When We Were Orphans

“What I saw was a small, rather elf-like young woman with dark, shoulder-length hair. Even though at that moment she was clearly wishing to charm the men she was talking to, I could see something about her smile that might in an instant turn it into a sneer. A slight crouch around her shoulders, like that of a bird of prey, gave her posture a suggestion of scheming.” 

Banks’s first sighting of Sarah indicates much about her character and his view of the young woman. He sees her as “elf-like,” suggesting an otherworldly quality, a being of beauty with powers that can help or hinder. He recognizes her cynical charm because it corresponds to his own. The fact that he describes her as a “bird of prey,” and then proceeds to fall in love with her tells us about his character: Banks knows, understands, and loves trouble.

“For gradually, from behind his cheerful anecdotes, there was emerging a picture of myself on that voyage to which I took exception. His repeated insinuation was that I had gone about the ship withdrawn and moody, liable to burst into tears at the slightest thing. No doubt the colonel had an investment in giving himself the role of an heroic guardian, and after all this time, I saw it was as pointless as it was unkind to contradict him. But as I say, I began to grow steadily more irritated.” 

This quote is another indication of Banks’s unreliable memory. He projects onto the Colonel negative feelings because the image the older man presents of Christopher as a child does not match Banks’s improved version of himself. Diction in words such as “insinuation,” “heroic guardian,” and growing “irritated” implies that Banks believes the Colonel wants intentionally to belittle him, but Banks does (and cannot) offer any rational reason why. These scenes help Ishiguro construct a complex character in Banks, one who is deeply involved in rewriting the past.

“‘I don’t come to places like this in search of famous men, Christopher. I come in search of distinguished ones. What do I care about a little embarrassment here and there?’—she waved towards the room—‘But I won’t accept it’s my fate to waste my life on some pleasant, polite, morally worthless man.’” 

Sarah is very open with Banks about her intentions. She recognizes in him a quality that is not unlike her own, a desperate desire to belong and to matter, to be of use in the world. Ishiguro positions both characters as orphans to indicate an essential lack of love and care that has transformed them into creatures whose desires often trump rationality, modesty, or shame. Both Sarah and Banks are searching for deeper meaning, feeling incomplete as persons.

“It is slightly surprising to me, looking back today, to think how as young boys we were allowed to come and go unsupervised to the extent that we were. But this was, of course, all within the relative safety of the International Settlement. I for one was absolutely forbidden to enter the Chinese areas of the city, and as far as I know, Akira’s parents were no less strict on the matter. Out there, we were told, lay all manner of ghastly diseases, filth and evil men.” 

Here Ishiguro offers an indication of how the white Westerners colonize and rule the space of foreign countries. Parents teach children to believe that the International Settlement is an oasis of European customs and manners, while the Chinese are savages best kept outside of the walls of the Settlement, unless they work as servants. “Evil men” that Banks recalls are simply “The Other” —a necessary cultural fabrication of the Westerners to create essential and reductive difference and further conceptualize their own superiority.

“Then he sat up and pointed to one of the slatted sun-blinds at that moment hanging partially down over a window. We children, he said, were like the twine that kept the slats held together. A Japanese monk had once told him this. We often failed to realise it, but it was we children who bound not only a family, but the whole world together. If we did not do our part, the slats would fall and scatter over the floor.” 

Ishiguro reports Akira’s words through Banks’s memory without quotation marks because Banks has long ago internalized his friend and the memory of their childhood. The image of the twine keeping the slats together is a powerful metaphor: Children are able to keep the world in one piece. However, Banks is an orphan, and his ‘twine’ has nothing to keep together. That is why his character’s mission is in the search of bigger truths, the center of which still hold his parents.

“The house appeared to be empty. Then as I was standing bewildered in the entrance hall, I heard a giggling sound. It had come from the library, and as I turned and went towards it, I saw through the half-open door Mei Li sitting at my work table. She was sitting very upright and as I appeared in the doorway, she looked at me and made another giggling sound, as if she were enjoying a private joke and trying to suppress her laughter. It dawned on me then that Mei Li was weeping, and I knew, as I had known throughout that punishing run home, that my mother was gone.” 

Ishiguro renders the moment of young Christopher’s realization that both his parents are gone through a sequence that reads as almost bizarre, comic and tragic at the same time. The giggling sound seems to mock the boy, and the juxtaposition of laughter and weeping represents the profoundly mixed emotions the boy is experiencing through this period. Banks’s idea that he felt, as a child, that his mother had been taken, is additional proof of his adult editorializing of his memories.

