So back to happier times: I have had occasional requests for the link to the following extensive post, written as I toured China in 2011, and originally posted on Dropbox. It was an incredible trip and I would strongly urge all of you to add China to your bucket list.
For the literary types, scroll to the bottom for a description of my visit to the childhood home of J.G. Ballard. The text, overall, has seen minor edits to bring it up to date but is otherwise identical to the original text posted in 2011.
China Diary
Being a summary of my excellent Chinese adventure, June 19 to July 9, 2011
Draft complete July 9, 2011; revisions to the section on JG Ballard, 26 August, 2011Overview
Having been invited to present a keynote speech at a conference in Xi’an, I ask my colleague Zhirun, who has offered to show me around China, and who is also on the conference organising committee, to help with the planning. He and his family accompany Mary and I for the first two weeks of a three week trip.
Departure
Toronto to Beijing is a polar flight. We fly north over Northern Quebec and Baffin Island, then between the Pole and the northern tips of Greenland and Norway, then along the Siberian coast north of Murmansk. We make landfall somewhere in Siberia, and cross Lake Baikal and the Mongolian steppes before following in Genghis Khan’s steps and approaching Beijing from the north. We arrive at 14:30 local time, 02:30 in Montreal, after 13 hours in flight. Due to the polar route and the proximity to the summer solstice, the entire flight is spent in sunlight.
Beijing
Arrival in Asia is properly chaotic, and we have to push through a huge crowd milling around just outside security. The baggage cart serves as a suitable battering ram to clear the way. As a clear indication that I travel too much, I recognize Yonghao Ni, a former McGill classmate and now a professor at UNB, in the crowd; he has been here for a few days and is waiting for his wife who is on the same flight from Toronto. At customs we used our first words of Mandarin, xie xie(pronounced somewhere between ‘she she’ and ‘chin chin’), meaning ‘thank you’.
On Tuesday morning Zhirun and I visit Beijing Forestry University where we make a presentation about FPInnovations and our R&D programs. The university buildings are decrepit relics of the 1960’s, and the quality of the lab equipment is far below that of the poorest Canadian universities. Budgetary constraints mean the lights are off in the bare, echoing hallways, giving it a gloomy, Stalinist feel. We are not impressed.
In the afternoon we are joined by Mary, Zhirun’s family (his wife Lizhen, 13 year-old Kevin and 8-year old Eric) and a BFU student delegated to ensure we have a Good Time and don’t get lost or robbed. We tour the Summer Palace which includes a lake and a number of pavilions. It’s pretty but not a must-see. I buy a genuine Red Army cap (or so the street vendor assures me) for 30 RMB; I pass on the genuine Mao watch as it is a knock off – I am pretty sure Mao’s watch would not have been quartz-powered.
On Wednesday the student from BFU has arranged a small minivan to take the six of us, the driver and himself to the Great Wall at Badaling. The climb is steep and full of people; my vertigo and the decent weather mean I take the steep path down with Zhirun while the others take the cable car which is likely to give me the willies. The day is hazy, hot and muggy with humidity, dust and smog, and the views are therefore less than spectacular, but nonetheless it is breathtaking. Ultimately the Wall was an exercise in futility as Ghengis Khan and his Mongol hordes didn’t like mountainous routes with narrow passes in any case; he cleverly stuck to flat land more suitable for cavalry and went around the central mountain range, and would have done so anyway, wall or no wall. At the exit there are sad-looking bears in pens which you can feed for 3 RMB (about $0.50), a thoroughly depressing sight. We finish the day in a restaurant where too much food is ordered; we send the grateful student home with a doggie bag.
On Thursday Zhirun and I take the high speed train to Tianjin, one of China’s 4 largest cities (Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing are the others), to visit Tianjin University of Science and Technology and the Nine Dragons Paper Company site there. We plan to return the same evening. This trip is where the true contrasts between the new and old Chinas become evident to me.
