30 years is a ridiculously long time in our fast-moving age. But I still remember the tactile experience of typing long Basic listings into the little rubber keyboard of my 16k Spectrum.

I remember the joy of having color and sound in a small computer on my desk – something not even possible with the Commodore PETs at the school lab. The exhilaration of Jetpac and Arcadia, the brain-teasing frustration of The Hobbit.

I remember the glimpses of the future through ambitious programs like Vu-3D and Ant Attack. The long hours learning Z80 assembly language in front of a flickery TV set, compiling long hex listings from assembly by hand.

I remember when I had set up the Speccy for the first time, standing in front of it in the evening and trying to understand how vast 16Kbyte of RAM was compared to the 1K ZX81.

The same feeling six months later when I had it upgraded to 48Kbyte.

Watching sine waves being plotted across its expansive 256 x 192 pixels of screen real estate. Over and over again.

The cool feeling of selling my very own designed games on hand-copied tapes to other kids in school.

I remember listening to the sounds of programs loading from tape. Being able to recognize certain data patterns at 1500 Baud – knowing what was loading without even looking at the screen.

This little machine formed me as a programmer more than any university course later on and even today I identify as a Spectrum guy whenever the early 1980s come up in tech discussions.

For a whole generation of mostly European programmers, the Speccy was – and still is – the origin of their craft.

One of the main themes of the book is that every person has a very different mental map of the city they are living in, based on their daily habits and their experience of the place. This is certainly true and at the same time endlessly fascinating, and the book tries to explore this fact with a number of fresh and unusual maps of San Francisco accompanied by essays that take short, deep dives into the infinite fractal histories that make up the sum of the city.

The book is very inspiring to go back out into the different neighborhoods of San Francisco and to look at the place with new eyes, to try to discover some of the deeper networked layers of historical detritus that are often hidden by not much more than a thin skin of paint.

I’ve lived in San Francisco for a dozen years and still come to the city daily from across the Bay, and this book rang very true. It very much is a reflection of my own experience of the city as I explore it on long walks.

Of course most places where humans have lived for a while will build up fascinating histories and unique life stories, but San Francisco has always stood out for me – it is such a young city: In less than 200 years – after thousands of years as a relatively serene collection of fishing villages – San Francisco has seen incredible growth, heartbreaking disasters, booms and busts.

It is one of the most multicultural cities on Earth that has been gracefully draped across one of the most breathtaking landscapes of the American West, filled with a wild collection of unique personalities that transform every street corner and every bus ride into improv theater.

And you thought this is a book review, hm? Nope, just letting you know that if you haven’t been here in a while or have never been to San Francisco before, go there now. And if you live here, go take a walk!

In 1989, just weeks before the Chinese government breakdown on the Democracy movement, I bought passage on a Yangtze river boat from Shanghai to Chongqing – a distance of more than a thousand miles. For the next six days, life came to a near-standstill as the slow, steady rhythm of the boat’s progress brought me from the coast of the Yellow Sea to the foothills of the Himalayas. Here are some impressions of this trip.

…

The boat is white and green, the kind of appliance-green you see on old-fashioned fridges, with streaks of rust down its sides. It is a wide-bodied river boat with three passenger decks and multiple classes and it runs a regular service all the way from Shanghai to Chongqing and back.

There are two-bed cabins on the upper deck, which are mostly full of elderly men that look like Communist Party officials that had, a lifetime ago, personally participated in the Long March. Facing the bow of the boat is a first-class lounge with deep armchairs and small side tables and large windows to the front and the sides. The bridge of the boat is above the lounge.

The main deck consists of eight-bed cabins on each side of the boat with a central corridor and gangways on the outside, so each cabin of four bunk beds has two doors, one to the central corridor and one to the outside of the boat. The cabins have a small sink, two huge thermos bottles with hot water that are regularly filled by the staff and two small rotating fans under the ceiling that push the air around without any actual improvement of the air quality.

The main deck also houses the ship’s restaurant near the stern – an open-walled affair with a few seats and a microscopic kitchen that churns out a never-ending stream of styrofoam boxes with rice and spicy veggies.

The lower deck consists of several large dormitories with dozens of bunk beds and every space in between filled with random freight and luggage, from live chickens in wire cages to unwieldy car parts.

We – the only three foreigners on a boat with some two hundred passengers – are together in one of the 8-bed cabins, providing an exciting international flair to an otherwise boring boat ride to our five Chinese cabin mates.

…

You know that you have reached the Yangtze river when the choppy grey-blue water of the Pacific turns yellow. It’s a sudden, sharp separation of the two bodies of water – here, grey salt water; there, yellow river water. The boat passes the line without any measurable motion. It looks like you should feel a bump.

