Setting Analysis- Shanghai After the War- Lucy Oliva

From Chapter 42, you receive a great insight into what the area is like after the war has ended:

1.The city appears to be full of life again, a far cry from the war-zone it had become just two months prior to Jim's return.

• "Below them was the Shanghai Bund, and all the clamour of the gaudy night'
• "...jostling among the trams and limousines, the jeeps and trucks of the US military, and a horde of rickshaws and pedicabs"

The in-depth description paints a picture for the reader, showing that Shanghai was once again a booming city.

2. The three cinema screens in Shanghai that had been set up allowed locals to get a glimpse of the war from an outside prospective, with the description of these screens and the way they were set up giving the reader an image of what it was really like.

• "Dominating this panorama of the Shanghai night were three cinema screens which had been set up on scaffolding along the Bund."
• "...and looked up at the trembling images, which were barely strong enough to hold their own against the neon signs and strip lighting on the hotel and nightclub facades."

These descriptions seems to suggest that the screens were not seen as very important to many people, with the advertising of hotels and nightclubs more noticeable and eye catching. You do not get a clear idea of how many people actually payed attention to the newsreels, but this would indicate that many overlooked them.

3. Amherst Avenue was now an unfamiliar place to Jim, not the home he had spent his childhood in. This new unfamiliarity shows how much the war changed him and how it was likely that nothing would ever be the same again.

• "... on the top floor of the unreal house in Amherst Avenue, which had once been his home but now seemed as much an illusion as the sets of Shanghai film studios"

After so many years living in poverty, going back to his luxurious house must have been a real shock. This extract shows how strange it was for him, as though he were living in a film set, that the home he had grown up in was now just a house, not him home.

4. The security around the city and new settlements of shanty towns in the fields shows the struggle that was continuing, even though the war was over. With so much desperation to enter the city and have a chance to rebuild their lives, it is possible to see what a volatile and difficult setting living in and around Shanghai was.

• "The Nationalist soldiers in their American tanks were turning back hundreds of destitute peasants, without rice or land to crop, trying to find refuge in Shanghai."
• "Shanty towns of mud dwellings...covered the fields near the burnt out Olympic stadium at Nantao"

This shows how lucky Jim was, to have a house such as his at Amherst Avenue to return to, as so many were left with nothing after the war.

5. By featuring Jim's return to Lunghua Camp, a powerful message is put across. To transform from a prison and place of death, starvation and poverty, to a settlement for hundreds of British natives and families, a great transition is shown from throughout the fighting to post-war China.

• "Jim expected to see Lunghua camp deserted, but far from being abandoned the former prison was busy again, fresh barbed wire strung along its fences."
• "The hospital and the camp cemetery had vanished, and the site was an open tract of ash and cinders, from which a few charred joists protruded."
• "...as a series of tennis courts were about to be laid."

The introduction of tennis courts seems to be quite prominent, as though by placing these down on the land that was once a resting ground for so many disease-stricken bodies, that the tragedy of war could be forgotten. By destroying the hospital and cemetery, it may have been a fresh start, no longer in a prison but a guarded living compound.