Shanghai Jim
(This is the first draft of the voice over to my new film parody of Steven Spielberg’s “Empire of the Sun” This does not include the dialogue)
I met Jim along the Shanghai waterfront a few weeks after the Japanese invaded.
Me and Frank scrounged what we could in scrap to survive.
Though I was mostly interested in collecting gold teeth from the dead bodies poor Chinese set adrift.
Before the attack, Jim had lived the high life as the song of an English textile man, riding through the city like royalty while the poor of the city starved.
The boy even sang in the great cathedral where he also attended school
And lived in a fine house along a broad boulevard in the richest part of town, with starving poor posted like sentries on his door step.
He was a spoiled rich kid that gave his servants fits, flying his airplane gliders across the lawn to imitate the Jap Zeros that flew overhead.
He even had a secret special place where he sat in the cockpit of a crashed Chinese fighter pretending he was flying, too.
But even his imagination didn’t prepare him for the night of the attack.
How he got torn from his parents when the war waged on the Bund, I never got straight.
I found him scrounging by the harbor and figured if poor Chinese had gold teeth; the boy’s mouth was a gold mine.
It wasn’t.
All he had was a mouth full of big words and claims we could find wealth where he lived.
I tried to sell him off as a slave but nobody had any use for him.
When we got to his house, the Japs attacked me one moment and the next moment I wake up to find Jim feeling me watered rice from a cheap tin, while we slept in some sort of outdoor theater.
Okay, I admit it, I tried to shake him when we got called to the camps.
I figured he could get on without me.
He figured different and clung to the truck cab until the Japs took him, too.
Maybe I should have noticed the change.
Jim had become more river rat than rich kid, making his living on the camp’s black market as if he was born a capitalist.
Other people noticed other changes, which is why the women in the family barracks sent him over to us to live with the men.
Jim saw too much and maybe started thinking he ought to get some, too, making some wives uncomfortable with his stares.
But Jim always had time for planes and often paused at the wire to watch the ritual of take off where he formed some kind of friendship with some Jap kid who liked flying as much as Jim did.
In some ways, Jim was more Jap than the Japs were, and he wished more than once he could go flying with them.
This was an aggravating prospect for the English doctor Jim had taken up with.
The doctor called Jim crazy until that night when Jim bowed before the Jap guards to keep them from killing the doctor.
Yes, I know Jim always figured to cut out from camp when I did.
I had plans to sail up river so deep into China even the Japs would be scared to come after us.
So Jim was pretty hurt when he found out I cut out without.
I heard he drifted a bit after the Japs broke up the camp towards the end of the war.
I figured I’d never see him again.
When I did, I heard strange tales coming out of him how he had seen a soul go up to heaven that was really the distant blaze of an atomic Nagasaki.
I didn’t mean to kill his Jap friend.
I didn’t know the Jap was giving Jim food.
I just got so used to killing Japs that I killed that Jap out of habit.
Jim hated me for it.
I heard later how he made his way back to Shanghai, and how he even found his family again.
I wonder if he remembers me.
Or thinks of me all these years later.
I know I can never forget him.
I just don’t know why.