Other than that, there is no indication that we are now on the river, only a few hours after leaving Shanghai behind. There is no land in sight in any direction, the mouth of the Yangtze is dozens of miles wide, dotted with water craft of all descriptions.

…

After almost a day on the river we can now consistently see the southern shore to our left. The river is so wide, that we haven’t seen much of the the northern shore yet at all.

We will arrive in Nanjing, our first port of call on the river, in another hour and suddenly there is an air of excitement. Many passengers seem to be leaving us there, I’m wondering why they preferred the slow boat to the train, although a look at their huge amounts of luggage may be the answer.

…

The boat stops on average twice a day at various towns and cities along the Yangtze. It’s a loud and exciting spectacle, with passengers lining up along the gangway, many of them dragging their luggage along in preparation to leave the boat. Others have just come out to watch and maybe to buy food from the vendors along the shore.

The crew has been doing this for many years every day and the boat approaches the shore rapidly with short economical bursts from the massive engines in the stern. Ropes are thrown to the dock crew and tied down within seconds, the boat pushes against the row of old tires along the edge of the dock, a crunching sound, a quick burst from the horn and the engines shudder to a stop.

Passengers that have reached their destination leave the boat seconds after it is tied down, and a stream of new passengers is lining up to board. At the same time dozens of food vendors push against the side of the boat, praising their wares in high pitched yells. There are apples and oranges, fresh dumplings and packages of instant noodles, boiled eggs and fresh bread.

To buy their wares the passengers point at a specific item from their high vantage point on the boat, or maybe shout the name of what they want over the general din of the dock. The vendors will sign the price with their fingers and then lift a very long wooden pole with a cup to receive the money. Once the money is safe in their hands, they raise the goods in a small basket.

…

Many of the towns along the river are heavily industrialized, with large factories and chemical plants that are invariably topped by huge clouds of dark smoke. At one point, not far from Wuhan, we see a chemical plant crowned by smoke in nearly all the colors of the rainbow.

…

The Yangtze Gorges are very impressive, but the weather isn’t very good and the tops of the mountains to either side are often covered in heavy clouds. We get a few breathtaking glimpses of cliffs along the river that are easily half a kilometer high. Through the narrow passages the massive river runs fast and deep and the engines have to work hard to push the boat upstream.

Small towns are built into narrow, steep side valleys along this part of the river, with buildings that look like they were glued to bare rocks just above the Yangtze waters. Many of the buildings are ancient, with new, ugly concrete structures poking out here and there.

…

Chongqing is a huge, hectic metropolis cut into sections by the two massive rivers that merge in its center. It is a confusing city with steep hills and narrow, windy streets that follow the contours of the river valleys. The air is humid and sits heavy and merely semi-translucent over the river. Many of the buildings feel dark and everything seems to be dripping with moisture.

After a week on a small boat slowly trawling upstream, the street scenes feel frenetic with an unbound energy, a strange contrast to the brooding cityscape around us.

The Kodak Duex is a very unusal 620-format camera with a helical telescoping lens cylinder made from bakelite, creating photos with a negative size of 6×4.5cm. It was only made for a very short time from 1940-42 at a cost of $6, approximately $167 in today’s money using the unskilled wage index.

The Duex is very simple with essentially no controls other than a B/I switch and the shutter, both of which are at the front of the lens assembly and are a little bit awkward to reach while looking through the viewfinder. The simple, spring-loaded shutter button has a lot of travel before the shutter fires, which makes it hard to get steady shots at the fixed 1/30th speed. There is no double-exposure protection.

The camera feels very different from most other Kodaks of the 1930s and 40s due to the lens mechanism and the materials used and it’s a rather rare camera nowadays since it was only made for two years during World War II and other than a low price had not much else going for it.

With modern eyes, the Duex has a certain late-Art-Deco charm all its own and the sturdiness and simplicity of its construction makes it an easy, carefree and light travel companion, something that can’t be said about many medium format cameras.

As with other 620 format cameras, it can still be used with re-rolled 120 film, since both film formats are the same size, only the spools are slightly different between them.

Like many of the simple 620 format cameras that Kodak made over the years, it can produce surprisingly good photos. Daylight photos generally came out a little soft in focus, with a mild camera shake due to the problematic placement of the shutter button being the main cause.

Here is a shot of the San Francisco Ferry Terminal in heavy fog taken with the Duex. The Doublet lens has the typical 1930s/40s era depth of field, which gives these photos their distinctive old-fashioned look.

Shanghai Gold is of course still available at Amazon (including a Kindle Edition), Barnes & Noble and your local bookstores – and I very much would like to encourage everybody to go out and buy a copy. But in addition there is now also a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licensed version of the book at shanghaigold.net.

If you weren’t sure yet if this is a novel for you, start reading right now. Enjoy!

