Passenger #130 here looks very much like it might be Melchior Stüßi. It was certainly the closest match in the passenger manifests kept on microfiche from that era. The age (22) is right. Date of landing (November 12, 1845) is right as well. Switzerland is the country of origin.

If so, then he appears to be traveling with a Samuel Stüssi who is 18 years old (passenger #129).

Ancestory.com is offering free searches until 9/6/2010.

We returned from New Glarus this morning at 3:30am. I have a treasure trove of images, videos and documents to share. Since I’m traveling again at the end of this week, it may be ten days or more before the best of these gets published.

Dad’s burial was at 10am, Saturday July 24, at the Swiss Reformed Cemetery in New Glarus, Wisconsin. A tent stands over the proceedings to protect from sun or rain. The location is perfect — on top of a low hill, immediately adjacent to Dad’s mother and father (Helen Freitag Steussy and Edwin Emil Steussy).

The roses, red and white for the University of Wisconsin, are ready. The urn is a polished rosewood box. Click below for more photos.

Explaining the tombstones and what a cemetery is to the next generation.

Inside the tent: Nic, Mom, Barbara, Chris

Lindsay, Marti and David; before the services

Jolly Sue, Buzzy, Veronica, Aaron and Gabi

Mom lays a red rose on Dad's urn

Camilla chooses a rose for Grandpa Cal, helped by Cousin Alex.

Daniel's rose is white

Close up of Dad's roses

After services, a look at Steussy's from the past. Here rests Maria Steussy, died of TB at age 23 in 1898. Mother to three boys, including Grandfather Edwin and Great Uncle Henry.

Another view of Maria Steussy's headstone

Chris looks at the tombstone of Melchoir Steussy, the first Steussy. Note the tombstone was raised by Melchoir's son Jacob, who changed the spelling of his name.

Locations of the tombstones

KC gives Aaron an impromptu spelling lesson nearby

Thanks to Helen for several of these pictures.

I have a lot of photos on Facebook. Please find them at the following links.

Arrival
First Day
Dinner at Mary and Larry’s

Finally, a one minute video of the oompah band playing for us at Wednesday morning breakfast:

Nighttime traffic in Shanghai, under the lights of the elevated highways.

Virtually every photo I took during the two week trip is here.

Road Warrior Tools

Going to China for two weeks requires a bit of technical preparation. In my sparse luggage, I took with me:

• MacBook Pro
• iPhone 3G
• External Hard Drive with Copy of Laptop Contents

I needed to be able to run my business, have confidential communications and surmount the Great Firewall of China. All of these were accomplished with ease.

iPhone screen in China. Note the service provider is China Unicom (the Chinese characters). 3G is active, as is my VPN service. The page showing is my sister's Blogger page, a page which is blocked in China by the Great Firewall.

Before leaving, I prepared two methods of encrypted communication with my server in Southern California. The first one was a standard VPN (Virtual Private Network). This is the gold standard for private communication. It establishes a direct digital connection between my laptop (or cellphone) and the server, scrambling all of the information using mathematical keywords. I installed PPTPD on my Linux server and tested it before leaving. Both Apple’s OS X operating system and iOS for the iPhone have VPN built-in to their systems.

As a backup, I also tested SSH Tunneling, a technique with is not as clean as VPN, but which I used when living in Budapest two years previously.

Mostly using VPN, I was able to drill through the Great Firewall and maintain posts on Facebook and Twitter while traveling. Further, I was able to do so both on my laptop and on my cellphone.

While in Shanghai, I used a blogger‘s instructions to use a China Unicom SIM card in my Apple iPhone. The SIM card cost 126RMB ($19) to purchase. It gave me a month-to-month billing program of 66RMB ($10) which included voice calls, SMS and 300MB of 3G data connection. I used the data connection extensively in my two weeks.

One unanticipated problem I ran into were locked-down WiFi services. There were several WiFi connections I used which only allowed traffic on ports 80 (standard web traffic) and 443 (secure web traffic, used for https:// connections like banking and shopping). Both VPN and SSH Tunneling require non-standard ports, so they were often useless with WiFi. Fortunately, I always had my cellphone connection, which did not block any ports, as a back-up.

Outgoing international phone calls were done with Skype (both through the laptop and cellphone directly). Incoming calls were routed directly to my Chinese phone number.

Posting to Facebook from China, another blocked service

The last time I stepped foot in Mainland China was April 24, 1989. I had just spent a month in-country, seeing Guangzhou, Guilin, Kunming and Shanghai. I spent the final five days of my trip in that city. The night before I left, the evening sky was filled with the protests of students as the forces that culminated in the Tiananmen Massacre of June 5. My American host at Fudan University told me it was probably a football match.

Regarding Shanghai, it’s hard to imagine a deeper contrast. Nanjing East Road, today a vast shopping route, was a sparsely traveled narrow road. I remember a few dozen shops open, including a dusty old bakery (one of the few in China – bakeries are not part of Chinese cuisine), a bookstore with perhaps a dozen titles, a few magazine shops and little more. Dust was everywhere.

Shanghai had been an international city, an open port since the Opium Wars in the early 1800′s. Prior to that, it was simply a sleepy fishing and weaving village of little importance. As trade came through the area, foreigners moved in. By the beginnings of the 20th Century, while there were only 20 to 30,000 westerners living there, their army of Chinese laborers had built them a full city of western buildings, paved roads and the like.

In 1989, much of this was still visibly evident. Between the concrete monstrosities of communist construction, there were numerous beautiful mansions and villas for the wealth few. In the middle of the city was the abandoned British horse racing track. A gigantic part of the inner city, it was leveled to build the People’s Square park and complex of museums.