“As the dancers proceeded with their floor show, the room seemed to lose all interest in the battle across the water, though the noises were still clearly audible behind the cheery music. It was as though for these people, one entertainment had finished and another had begun. I felt, not for the first time since arriving in Shanghai, a wave of revulsion towards them. It was not simply the fact of their having failed so dismally over the years to rise to the challenge of the case, of their having allowed matters to slip to the present appalling level with all its huge ramifications.” 

Banks’s reaction to the “new” Shanghai, no longer the circumscribed city of his memory, is complex. He reacts both to the changes in the city and to the international community that he now witnesses as an adult for the first time. Ishiguro again utilizes contrast in the sounds of the battle and the “cheery music” to emphasize the profound lack of interest of the Westerners for the war that rages between China and Japan. As long as their community is undisturbed, and they are allowed to keep pretenses by organizing parties and celebrations, the people to whom Banks belongs see no reason to openly get involved. Still, their inaction is only a ruse: Banks understands the international community is involved in all the shady dealings that make Shanghai such a dangerous place. However, Banks himself is guilty of looking at the picture through a very narrow lens of his own obsessive search.

“It’s you they don’t like in there, my dear. When I used to frequent this place by myself, they always treated me like royalty. Oh yes, like royalty. Don’t like women of your sort. They only want real ladies or else whores. And you’re neither. So you see, they don’t like you one bit. Never had any trouble here until you insisted on tagging along.” 

Sir Cecil’s harsh and revelatory words to Sarah highlight the deeper truth of a woman’s position in any society. Sarah’s role as a worried wife has no place in a den of iniquity. The only female roles recognized there are the roles into which men have traditionally liked to categorize women—”real ladies or else whores.” Ishiguro styles Sir Cecil’s words in an ambiguous way; he seems to resent Sarah’s company, even though he largely depends on her (or perhaps because of that). In that sense, the words “they don’t like you one bit” is likely his personal expression of a truth that he shares with the rest of the men. 

“Once we went down a side-street on both sides of which the pavements were filled with huddled figures. I could see them in the lamplight, sitting, squatting, some curled up asleep on the ground, squeezed one upon the other, so that there was only just enough space down the middle of the street for traffic to pass. They were of every age—I could see babies asleep in mothers’ arms—and their belongings were all around them; ragged bundles, bird-cages, the occasional wheelbarrow piled high with possessions.” 

Ishiguro offers a glimpse into the Shanghai that we as readers, and Banks as protagonist, have rarely seen before. Throngs of homeless people of all dispossessed nations lie huddled in the streets, obstructing traffic, contrasting painfully the order and quiet of the International Settlement. Banks learns of lives led in ways so far removed from his experiences and sees the “ripped side” of the city where he has grown up.

“But his assertion that I had likewise been a ‘miserable loner,’ one with whom he might have made a matching pair, was such an astounding one, it took me a little while to realise it was simply a piece of self-delusion on Morgan’s part—in all likelihood something he had invented years ago to make more palatable memories of an unhappy period.” 

In this quote, Ishiguro comes closest to implicating Banks openly in falsifying his childhood memories. His thoughts on a school friend who is yet another one of the people from the past to have remembered Banks specifically as a loner and a sad boy, give Banks the opportunity to evacuate his unbearable feelings onto his former friend. Banks attributes to him the process of which he is the perpetrator—that of inventing a happier, more meaningful past to be able to construct a functioning adult personality. Ishiguro makes certain through these repetitions that the readers understand that Banks has buried his past, and that his return to Shanghai is slowly uncovering it.

“‘But in the end,’ he went on, ‘this city defeats you. Every man betrays his friend. You trust someone, and he turns out to be in the pay of a gangster. The government are gangsters too. How is a detective to do his duty in a place like this?’” 

The words of former Inspector Kung show resignation, despair, and ultimately the indifference of a man destroyed by his ideals. His speech foreshadows Banks’s own journey and the knowledge of Uncle Philip’s betrayal. In the character of the disgraced inspector, Ishiguro creates a potential mirror image for Banks in the future if he persists with his obsessive search instead of dealing with his own past. Shanghai is here a symbol of the falsely built perceptions of reality.

