‘How far do the landscapes of one’s childhood, as much as its emotional experiences, provide an inescapable background to all one’s imaginative writing. Certainly my own earliest memories are of Shanghai during the annual long summer of floods, when the streets of the city were two or three feet deep in brown silt-laden water, and where the surrounding countryside, in the centre of the flood-table of the Yangtze, was an almost continuous mirror of the drowned paddy fields and irrigation canals stirring sluggishly in the hot sunlight.’
from ‘Time, Memory and Inner Space’ by JG Ballard
Absence Club 