First is the transportation. It takes an hour to do the 10 km from the hotel to Beijing South train station, dealing with chaotic early morning traffic. You can’t rent a car in China without a residency permit, which is a good thing as the traffic is a complete madhouse with its own set of complex rules (Rule #1: vigorously and melodiously manipulate the audible warning device, aka horn, at any provocation). The taxi costs about 60 RMB (under $10). From the train station we take the high speed train which hits 330 km/h and covers the 200+ km to Tang Gu (an eastern suburb of Tianjin) in 45 minutes, at a cost of 70 RMB per person. Then it’s back into a taxi for another 45 minute, 10 km ride to the university where we do our dog and pony show again. TUST is newer and better equipped than BFU, having been uprooted from downtown Tianjin and transplanted bodily to this suburban oasis a few years ago. Students ask questions in decent English, wanting to know about employment opportunities in Canada and my views on the future of the pulp and paper industry in China. I am getting good at this Expert thing and they are all suitably impressed.
After lunch in the cafeteria, a driver collects us for the 45 minute drive to the Nine Dragons Paper Company outside Tianjin. We follow a coastal road north. The road is a flat, dead straight 10-lane boulevard, obviously brand new, and utterly deserted. The driver, an employee of the paper mill, is driving the vice mill manager’s new Honda Accord and is soon doing 150 km/h. The surrounding landscape consists of: dirt. Nothing but dirt, and lots of it. In some places the dirt is flat; elsewhere it is arranged in long ridges or furrows; still other places have geometric patterns carved into it. The smog is still quite heavy and we can only see a few kilometres in any direction, where we can occasionally glimpse a solitary excavator slowly rearranging the dirt. It is clear that this entire stretch has been recently cleared for new industrial development, with the road infrastructure going in before industry can build. Google Maps still shows this area (if I have the right spot) as a large series of small fields and narrow tracks, with occasional little farm compounds; the grid of 10 lane boulevards is too new to show up in the photos.Every few kilometres there is an intersection with an identical boulevard. Road blocks prevent our driver barrelling through these at 150 km/h, and also permit bored police officers to get a good view of the vehicle license plates and occupants. It becomes clear that we might not be able to visit here on our own.
Apart from the heavy police presence, there are occasional labourers. We came across a team of 5 or 6, quietly creating a brick sidewalk. Looking forward and back, there is nothing but empty road as far as the eye can see; the emptiness makes the idea of completing another 100 meters of brick sidewalk seem utterly futile. Later we pass a team of 10 tending the flowers and shrubs in the median strip, and finally a pair of ladies sweeping the gutters with long witch’s brooms in a futile attempt to keep the dirt where it belongs, i.e. off the road. None of these work crews are accompanied by a vehicle of any kind, so they are obviously at the mercy of shift foremen. (The two fellows selling melons were obviously independent entrepreneurs as they both had tricycles). After 20 minutes of this, a block of apartment towers under construction emerges from the smog. Completely isolated from any other building, this site consists of 8 or 10 rows of buildings, each row consisting of 8 or 10 apartment blocks, for a total of about 80 towers. None are complete; all are at least 20, if not 30 stories. (Exact details were hard to gather at 150 km/h). Assuming 80 towers of 25 floors, with 20 apartments per floor and two people on average per apartment (an average between bachelors and the standard Chinese 3-person family), this works out to housing for 80,000 people. Presumably there will soon be industrial employment near by. We will come across many similar blocks of housing, each suitable for tens of thousands of residents, either complete or in construction, in all of our travels.
Beyond the new tower blocks, we start to see industrial plants: a huge petrochemical plant of some kind, then the Nine Dragons paper mill. We are greeted by the vice general manager, a classmate of the professor at TUST who arranged the visit. Both offices and paper mills are spotless; staff are apparently hired to permanently mop the offices and sweep the streets to keep the dirt at bay. The mill employs 2000, and most, including the vice mill manager, live in company housing onsite. The mill operates 4 state-of-the-art paper machines to make 1.6 million tonnes per year of recycled cardboard, using old papers and cardboard imported from North America as well as that collected locally. This is a staggering amount (total Canadian cardboard production is probably about 1.6 MT) but it is apparently not enough to meet demand: the building for a fifth machine is almost complete, the foundations for a sixth are being poured, and there is a field with room for machines number 7 through 10. Once complete, total production from the site will then be 4 MT/y. This is, however, just a portion of the Nine Dragons output; they operate about 32 other machines in other locations across China and can’t keep up with demand for cardboard, both for shipping goods to North America and for internal use.The vice-general manager drives us around the mill in his new Honda. After a tour of two of the machines (which are temporarily idled because there is a problem with the onsite coal-fired power generating station), we approach the gate to leave. The guard, in crisp military-style uniform and cap despite the heat and humidity, recognises the car and snaps to attention, saluting us as he opens the gate. The manager recognises his efforts with an idle wave, lifting two fingers off the steering wheel.