“All I know is that I’ve wasted all these years looking for something, a sort of trophy I’d get only if I really, really did enough to deserve it. But I don’t want it any more, I want something else now, something warm and sheltering, something I can turn to, regardless of what I do, regardless of who I become. Something that will just be there, always, like tomorrow’s sky. That’s what I want now, and I think it’s what you should want too. But it will be too late soon.” 

Sarah’s admission of wasted years contrasts with Bank’s inability to face up to his own fantasies. She reaches out to Christopher yet again because they share the same fate; they are orphans both literally and metaphorically, people without fixed roots and without pasts based on real memories. Sarah’s hard life with the fallen idol that is Sir Cecil has made her grasp the need for something real in her life. She is tired of chasing fantasies because she knows they are not functional. She offers Banks the opportunity to save himself from his own myths.

“The house I wish to find, which I know is very near us now, is none other than the one in which my parents are being held. That’s right, Lieutenant! I’m talking about nothing less than the solving of this case after all these years. You see now why I felt my request, even at this busy moment for you, quite warranted.” 

Banks has become deluded, trapped within his own fantasy. He believes that there is a chance of finding his parents in a war-torn Shanghai, and Ishiguro shows in his conversation with the Chinese lieutenant that Banks’s powers of discernment are impaired. The character displays a complex web of delusions of grandeur and self-falsification, as well as a complete disregard for the reality of situation which also has its roots in his privileged position as a Westerner in Shanghai.

“You would not believe human beings could live like that. It is like an ants’ nest. Those houses, they were intended for the poorest people. Houses with tiny rooms, row after row, back to back. A warren. If you look carefully, you may see the lanes. Little alleys just wide enough to allow the people to get into their homes. At the back, the houses have no windows at all. The rear rooms are black holes, backing on to the houses behind.” 

Ishiguro positions the Chinese lieutenant in relation to Banks almost as Virgil was to Dante: a guide not just through the physical landscape of the Chinese warrens, places in which no human being should ever live, but also through the ethical ambiguities of the Shanghai society. The place where Banks hopes to find his parents is an ironic battleground: there is nothing there to conquer except for humans who live as ants. Additionally, even the higher-class Chinese know nothing of the sad reality of the lower classes—they never visit such areas of the city. This quote draws parallels to the Westerner’s ignorance of the reality of Shanghai. Ishiguro again emphasizes the many false or incomplete perceptions of the world around us. 

“I thought again of those pompous men of the International Settlement, of all the prevarications they must have employed to evade their responsibilities down so many years, and at such moments I felt my fury mount with so much intensity I was on the verge of calling out to the lieutenant to halt, just so I could give vent to it.” 

Ishiguro depicts Banks here as a man living two identities: one is the false structure created based on imagined childhood characteristics, and the other one is the adult detective who has developed strong moral guidelines through his work. While pursuing the fantasy of solving the case and finding his parents, Banks also experiences the full force of the Westerner’s duplicity in Shanghai. Ironically, he can recognize it fully because he has grown up in the city, yet his memories are mostly idealized. Inside of Banks these two ideas of reality continue to clash.

“I gave a sigh of exasperation. ‘I must say, Lieutenant, it was pretty sloppy work on the part of your men to have allowed these Japanese in behind your line. If all your people had been doing their jobs properly, I’m sure such a thing would never have arisen.’

‘My men have fought with commendable bravery, Mr. Banks. It is hardly their fault that your mission is, for the time being, inconvenienced.’” 

This quote is works well with the previous in establishing the dual nature of Bank’s character. Here, he discards the harsh realities of the war through condemning off-handedly the efforts of the Chinese soldiers as if he were still a child, ignorant of the way war works. The ironic response from the lieutenant shows that even the restrained Chinese man finds it hard to deal with a recalcitrant Westerner who believes the war is inconveniencing his lofty pursuits.

“‘Our childhood seems so far away now. All this’—he gestured out of the vehicle—‘so much suffering. One of our Japanese poets, a court lady many years ago, wrote of how sad this was. She wrote of how our childhood becomes like a foreign land once we have grown.’

‘Well, Colonel, it’s hardly a foreign land to me. In many ways, it’s where I’ve continued to live all my life. It’s only now I’ve started to make my journey from it.’” 

This quote contains the thematic core of Ishiguro’s novel. The Japanese Colonel’s words echo strongly with Bank’s emotions. He is not able to recognize his childhood as a foreign country because in crucial ways he has never left it behind; he has remained stuck in a false memory loop allowing it to become his defining characteristic, and the determinant of his personality. His physical journey back to Shanghai of the present time, and his trawl through the warrens of the ruined streets, is the beginning of the mending process for his character, which has to grow away from the memories in order to survive.

