Wednesday 1 September 2010

Chapter 42 Summary-Lucy Oliva

Two months have passed since the was ended and Jim was rescued, with his parents preparing to depart for England. Shanghai is once again a busy city, bustling with British and American soldiers, thousands of Chinese, pickpockets, pedicabs, prostitutes, vendors, dealers, traders and 'the evening citizenry.'
Three Cinema screens have been set up, continuously showing newsreels from Europe and the Pacific. From Russian machine guns to US marine flame-throwers, RAF fighters and Chinese propaganda against the communists, Jim had repeatedly watched the videos in his two months since returning home. His parents were slowly recovering from imprisonment at the camp in Soochow, and so he spent endless hours being driven around by Yang, his chauffeur, in the families different cars.
Yang could not understand why Jim would want to watch the same films, such as Bataan and The Fighting Lady, over and over again. Jim wonders what Yang did during the war before returning to serve for his father.
Since returning home Jim had had dental work done on his jaw and gained weight, eating large meals and sleeping peacefully at night. Amherst Avenue no longer felt like home to him, but more of an illusion like a set at Shanghai film studios.
Jim often thought about the room he and the Vincent's shared at the camp, so ordered Yang to drive him to Lunghua at the end of October. Checkpoints now guarded the entrances of the city, with National soldiers turning away hundreds of peasants trying to find refuge. Shanty towns now covered the fields around the Olympic Stadium at Nantao.
Rather than be deserted, the former prison was now home to hundreds of British nationals. Entire families had built suites of rooms in E block. Jim found Basie's cubicle and tried to retrieve one of the magazines from the makeshift walls, but was warned away. He was also refused from G block by a British couple that now occupied it, so returned to the Lincoln, sending Yang on a final circuit of the camp. The hospital and cemetery had disappeared, the land now being used to build tennis courts. The airfield and runway were completely covered in vegetation, the wrecks of the Japanese aircraft's densely hidden.
On the drive back to Amherst Avenue, Jim reflected on the last few weeks of the war. It had been a muddle, his starvation possibly turning him mad. Despite this, he had seen the bright flash of the atomic bomb at Nagasaki. He had seen the start of World War III, realizing that it was going on all around him. He also commented that the crowds that watched the newsreels had not yet grasped that the war had already started.
In the last weeks before Jim and his mother sailed to England, he thought about the young Japanese pilot that he seemed to have raised from the dead. He concluded that the man had probably been dying, and Jim's movements had woken him. Mrs. Vincent and her husband had died on the walk from the stadium, and Jim wondered if Bassie too had died during his attack on the stadium, or if he and Lieutenant Price were still roaming the land of The Yangtze.
Jim did not confide any of these thoughts with his parents or Dr. Ransome. He recalls his first return home, where his mother and fathered has smiled at him weakly from their deck chairs in the garden. He realized that they had fought their own war, different from his own experience. Despite there continued affection towards him, the seems old and far away.
Walking across the quay from the Arrawa, Jim witnessed a spectacle to which many of the Chinese around him were focusing on. At the Shanghai Club, a group of drunken British and American soldiers has emerged from inside. Jeering at the Chinese and forming a chorus line, they proceeded to urinate down the steps. The audience stood silent and expressionless, and from looking at the faces of clerks, coolies and peasant women, Jim realized that 'one day China would punish the rest of the world, and take frightening revenge.'
Jim made his way to his parents on the boats upper deck, spending a last night with his father as he and his mother were sailing to England the next day. Stepping onto the gangway, he realized that it was most likely the last time he would leave Shanghai, returning 'home' to a strange, small world he had never visited before. He concluded that only a small part of his mind would leave, the rest remaining in Shanghai forever.
Watching a child's coffin drifting in the stream below the Arrawa, Jim noted that it was beginning its journey to the estuary of the Yangtze, but was still being swept back, 'driven once again to the shores of this terrible city.'

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