We take a different route back to Tianjin, avoiding the coastal route. The driver can’t do 150 km/h anymore due to lumbering, belching communist-era lorries hogging the left lanes at 45 km/h, and tricycles full of building materials in the right lanes. This leads to a lot of lane changing and dodging traffic; it is a miracle no one is killed. The city core is choked due to traffic and the fact that the entire city is one big construction site, and the last 10 km to the train station takes another 45 minutes. The return train hits 330 km/h again, getting us to Beijing in 30 minutes. In Beijing there is a torrential downpour, and there are no taxis to be had. We walk the 40 minutes from the nearest subway station to our hotel in steady rain, after buying umbrellas from an enterprising fellow at the subway exit who had a duffle bag full and was selling them for 15 RMB. He knew he was sitting on a gold mine; our offer of two for 20 RMB was dismissed. Just another reminder of the contrasts in this city of 30 million people.
Beijing, part 2On Friday another BFU student takes us to the Forbidden City. Unlike the hordes of tourists, who enter by the south gate facing Tiananmen Square, we enter through the north gate directly into the Emperor’s gardens and residences. This is a stunning area of small pavilions and sculpture, masked by cypress trees which reveal new delights at every turn of the path. The layout is geometrical but with deliberate small areas of more organic layouts. The pavilions have evocative but almost comical names, bordering on parody – you couldn’t make some of these names up with a straight face: the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the Hall of Mental Cultivation, the Pavilion to Usher in Light, the Hill of Accumulated Elegance, the Hall of Literary Elegance, and my personal favourite, the Hall of Central Extremities. As you leave the Emperor’s quarters, you move through increasingly large squares where a progressively larger number of outsiders, of progressively lower rank, would have been permitted to visit, until you leave by the main south gate onto Tiananmen Square. The last gate but one was originally called the Gate for Worshipping Heaven when it was built under the Ming Dynasty, but was renamed the Gate of Imperial Supremacy, presumably following some internal debate on the topic; with the matter settled it was renamed the Gate of Supreme Harmony.
After a visit to the silk and pearl emporium, which is worth a separate report and where we profitably use our second Chinese word, tai qui le, meaning ‘too expensive’, we have what is said to be the best Beijing duck available anywhere. Indeed it is delicious, and once again the lucky student goes home with a doggie bag.
On Saturday morning we move to the Fragrant Hill Empark Hotel, a resort in the shadow of the mountains surrounding Beijing to the west. The Wall is visible above the hotel on the ridgeline. Saturday is devoted to a meeting of the Eminent Refiner and Groundwood Scientists (ERGS), a private club accessible only by invitation. I attend at the invitation of Zhirun, who passes his initiation rite and becomes a full member at the official dinner. (I am invited to attend the meeting, and to share in the costs, but not to become a member, as I am not really a scientist anymore).The main purpose of the club appears to be eating and drinking in exotic locales, although some interesting technical papers are given. The winner of the award for Best Paper will get his name engraved on the base of the ERGS Elephant (don’t ask), which is in my keeping as Program Manager, Mechanical Pulping.
On Sunday we head to the airport for a 90 minute flight to Xi’an, the ancient Chinese capital and location of the main event, the International Mechanical Pulping Conference.
Playing tourist in Xi’anXi’an is the ancient Chinese capital, and portions of it survived the turmoil associated with numerous changes of dynasty relatively intact. We are driven to the Xi’an City Wall, a 600-year old pile of dirt with bricks on top. It is intact and you can rent bicycles to ride the full loop along the broad brick-paved top. Mary and I wind up with a battered tandem with dodgy brakes.
We are told that the 14 km-long wall encloses a total of two million inhabitants, with another 6 million living outside. Given the surface area of 12 km2, this is a staggering 167,000 people per square kilometre, mostly in low-rise buildings. Later in the week, in torrid but dry weather, we visit the Xi’an International Horticultural Exposition on the outskirts of the city. Everywhere there are blocks of apartment towers under construction; we pass a small traditional walled village which is being demolished to make room for another such development. On Thursday we move to the Tang Paradise, a spectacular hotel built in the Tang Dynasty style with pavilions set in public formal gardens and pools. It looks like it is 1000 years old, but, according to Google Maps, was just a field full of dirt a couple of years ago, and it is surrounded by apartment towers under construction. On the way we pass what looks like a Western-style townhouse development: with only a few families per hectare, this must be for very wealthy people indeed.