“He always loved your mother, loved her intensely. I’m jolly sure he never stopped loving her right to the end. In some ways, Puffin, that was the trouble. He loved her too much, idealised her. And it was just too much for him, trying to come up to what he saw as her mark. He tried. Oh yes, he tried, and it nearly broke him.” 

In this quote regarding Bank’s parents, Ishiguro poses several dilemmas: If Banks’s memories are unreliable, can we trust memories of those around him, and especially Uncle Philip, the infamous informer against the Communists? Additionally, the readers remain unclear as to Philip’s real agenda, and therefore they cannot assess his reliability as a witness. Even though he is sharing with Banks the crucial facts of his father’s motivations, Philip’s diction (“I’m jolly sure”) is unsuitable for the occasion, which might indicate insincerity or indifference. Importantly, Philip’s story matches with bank’s memories of his parents and that adds another layer of ambiguity and makes the full truth unknowable.

“We discovered that these people, they not only liked the profits very much, they actually wanted the Chinese to be useless. They liked them to be in chaos, drug-addicted, unable to govern themselves properly. That way, the country could be run virtually like a colony, but with none of the usual obligations.” 

Philip’s revelations about the large companies profiting from the opium trade into China connect not just with Banks’s memories of his mother’s rebellion against his father’s company, but also with his adult perceptions as regards the behavior of the Western presence in China. Ishiguro here openly condemns British imperial and colonial practices, yet at a remove since China has never been an official colony. Rather, this speaks of a wider, more insidious net the Westerners used to cast over less developed countries in order to control their assets and earn wealth off them.

“Why? Because I want you to know the truth! All these years, you’ve thought of me as a despicable creature. Perhaps I am, but it’s what this world does to you. I never meant to be like this. I meant to do good in this world. In my way, I once made courageous decisions. And look at me now. You despise me.” 

Ishiguro utilizes the character of Uncle Philip to reveal the many unknowns from the past. Near the end of his long speech, Philip seems to reach a point when he no longer cares for subterfuge but demands an emotional response from Christopher. However, the author has positioned the character in such a way that we cannot fully trust his reliability as a narrator of the past. As he justifies himself to Banks by blaming the harsh reality, he resembles Inspector Kung, who blamed his failings on the harsh reality of Shanghai. Through their example, Banks has the opportunity to learn how not to deflect responsibility for his own decisions and accept his past.

“How deeply these evils have been eradicated remains to be seen, but it would certainly appear that communism has been able to achieve in a handful of years what philanthropy and ardent campaigning could not in decades.”

Banks’s reflection here offers an interesting point of view: Western society fears and despises communism and all it represents. Yet Banks as a Westerner observes that the hard, dictatorial discipline which prevails in China seems to have succeeded in curtailing the horrors of opium trade much more efficiently than ‘philanthropy and campaigning.’ Ishiguro seems to invite the readers to ponder the potential benefits of disciplinarian societies as opposed to their much more known negative influences.

“I realised she’d never ceased to love me, not through any of it. All she’d ever wanted was for me to have a good life. And all the rest of it, all my trying to find her, trying to save the world from ruin, that wouldn’t have made any difference either way. Her feelings for me, they were always just there, they didn’t depend on anything. I suppose that might not seem so very surprising. But it took me all that time to realise it.”

Banks utters these words of self-consolation to his protégée, Jennifer, regarding his mother, found at last. Banks needs this realization—that his mother has always loved him, no matter what. He needs to understand that his life’s mission of becoming a great detective and solving his parents’ disappearance has been a child’s fantasy of omnipotence, created as a way out of unsettling, unbearable emotions of a lonely orphan. This realization helps Banks finally conceive a new way of living, one that does not depend on his becoming a hero to his childhood self.

“You always felt you had a mission to complete, and I dare say you would never have been able to give your heart to anyone or anything until you had done so. I can only hope that by now your tasks are behind you, and that you too have been able to find the sort of happiness and companionship which I have come lately almost to take for granted.”

Through Sarah’s letter, Ishiguro shows that she, too, has reached a level of clarity regarding both her and Banks’s lives. Even though she might have exchanged her old obsession for a new fiction to present as reality, she correctly guesses that Banks would never have been able to live a full life without seeing his fantasy to the end. Their connection never amounts to love; it is based on their mutual recognition of childlike fantasy in place of a mature acceptance of life.