Word: shanghaiing
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...long as J.G. Ballard. Yet the disturbing, warped realms conjured up in his 19 novels and myriad short stories have always stood in intriguing contradiction to the engaging, resolutely suburban, rather old-fashioned man who wrote them. At no point in his slim and dignified autobiography, Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, does Ballard address that mismatch. But just by the telling, his story explains...
...subtitle suggests, the first half of Miracles of Life deals with Ballard's extraordinary childhood in war-torn Shanghai; the second is spent at the typewriter in the leafy west London suburb where the author has lived for the last 47 years. The 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...
Ballard's tenuous relationship with his parents explains why he excluded them from Empire of the Sun. His father, who left England in 1929 to run a cotton factory, along with his wife and hundreds of other Brits, had a high old time of it in Shanghai's free-trade, hard-boozing International Settlement. For the young Ballard, life before the war was giddy and privileged, too - a succession of gymkhanas, parties and inexhaustible supplies of American comics. But it was all colored by a guilt-edged curiosity at the poverty and brutality he saw on his frequent bike rides...
...Western manners: eating with your mouth open is acceptable. In fact, slurping hot noodles is a compliment to the chef. 13) Get your cup of joe before visiting the Forbidden City: the Starbucks there has been removed. 14) Afraid to hawk a loogie in Cambridge? Let it fly in Shanghai. It’s all the rage. 15) In Beijing, the 22nd of each month has been designated “Share Your Seat Day,” a recent initiative to eradicate impolite behavior before the Olympics...
...journeys into town. Over time my wife and she became friendly. One day last summer, they had tea together and Lin told Joyce she was pregnant, and that she and her husband were moving away from New Songjiang to a neighborhood in Shanghai with a lot of new construction, where her husband would continue to try to make a living shuttling workers around. Lin came over to our house one evening just before leaving; Joyce was giving her some of Abby's old baby clothes. We sat up on our deck, overlooking the river and the ever-shrinking patch...