July 1 is the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist party, and the television stations are full of speeches by President Hu Jintao and pageants featuring cute Chinese girls singing patriotic songs in military uniforms with short (but not indecently short) skirts, backed by masses of dancers in traditional costume. One show features dancers in front of a huge video screen showing modernization: highways with flowing traffic (a lie, as the traffic is usually gridlocked), scientists in labs with test tubes (a moderate lie if some of the pulp and paper labs we saw were any guide), modern cityscapes, etc. Clearly the government is selling the idea that modernisation will bring better lives for all, if not for the peasants doing the grunt work, then for their children.
After another university tour, we visit the Terra Cotta Warrior site. It is spectacular. The most amazing fact is that, in a country which carefully records everything and has done so through something like 26 consecutive dynasties, there was no historical record of this tomb; farmers drilling a well stumbled across the site in 1974. Equally impressive was a Han Dynasty mausoleum, about 2000 years old, also featuring huge numbers of clay figurines of animals and people, with the largest about 3 feet tall. The figures were made with clay bodies (anatomically correct, I might add), with real clothes and wooden arms that rotted away, leaving only the armless clay figures behind. This tour ended in a restaurant specialising in dumplings.
And throughout it all, the most memorable part of the visit to Xi’an has to be the enormous number of apartment buildings under construction. From the top of the pagoda in the Tang Paradise public park, I count 20 construction cranes before giving up. The country is modernising at a massive rate, using all the money earned by selling stuff to Walmart. And what looks old is frequently deceiving, as shown by the Tang Dynasty theme park encompassing our hotel. It’s not quite Disney World, but it’s close; Tang World, anyone?
Night train to SuzhouIn a scene of utter chaos, surrounded by thousands of people with bags and boxes held together with twine and duct tape, we make our way across the central square in front of Xi’an’s old train station. Propelled by an energetic porter on a tricycle, Zhirun, his eldest son and our luggage disappear into the crowd and there is a brief panic until I manage to get my cell phone to negotiate China’s digital network and contact Zhirun through his Chinese cell phone. With some collaboration from authorities, we get our large amounts of luggage on the train and secreted among the bunks of the sleeper car. The sleeper car is made up of little rooms with four bunks each; we share our berth with a young girl who goes right to sleep, and a young mother with her two-year old son.
Fortunately the kid is well behaved and sleeps through the night. The ride is bumpy and the partition with the next berth rattles; neither of us gets much sleep. However the opportunity to see some countryside before dozing off (we leave at 5:00 pm) makes it worthwhile. Abandoned villages full of windowless two story brick buildings, all huddled inside a wall, are numerous, and are being slowly disassembled (not bulldozed) and replaced by tower blocks. We pass at least two coal-fired generating stations under expansion before dark, one so close we can almost touch the new cooling tower. High speed rail lines are being built everywhere we look, using a bridge type of architecture consisting of standardised pre-stressed concrete beams sitting on piers rather than more traditional railway building methods; we pass a plant churning out these beams in vast numbers and loading them onto rail flatbeds. One advantage of the bridge method is that it can leap over obstacles (such as the aforementioned abandoned villages) with little or no demolition – this can be done later; also wildlife is unlikely to wander out onto the tracks, and there are no level crossings to convert to underpasses. (You can’t have a level crossing with a train bearing down at 330 km/h). The night train, while not high-speed, is relatively quick and makes few stops but is pretty uncomfortable; if you choose to travel this way in China, remember to bring your own toilet paper and some sleeping pills.
Suzhou
We arrive in Suzhou, totally exhausted, at 7:00 a.m. on Monday morning. Given our past experiences with taxis, Zhirun has arranged a minivan and driver to take us to the hotel. At a cost of 200 RMB, this is about $32 and well worth it as we would have needed two taxis at 50 RMB each, assuming we could find some willing to take us and our voluminous luggage. Fortunately the hotel, part of an American chain with a large replica of the Statue of Liberty in the lobby, has rooms available this early and we can shower, shave and change before visiting the paper mill at Changshu. Unlike Xi’an, which is hot and dry, Suzhou is hot and humid, and my shirt is quickly soaked after a short walk around the park to the west of the hotel. To the east, there are six construction sites within the same number of city blocks, each with a new tower going up; we can see at least 13 cranes without really trying.
