Word: lunghua
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...journey from one to the other has been central to his life and his fiction. Readers of his 1984 novel Empire of the Sun - and the millions more who saw Steven Spielberg's film version of it - will recognize Ballard's descriptions of the deprivations he suffered at the Lunghua detention camp after the Japanese army overran Shanghai in 1943. They'll recall, too, the blank, dreamlike gaze with which he absorbed the horrors unfolding around him: at the age of 14, he watched as a group of defeated Japanese soldiers, "aware that their own lives would shortly...
...suffering from advanced prostate cancer, Ballard finds the answers that matter in his children and grandchildren - his Miracles of Life. But there are miracles of fiction here, too. So convincing was the story he made of the horrors of Lunghua that when Ballard finally returned there in 1991, it was as if he had "walked up to a mirage, accepted that in its way it was real, and then walked straight through it to the other side." Ballard's own journey from inner to outer space turned out to be no distance...
...Fight, Push. While a Nationalist spokesman was shouting words of defiance, something else was happening around Shanghai's defense perimeter. From his vantage point on the twelfth floor of the massive Picardie Apartments in Shanghai's old French concession, an American looked south over Lunghua airport. Later he described what he saw: "There were sharp bursts of machine-gun fire from the south. Then, within minutes, every road into the city was clogged with retreating Nationalist soldiers and civilians. Soldiers who were walking yanked civilians from their bicycles and pedicabs. The soldiers ran and fought and pushed...
...morning at week's end, fugitives from Shanghai arrived at Lunghua airport, found the field deserted, a brief message scrawled in chalk across the schedule board. The message read: "Evacuated at midnight." That afternoon, some 750 miles to the south in Hong Kong, an American pilot who had flown one of the last planes out of Shanghai shrugged and said: "Looks like we'll all be going home soon. We're running out of cities to evacuate...
...blood and death the troops are fighting on & on." To bolster morale, Shanghai's new mayor, Chen Liang, rode out to the front in a truck loaded with gifts for the troops-20 live pigs, 20 cases of cigarettes, 3,000 sandwiches and 600 towels. At Lunghua airport, U.S. airlines announced the departure of their last planes from Shanghai. The planes took off with passengers jammed three to a seat...