SmartShanghai | [Offbeat]: Fore Saken

[Offbeat]: Fore Saken

By Ric Stockfis , May 12th, 2009 | In Activities

"Offbeat" is a SmartShanghai column about stuff to look at or do in Shanghai that's interesting or weird (relatively, of course), that doesn't fit anywhere else. It appears weekly, monthly, or maybe even annually, when we're not busy working on other superfluous column ideas.

"It held a deeper meaning for me, the sense that reality itself was a stage set which can be dismantled at any moment and... no matter how magnificent anything appeared, it could be swept aside into the debris of the past."

Abandonment and decay figure heavily in the work of JG Ballard. Derelict hotels, drained swimming pools,downed aircraft. They are, he once said, "highly significant elements in what makes up my world". It seemed fitting therefore -- comforting even -- that a cycle ride, in the weeks after his death, in the area surrounding around Longhua Airfield -- south of Xujiahui and itself a focal point of the action in Empire of the Sun -- turned up an abandoned driving-range.

The interior of the Chiao Tai Golf Club appears to have been hastily deserted -- bicycle locks on the doors, slides tipped over in the children's play area, some sharp and mysterious tragedy that left coffee beans languishing in the kitchen. The reality is more mundane -- re-designation of the land after the range had been completed but before a single paid-for ball had been struck. The official line is that all the equipment -- the stacked golfbags, the shiny espresso machine, the soft leather furnishings -- will be moved to a new site in due course. But, after two years in limbo, the place exerts the same "mysterious empty presence" that Ballard found in those empty swimming pools.

Wildflowers grow thick on the ground, poking through knee-high grass. A huge trench has been gouged in front of the clubhouse, as if someone had slashed a new painting for not being up to par. The tees themselves are a mess of broken glass, clods of earth, and shards of plastic. Out on the field, distance markers stand detached from all meaning. Water pipes, originally laid to sustain an illusion of green, now service workers from the adjacent construction site, who bring buckets to fill and crockery to wash. The perimeter fence posts have fallen, or been pulled down; a ball-collecting cart sits upended on the ground, advertising a tattered Vegas dream. And, all the while, the security guards -- golf instructors from Jiangsu whose swings must now be as rusty as their workplace -- sit languidly at the front gate, sipping tea from grand-opening commemorative flasks, occasionally stirring to stroke balls across a bilious putting green.

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The Bigger Picture

You can see the driving-range in its original glory -- around the time it opened, in late 2006 -- in this image from Google Maps. Note the shadows of the upright fence posts on the neatly mown grass.

Look west too, at those yellow bugs swarming into frame. They're taxis, spinning around a driver-training school that is, perhaps wisely, not open for public viewing. The rest of the neighbourhood, however, dusty wasteland though much of it may be, is well worth exploring. Head east from the Longhua Pagoda, haul your bike over the railway tracks (locals use this section of the Shanghai-Hangzhou line as a shortcut footpath), and make for the three Russian propeller planes parked at the north of Ballard's airfield. ("Deserted runways have a tremendous magnetic pull for me. ...The concrete strip just beckons one into new realms.") This end of the strip currently serves as a bus depot, but ask politely and you can cycle the entire length of it.

Go east perhaps, down to the river, where rusting barges enjoy unrivalled views of the Lupu Bridge, and the towers of Pudong on the horizon. Or else head south, to the huge cement factory and the small community of workers and their families living out of converted shipping containers at the gates. Buy yourself a no-name beer, wipe the construction dust from your eye, shoot a round of pool. The road that passes through here has been bricked off, and for now you can go no further. But the streetlights, and the banners that hang from them, are still visible on the other side of the wall, leading in steady increments away from the city.

"Of course, he does find fulfillment. He's living out the logic of his own mythology, of his own dreams. He wants to go south into self-annihilation."