The mill at Changshu, an hour north by car, is interesting because it is owned and operated by the Finnish paper making giant UPM-Kymmene, and because it is a customer of several of our Canadian pulp mills. The product is largely photocopy paper, with some lightly coated magazine grades thrown in, made on two big, fast modern paper machines. It’s not as big as the Nine Dragons mill in Tianjin, but it is probably as profitable, and like Nine Dragons, it has lots of room for new paper machines should the demand arise. Also like Nine Dragons, most of the 850 employees live onsite, with their families, in company housing.
The mill visit over, we are now officially on vacation, and Zhirun treats us to typical Suzhou dishes for dinner. Suzhou is Zhirun’s home town and he is glad to be able to show it off to us. The cuisine here tends towards sweeter sauces than the fiery concoctions in western Xi’an; seafood is more prevalent too, given the short distance to Shanghai and the sea, and the octopus is delicious. 
Suzhou, at least the section we are staying in, is clean and modern, with lots of new construction. I walk to the waterfront along a lake, and notice a school, shops and other services aimed at the residents of the new high-rises. The streets are broad and straight. Later we visit the market in the old part of town where the streets are narrow and crooked, and prices are even lower than the silk and pearl emporium in Beijing (perhaps due to the fact we are the only westerners in sight). Then we tour a Buddhist monastery which also serves vegetarian meals. The monastery doesn’t look like much from outside, but includes a cool, dark wooden hall with 500 gilt Buddhas, all slightly larger than life size, and all with different clothes, poses and expressions, in cases made of gorgeous dark wood and glass. No photos are allowed, and even if they were, it would be somewhat crass in such a beautiful spot. Outside there is a garden whose purpose is releasing live things; the pools are full of turtles, frogs and fish, and there are two white doves that allow me to approach to within a few feet. This quick glimpse of the old Asia makes me want to return and explore more thoroughly. That afternoon, we visit Zhirun’s brother, who is a senior executive with a silk manufacturing company; Mary runs amok in the warehouse. We are invited to dinner with Zhirun’s brother, sister and elderly parents and are treated like royalty. His 91-year old father was raised by missionaries in Shanghai in the ‘20s and ‘30s, and still knows enough English to welcome us to China. Overall we would not have seen anywhere near as much of China without Zhirun and Lizhen’s help, and without the translation services provided by Kevin (their eldest son).
Shanghai
On Wednesday morning we bid farewell to Zhirun and his family, and set off alone (in another car provided by the agency) to hot and humid Shanghai, about 90 minutes away. 
At first glance, Shanghai is very different from Beijing. Partly it is more Western; the main shopping streets near our hotel (on the edge of the French Concession) feature expensive New York, London or Paris brands; there are Westerners on the street who look like they live here (as opposed to tourists with cameras); it doesn’t have the broad, straight boulevards of Beijing but narrower tree-lined streets that follow gently curving paths. At least one of these streets reminded both Mary and I of some Parisian neighbourhoods. (The plaque proclaiming ‘Place de Tong Ren’ as part of the 280ième Arrondissement strengthens the impression). But Shanghai is also more Asian, with more of the old alleyways still surviving. We also notice beggars and street people for the first time, perhaps an indication of our limited experience in other cities, but perhaps also an indicator of a greater disparity between rich and poor here. Certainly the city around our downtown hotel is a startling mix of new shopping streets and narrow little Asian laneways, many consisting of 3-story brick buildings.
In one such laneway, we visit one of Mao’s residences when he was preparing the revolution in the 1920’s. The purpose of the museum, which is free, is to encourage the study of Marxism-Leninism, Maoism and the theories of Deng Xiaoping in order to promote the development of a healthy economy. I’m paraphrasing a bit but it was all heavy on the propaganda and sounded a lot like a bad Cold War movie about the Yellow Peril full of people calling each other Comrade. A room is devoted to Mao’s son, Mao Anyong, who was killed in action during the War Against US Imperialism in Korea (or words to that effect). The exhibit includes soil from the location of his death and other mementos. The Lonely Planet guide says this museum is for people with real nostalgia for the Great Helmsman and the Cultural Revolution, and they are probably right. Dinner that night is in a Balinese restaurant where we have a wonderful meal for about 400 RMB (not cheap for China, at just under $65); only the wine is priced at Western levels, with a California Chardonnay costing 300 RMB.
