousands of bars and brothels. Unlimited venture capitalism rode in gaudy style down streets lined with beggars showing off their sores and wounds.

Every day the trucks of the Shanghai municipal council roamed the streets collecting the hundreds of bodies of destitute Chinese who had starved to death. Partying, cholera and smallpox somehow coexisted with a small English boy’s excited trips in the family Buick to the country club swimming pool.

Every drive through Shanghai I would see something strange and mysterious but treat it as normal – the prosperous Chinese businessmen pausing to savour a thimble of blood tapped from the neck of a vicious goose tethered to a telephone pole; young Chinese gangsters in American suits beating up a shopkeeper; beggars fighting over their pitches; a vast firework display celebrating a new night-club while armoured cars of the Shanghai police drove into a screaming mob of rioting factory workers; the army of prostitutes in fur coats outside the Park hotel, “waiting for friends” as Vera, my White Russian nanny, told me. Open sewers fed into the stinking Whangpoo River and the whole city reeked of dirt, disease and a miasma of cooking fat from the thousands of Chinese food vendors. Anything was possible and everything could be bought and sold.

Unfortunately, “Passages” is a doubly appropriate term here. Ballard has disclosed that he was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in mid-2006, which spurred him to write Miracles of Life. This is terribly sad news, and all I can do is wish him all the best.