Today, Shanghai is again a cosmopolitan center of business, finance and trade.

Skyscrapers dot the skyline. Streets are littered with shops, banks and other modern delights. The remaining old villas of pre-communist China are marked by historical markers, but are otherwise not very noticeable between the modern, trendy constructions of the present.

But these were changes I was expecting. The news, after all, is full of detail on the changing face of China. But there were aspects of these changes that struck me to the core. Three things in particular that I was not expecting.

1) Chinese Backpackers and Tourists. When I traveled China in 1989, moving from one place to another was so enormously complicated, difficult and expensive, few Chinese people did so for pleasure. I remember talking to people in a village outside of Kunming. None of them had traveled anywhere expect to the provincial capital. And those trips were only by necessity, not to see the sights.

The Chinese backpackers were everywhere, taking pictures of everything. They look exactly like I did when I was one of the first independent travelers in China all those years ago. These people saw what we were doing, copied it, and made it theirs. The Chinese backpackers, in the swarming thousands, are my spiritual descendants.

Suzhou Redlight

2) Red Light Districts in Suzhou. Nothing prepared me for a red light district in the People’s Republic of China. Walking to a pub to meet a friend and watch World Cup Soccer one night, a Mama-san grabbed my arm and took me into her small pub to show me her girls. It simply shocked me. I’ve seen Manila, Hong Kong and the infamous Patpong District in Bangkok, but never expected anything here. There was one for foreigners (located on Shiquan Street, near the intersection with Fenghuang Street), and one that was exclusively Chinese south of the Night Market.

Suzhou Massage

A local resident told me that Shanghai had closed all of their redlight districts in preparation for the Expo, and that several of them had move to Suzhou, an hours drive to the west.

Friendly People

3) Talking to People. In 1989, Chinese people were extremely reticent to talk to foreigners traveling in their country. I don’t blame them; people with foreign connections were targets during some of the upheavals in the ’60s and ’70s.

Today is different. It really is possible to sit down and talk with people. Not everyone, but lots of people are certainly open to just talking for a period of time. Common questions when they learn I can speak Chinese: “Where are you from?” “How do you like China?” “How many kids do you have?” “Four!?!?!?!”

It’s a different place. And, very largely, for the good. Twenty years ago I thought growing up Chinese was a terrible tragedy. I’m so happy to be proven wrong.

Re-acquiring the language after a twenty year hiatus was like this, only at warp speed. I’d listened to elementary CD’s at home in Southern California, which all seemed clear as a bell. But when I stepped in my first taxi on the first day in Shanghai and tried to tell the driver to turn left or right, my mouth opened and nothing came out.

It was like this for the first three or four days. The very simplest of statements came only with great difficulty. I moved into a youth hostel in Suzhou where very few people spoke English (the clientele were mostly Chinese backpackers). And there were days in that hostel when I would wake up in the morning, dreading going out and challenging my lack of language again. Several times, I thought I’d imagined ever speaking Chinese in the past. It was one of those ways the brain tricks you into thinking that you are someone special or different. No, I’d never done it.

Then, on Wednesday, after living in the hostel for three days, I negotiated changing my room to a nicer one. The whole negotiation and moving was done entirely in the language. One of the assistants in the hostel looked at me and said, “You speak Chinese now?” It was my first serious breakthrough. I was in heaven.

Every day after that had a breakthrough of one kind or another, very much like learning a language from scratch, but much, much faster. Phrases would come to my mouth, unbidden but remembered. The long phrase for percentage in Chinese was one. Thursday, I had a 20 minute conversation about my family with two cleaning ladies at the hostel. I’d been back in China for six days then.

The re-learning was not a smooth ride. While I gained confidence, there would always be somewhere to fall down. And once a conversation goes poorly, it becomes difficult to re-start it and convince your partner that, yes, you do understand what they are saying.

My professional conference started on Monday, June 28. I’d been in-country for ten days and, while not at all fluent, I was able to make myself understood and listen to other people. My level was still one where the language was a basic and blunt tool, not a thing of joy.

On my days back in Shanghai, before coming back to the US, I found myself again able to make simple jokes. Taxis had long ceased to be a problem. I could work my way around most forgotten or mis-understood words. I’d found part of my tongue, but not all of it. I can now remember being able to play word games twenty years ago, and know that those memories are genuine. And if I were to remain in-country for some time, I’d certainly re-acquire the ability.

But the last two days in Shanghai before boarding the plane were really very comfortable for me. My language was back, and I could use it.

Confusing, big, crowded, busy, noisy. Everything that you’ve heard, and lot’s that you haven’t. I plan on doing a few posts over the next few days, detailing some of the things that I was interested in.

As an overview, the trip was very successful. I gave a well-received speech and met lots of people from my industry in Suzhou. By coming ten days early, I was able to re-start my Chinese language skills from twenty years ago. And, I was able to get all of my techie-things more or less accomplished (bypassing the Great Firewall and posting to Facebook – getting my iPhone to work on a Chinese SIM card – and the like).

I expected to see lots of things: buildings, roadways and factories. I was not expecting to see others: Chinese backpackers, loads of Chinese speaking foreigners and an incredible invasion of American franchise stores.

If you want to see my photos from Facebook, but for some reason haven’t managed to, they can be seen on the following links:

Shanghai, my first day

Suzhou, my first day in a smaller Chinese city

Traveling in China

Day Trip to Shanghai

Back in Suzhou

Speaking at LISA, Five Star Hotel and a return to Shanghai

Seeing Nick and Aubrey, and my last day in China