On Thursday we visit the Old Town and stray into very narrow alleys with live chickens and ducks, some very bizarre smells, narrow little stalls with families living above, and plenty of poverty. The electrical wiring hanging overhead illustrates ingenuity if not respect for building codes. In places we feel like intruders even if no one is staring; I don’t take out the camera. Along the way, we pass what the Lonely Planet map says is another such neighbourhood, but there is a wall around it and it has been reduced to rubble to make way for a new tower development of some sort. We also visit a shopping area designed to look like an old Chinese town but obviously quite a bit newer than the real thing. Nonetheless the silk goods in the phony, new ‘old town’ are quite a bit cheaper than those in the markets on the edge of the real Old Town, I assume due to the fact that the Lonely Planet guide recommends these edgier, more ‘authentic’ markets which are therefore full of gullible foreigners getting fleeced by shop owners unwilling to haggle if they think they’ve hooked a live one.
Finally we visit a Buddhist temple with an astonishing jade Budddha. (It also has the requisite assortment of gilt Buddhas). Ordinary people are burning wads of incense and phony paper money, and kneeling in front of various Buddhas, so the religion is very much alive. A guide appears out of nowhere and shows us around, skilfully navigating us to the air-conditioned boutique near the exit, a welcome occasion as it is sweltering. They may be monks, but that doesn’t mean they can’t also be businessmen.We take a quick trip to the Bund where the offices of the British merchant bankers and opium dealers of the 1920’s face the futuristic towers of Pudong across the Huangpo River. We don’t make it to the Shanghai World Finance Centre, the third highest building in the world at almost half a kilometre. It’s impressive, even if it does look a bit like a giant beer bottle opener.
Searching for J.G. Ballard
My regular readers (if any) may know of my fondness for the writer J.G. Ballard. Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930, of wealthy British parents. His father ran a cotton mill for a large British textile company, and the family lived on what was then the outskirts of Shanghai in a large British-style home just to the west of what is today the French Concession. They had as many as ten Chinese servants, including a chauffeur who would drive them into town in the family Buick. In 1937, the Japanese took Shanghai, and while the Chinese population suffered immeasurably as a result, the Japanese left the large expat community alone and allowed them to continue with their business. (Up until 1937, the city had little in the way of immigration controls, and there were large communities of White Russians, Eastern European Jews and others fleeing troubles at home, as well as a large French, British, American and German population of businessmen and their families).
Following the attack on Pearl Harbour, the Japanese decided the expats represented a potential threat, and over the next two years had them rounded up and interned in civilian camps. The camp where the Ballard family was imprisoned with other British expats was probably typical: there was usually a reasonable amount of food, and the bored guards usually limited their activities to an occasional roll call. Of course there were periods of insufficient food and random acts of violence (usually directed at Chinese civilians); life must have seemed suddenly precarious for the formerly well-to-do, and it got more so as the war progressed and the Japanese began suffering military losses. Although he remembers the war years fondly in his memoirs, this must have been a significant shock for the 11 year-old Ballard, and I can’t help thinking it shaped his later fiction. In 1945, the Americans liberated the camp; Ballard moved to England with his mother and younger sister in 1946, his father staying on to run the cotton mill until shortly after the communist takeover in 1949. If anything, Britain after the war was an even bigger shock for the now 16 year-old Ballard.
With the aid of a web site set up by Ballard enthusiasts, and using Google Maps and the GPS on my smart phone, I set out early one morning from the Shanghai Hilton, where, coincidentally, Ballard stayed during his only return trip in 1991. My objective was to locate the Ballard residence. The walk through the French Concession reveals plenty of 1920’s vintage stately homes, some well preserved, others looking ratty and subdivided into apartments. The front door of the Ballard home, at 31 Amherst Avenue, is now at the end of a laneway leading south from what is now Xinhua Road, just west of Pan Yu Road (or Fan Yu Road as the Lonely Planet guide has it, incorrectly). The former back gate on Columbia Avenue is now the front entrance at 508 Pan Yu Road, and the building houses some form of club or restaurant. There have been renovations but a number of the external features remain as described by Ballard and, later, by his fans on their website.