I’d been trying to go to Hangzhou not too far from Shanghai for several years, but had always been deflected by inconvenient bus or train connections. In the summer of 1993 I finally managed to make it there and had more than the usual amount of trouble finding accommodation. A small reference in a guide book pointed to a guest house outside of town and I finally found a bike rickshaw driver who was willing to pedal me out there – which is where the memories are getting intense…

The old man is pedaling hard to get the rickshaw across a steep hill. I can see the bulging muscles in his legs, but also his smiling face as he turns around as he reaches the top, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth bobbing up and down.

“This is tea!” – he points at the deep green fields all around us, his Chinese with a thick local accent barely understandable. And indeed, we are surrounded by tea plantations. Row after row of tea plants cover the steep hillsides and valleys all around us.

The guest house is another hill further down the road and on the final climb we enter a deep forest, a mixture of bamboo groves and thick-leaved trees. I thank the driver profusely since only now I know how far it had really been. He laughs, takes the money and bikes back down the hill, disappearing from view in seconds.

The guest house consists of several dark, squat buildings, each in a small clearing of the forest. The walls are overgrown with ivy and green patches of mold cover the white plaster. It’s been raining daily and the air is humid, heavy and full with the sounds of cicadas and other insects.

It’s easy to get a room – I’m pretty sure the guest house is not licensed to host foreigners, but it is probably a hotel for party officials and the local police has better things to do than to check the books. It’s also very empty. Later in the dining room I meet two more backpackers that made it here, Craig from the UK and Jürgen from Germany. That’s it. No Chinese guests at all as far as I can tell.

Dinner was not bad and the three of us spend a long evening in the dining room and later in the lobby talking about our respective trips through the country. As darkness falls, it becomes obvious how remote this place is. There are no lights beyond the small parking lot in front of the lobby. The world ends abruptly at a wall of bamboo swaying in the wind, leaves rustling, the stalks knocking against each other with gentle, oddly melodic sounds.

I finally go back to my room and turn on the TV which surprises me with functioning controls and several channels to choose from. While I prepare for bed I flip randomly through the channels and suddenly see a title sequence that is strangely familiar. It’s the beginning of “A Chinese Ghost Story” – I’d seen the movie just the year before at a cinema in Munich during a foreign film festival.

For the next ninety minutes I’m enchanted by this movie – I’d liked it in Munich, but to see it here, with the sounds of the wind and rain in the trees outside of my room, in a dark, remote forest in the middle of China… it takes on a whole new dimension.

After the movie I put on my shoes one more time and go out in front of the guest house. I don’t walk far, just to the edge of the light. It’s after midnight and the night is very dark. Heavy drops fall from the leaves as the wind shifts the bamboo stalks.

Deep in the forest, I can hear the tree spirit move.

In the early nineties it was still very common in China to see steam engines pulling freight trains. I vividly remember the first time I saw these huge, smoke-black trains lumbering through a station, white clouds of steam escaping from the valves with a loud, hissing noise.

But what I really remember on a much deeper level is this…

Being on a night train, sleeping under the hot ceiling of a hardsleeper carriage in the topmost of three bunks. The trains often stop in nondescript stations in the early morning hours to switch engines and the carriages shudder and bang against each other as the engine decouples, followed by eery silence.

The silence is only disturbed by the snoring from other passengers and the odd clank and hiss of the carriage breaks as the pressure on the lines slowly decreases. It is two or maybe three o’clock in the morning, the station is dark and whatever town lies on the other side of the tracks is invisible. There could be a million people sleeping nearby or maybe only a few hundred.

I usually wake up at this point, since the sudden silence is disturbing and strange, alerting the subconscious mind as it had adjusted to the constant rumble of the train, the blaring of the horn, the rhythm of the clickety-clack of the wheels on the rails.

And just as I am about to fall asleep again, there comes a deep, throaty, whooshing noise, a rhythmic, mechanical breathing with a bass note that rumbles through your gut. A freight train rolls into the station and comes to a slow stop next to my carriage. The world is suddenly filled with a loud hissing noise. The steam engine on the next track is only meters away, a mighty “ka-chooong, ka-chooong, ka-chooong” vibrates through every bone.

No other machine sounds so alive as a steam train late at night.

For reference, here are my previous posts on MJB and their ads:

• Some Old Ads Never Die
• Again, Why?
• Why? Because.

Now walking down Third street to the office I happened to look up and guess what I saw? “MJB”!

I remember from reading “Coffee, Martinis and San Francisco” by Ruth Bransten McDougall that after the 1906 earthquake the MJB company rebuilt their San Francisco warehouse and headquarters south of Market – and as it turns out, on Third and Townsend. The building still stands, and the MJB logo seems to have been faithfully re-painted over the last century.

I doubt that there is anything else about the building that is left from MJB’s tenure here, but it was a nice surprise to see the logo on one more building in San Francisco.