San Francisco

"On the best days, Steve would eagerly show me the products he was working on at Apple. I first listened on an iPod, talked on an iPhone, and played on an iPad in Steve’s office at his home. He invited me to all of Apple’s big product announcements where I sat quietly at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco as he mesmerized the world year after year. I even saw the stunning designs of a yacht that Steve dreamed about building. Steve’s aesthetic genius extended far beyond the domain of technology."

"The year 2008 offers a direct comparison between California’s speed and China’s speed. That year, California voters approved a state proposition to fund a high-speed rail link between San Francisco and Los Angeles; also that year, China began construction of its high-speed rail line between Beijing and Shanghai. Both lines would be around eight hundred miles long upon completion. China opened the Beijing–Shanghai line in 2011 at [a cost of $36 billion](private://read/01k3jwt46q240aq6fe12mqkyr0/16_Notes.xhtml#_idTextAnchor281). In its first decade of operation, it completed [1.35 billion passenger trips](private://read/01k3jwt46q240aq6fe12mqkyr0/16_Notes.xhtml#_idTextAnchor282). California has built, seventeen years after the ballot proposition, a small stretch of rail to connect two cities in the Central Valley, neither of which are close to San Francisco or Los Angeles."

"Still, Cupertino wanted to send engineers to China and offered bonuses between $500 and $1,000 a day for people to go. But flights had been dramatically reduced. United halted nonstop flights from San Francisco to Shanghai from March to October 2020. So Apple scrambled the jets. In the spring, Cupertino began sending engineers to Shanghai on private planes departing from San Jose, with a pit stop in Alaska. “Each jet could hold thirteen people, but we only sat six,” says a person familiar with the flights. “We wanted room and, you know, we’re Apple.”"

"Thus, in 1890, he and his younger brother Li Wenyi left their birthplace, Shuiwell village in Pingxiang, boarding a ship in Fuzhou bound for the "Gold Mountain," San Francisco (historically referred to as "Gold Mountain," and later changed to "Old Gold Mountain" after Australia discovered gold, calling Australia the "New Gold Mountain" to distinguish) to start a new life (Li Dehui, 1995:48)."

"A few months before he died, we were together in San Francisco. Charlie was in the Presidential Suite at the Fairmont hotel, and I was in the suite directly underneath him. We started having what was to be a long and sensitive phone conversation. At several points I said, “Why don’t I just come up and see you instead of talking like this?” Very firmly, he said, “No, let’s just keep talking,” which I thought was weird. It didn’t occur to me that he didn’t want me to see him wigless or in whatever poor shape he was in."

"What took my father from his San Francisco–based construction-supply business to Los Angeles was the postwar housing boom in Southern California, where servicemen coming back from World War II were starting families and looking to use their government loans to buy homes in that sunny land of plenty. Back then, the great valley basin was mostly endless citrus orchards and thousands of acres of undeveloped land. My father, his brother, and three entrepreneurial colleagues essentially bought and built entire sections of Southern California—the San Fernando Valley, Palos Verdes, West Covina—replacing vast orange orchards with hundreds of thousands of tract homes, sometimes in ten-thousand-unit parcels divided into four basic models, mostly indistinguishable from each other. Men like my father made fortunes delivering the American dream to young couples in cookie-cutter houses in made-from-scratch communities. My father was far from the dominating force, that was his brilliant elder brother, and he always felt in his shadow."

"The soap opera saga began: It turned out that the husband of Janice, my mother’s best friend for fifty years, had also recently died. They were the model family I wished I’d belonged to when my parents’ marriage was on the rocks. Janice still lived in San Francisco, and after my mother died, my father secretly began seeing her. He was flying up and down the coast, back and forth to San Francisco, to be with her. Every once in a while I’d hear from the nurse about how my father was coping, but one day she called saying, “Your father’s acting very strangely, disappearing for days with no explanation.”"

"I knew almost nothing of the life she had before I was born. She said her mother was Jewish, but I hardly ever saw her, and my mother rarely spoke of her father. He had been run over by a trolley car in San Francisco when she was three years old. If he was ever mentioned at all, she simply called him by his surname, “Mr. Addison.” My grandmother quickly remarried a well-off walnut merchant and with monstrous selfishness put her only daughter in an orphanage. She was five years old. My mother remained locked away there until she was sixteen. She never forgave her mother and never discussed with me her time in the orphanage. I often wondered if she’d been molested there; the surface gaiety, niceness, and kindness she displayed toward others seemed to hide a basic lack of emotional plumbing, as if it had been soldered shut."

"After being taken care of at Kansai for two years, I moved to “Mutsu” in San Mateo, about a 30-minute drive south from San Francisco. Today, San Mateo is home to many sushi bars, izakayas, and ramen shops, making it one of the largest concentrations of Japanese restaurants around Silicon Valley, but back then, there were only Mutsu and one other restaurant."

"In September 1982, we rented an apartment in the Richmond District, not far from downtown San Francisco, and started our new life. Although the apartment, located midway up a gentle slope, was not particularly spacious at 1DK, it was conveniently situated near Clement Street, known as the second Chinatown, with restaurants and movie theaters within walking distance."

"Of course, an 11-year-old does not see his home country on such terms. Put an 11-year-old in Moscow under Brezhnev or in Tehran today and he will sculpt a world that suits his interests and enthusiasms. But this particular 11-year-old who was taken from Reykjavik to San Francisco in 1978 made a discovery and a long-term decision."