From there I take the subway south and west to find the location of Lunghua airfield, where the Americans dropped food and supplies from airplanes for the camp residents in 1945. The pagoda at the north end of the field, where the Japanese had mounted anti-aircraft guns, was moved a number of years ago. Today the runway serves as a parking lot for city buses, and the area near where the terminal used to be, which still shows a couple of old airplanes when viewed using Google Maps, is a construction site. The planes are gone but the site, large portions of which are complete and operational today, is meant to be a vocational college for aircraft maintenance trades. The artist’s rendition on the barricades shows several airplanes in the original location just off Fenggu Road, so perhaps they will be returned or replaced. I don’t have time to look for the Lunghua internment camp, which apparently is now a girl’s high school; during Ballard’s return in 1991, he was able to visit the very cell which his family occupied, and which was then a storeroom.
Most of Ballard’s novels and stories explore, in one way or another, the sometimes bizarre behaviour of ordinary people suddenly thrust into inexplicable situations not entirely of their own making. It may have been The Times Literary Supplement that coined the word ‘Ballardian’ to describe a particular form of dystopia built around this theme. Ballard’s first published novel, The Drowned World, appeared in 1963, and I stumbled across it as a teenager while roaming the aisles of Bonder’s Bookstore on rue Bernard in Outremont. In 1972 he published Crash, a disturbing novel exploring the potential relationship between car accidents and sex; it was 1996 before this was eventually made into an equally disturbing film by David Cronenberg, not to be confused with the 2004 film of the same name directed by Paul Haggis. The basic premise may sound bizarre, but in 1970 he set up an art installation in a disused London warehouse involving three wrecked cars, one of them a large Pontiac. This being London in the Swinging ‘60s, he easily convinced a young lady of his acquaintance to serve cocktails and interview guests at the vernissage while entirely in the nude, until she found out that the show involved wrecked cars, at which point she insisted on wearing her bikini bottom. Ballard says he never saw a crowd get so drunk so quickly at an art exhibit, and people were soon vandalising the wrecked cars; in the midst of the general mayhem the young lady in the bikini bottom later claimed to have had to fend off a rape attempt in the back seat of the Pontiac. As Ballard commented in an interview many years later, an interesting social dynamic was on display, and this convinced him to press ahead with the novel. In 1982 he published Empire of the Sun, a semi-autobiographical novel about a boy named Jim who grows up in war-time Shanghai. It outsold all his other novels put together; after Spielberg made it into a popular film, his back catalogue was revived, and many unsuspecting readers must have been surprised at the radically different content of some of his other titles. His best novel, in my opinion, is Cocaine Nights (circa 2000), which explores the notion that a low level of background danger or violence is a necessary precondition for the development of culturally vibrant societies. In the absence of any personal risk of any kind, we will all turn into couch potatoes, sprawled in front of the TV; throw in some random robberies, vandalism, sexual assaults and drugs, and you’ll get retired orthodontists and their wives from Shepperton (the London suburb where Ballard lived most of his life) suddenly starting up amateur Gilbert and Sullivan troupes, participating in debates at local council meetings and maybe even engaging, with the accountant and his wife next door, in the production of somewhat kinky home movies. It’s written as a murder mystery: Agatha Christie meets a 21st century version of Alfred Hitchcock. And his writing, especially in the later years, is very good.
J.G. Ballard died of cancer in 2009, at the age of 79. Home
Given the large number of suitcases we have accumulated in three weeks, we decide not to struggle through the public transit system in order to take the magnetic levitation train to the airport at Pudong.
The maglev train, the only one of its kind in the world, hits over 450 km/h and as a result takes only 8 minutes to get from downtown to the airport. It is on my bucket list, but it will have to be another time. Instead we take a taxi. The driver only feels like he is driving 450 km/h – actually he tops out at 145 km/h, and the ride takes 45 minutes at mid-day on a Saturday. At 200 RMB it is probably more expensive than the maglev, too. The view from the business lounge at the airport is of container ships heading towards the East China Sea, a fitting end to our trip.
Three weeks is a long time, but China is huge – there are urban areas with almost as many people as all of Canada – so I’m sure I’ve only scratched the surface. Nonetheless, the primary message I’ve taken away is the break-neck pace of change. Young Chinese, both boys and girls, blow-dry their hair, like nice shoes and are expecting a better life than their peasant forefathers who wore flip flops while toiling in the fields or factories. There should be no problems as long as the Party continues meeting these expectations. 