I take a break from researching the Lunghwa Civilian Assembly Centre. On Facebook my friend posts a photograph of the windy desert of Manzanar. She is there on a "pilgrimage," she says, to honor her heritage. Japanese internment: 1) the interning of Japanese; 2) the interning Japanese. One so well-known it has become a cliché. The other a whisper among international students in a high school in Shanghai.
2
When things are not named, do they disappear?*
If a tree falls in a forest onto the man who felled it, does it still make a sound?
3
We sat on the steps to the Big Auditorium, sipping our black tea from wax-covered cartons. We were a landmark at the school. If a teacher needed one of us during lunch break, they would know where to look. We made it onto our high school's Wikipedia page—one would instantly recognize us if they knew where to look.
You know that new indoor swimming pool by the dorms? someone asked.
Yeah? someone responded.
I heard that someone hung himself there before it was a swimming pool.
Hanged.
What?
What was there originally?
I heard our school used to be a concentration camp.
An azure-winged magpie shrieked as it fluttered across the grid-like forest of dawn redwoods.
Who was interned here?
I don't know.
Who'd you hear this from?
My English teacher heard from someone else.
Wasn't there also a teacher whose daughter drowned in Zhongxing Lake while chasing after her ball?
I think I've heard that before too.
I wonder if any of these stories are true.
4
The Shanghai Civil Assembly Center consisted of eight branches. The largest one was Lunghwa Camp, or the Lunghwa Civilian Assembly Centre. During the war period, it incarcerated a total of 1 756 people. Of these, Britain yielded 1 584, Belgium 39, the United States 37, Australia 32, Canada 24, the Netherlands 17, New Zealand 11, South Africa 7, the Soviet Union 3, Portugal 1, and Norway 1.
There were seven main buildings and several large wooden barracks. In the 59 dorms were 127 rooms for families. The death rate was one in twenty. James Graham Ballard lived amongst the incarcerated.
Lunghwa Camp had been converted from a school—longmen shuyuan, or Dragon Gate Academy—in 1943. In Chinese mythology, a carp becomes a dragon once it leaps through a particular gate. Dragon Gate Academy was intended to be such a gate. Inside the main classroom building, the Chinese character for "dragon" has been written in 115 different styles and engraved upon the lobby walls. The chandelier above has an upward-jumping carp as its body.
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We loved exploring the vast university-like campus. We spotted out-of-place cement formations and hoped they were tombs. We slunk into the Big Auditorium through windows left open because the doors were locked to keep us out.
The building was under partial renovation but we climbed the scaffolding above the stage, through off-limit corridors and bedrooms that belonged to an older era, through metal bars, and more windows. We found our way onto the shingled roof. We stood there triumphantly, overseeing the campus hiding beneath the lush canopy of trees. We saw our director walk by and we felt an excitement that came from being above authority.
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J.G. Ballard: English novelist, writer of Empire of the Sun (1984), which was adapted into a film by Tom Stoppard and Steven Spielberg three years later.
Jim Graham: the small English boy with sad-looking eyes who often sat on the balcony of the assembly hall, gazing down at Lunghwa Camp. The assembly hall would later become Shanghai High School's Big Auditorium, upon which my friends and I also perched.
7
Near the cafeteria, we stumbled across a gate. Behind the gate was a garden. A few days after we discovered the garden, a padlock was added to the gate.
Across from the garden gate, we found a derelict brick house among a yard of weeds. We began circling the structure and believed it to be deserted, until we heard the sound of a radio through one of the windows. We found the front door—a screen door—and saw an electric white rectangle shining through. A dog inside jumped at the door, scratching and barking at us.
We bolted.
Who could possibly be living there? Staff members of the school?
No, that can’t be.
Freeloaders?
Why would there be a house here?
I would later learn that the house was a ruin of the Japanese guards’ dwellings, but I never found out who was living there that day.
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The tree lies on the ground, but the act of falling is imagined, a hypothetical.
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To verify the location of certain buildings, I look up Shanghai High School on Google
Maps. For some reason the satellite image shows rows and rows of apartment buildings where the main entrance should be. Has even the school been erased from memory? I have not returned in two years, but how can I not have heard of such drastic changes to the campus?
10
A history teacher at Shanghai High School International Division argues that while the Chinese government has been calling out Japan for its atrocities against the Chinese, the sufferings of foreigners who lived in China remain unseen and unheard. Though Empire of the Sun was set on the campus, very few at Shanghai High School realize that it is their campus.
He suggests that a reason for this suppression is the many Japanese students on campus.
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Stumbling across the fallen tree is imagined, but the incarceration truly happened.
The history teacher now gives tours and is making a mobile application as a guide for the school’s devastating past.
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On Google Maps, the satellite image map for Shanghai is not aligned with the map of the
roads. The realization took me several refreshes of the page and ghostly streets through buildings.
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The tree lies on the ground, and we are putting up a cautionary sign for those who fail to see it. The history of Shanghai High School and the incarceration of civilians from members of the Allied forces shall be remembered. At a school whose curriculum teaches the World Wars and Cold War three times between grades 6 and 12, its own role in the story is finally heard.
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* A line from Gina Apostol’s novel Gun Dealers’ Daughter.
