The year is 1997, I was an American teenager living in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin and there was nothing to do. “Nothing to do” is quite the achievement for a city of 10+ million people, but at the time it was true, at least for teenagers. Even for adults, not much happened in China in the 90s.
One thing we did have was the internet, which was a game changer when it arrived, but our dialup internet was glacially slow, and unreliable, and it was also metered by the minute. But we had computers. And computer games.
We played a lot of computer games, because there wasn’t much else to do, and that was pretty OK because the late 90s was a magical time for computer games! Huge, rapid advances in computing power ushered in a golden age of gaming with titles like Quake, Starcraft, Half-life, and many others. With each new game, the graphics and technical achievements improved with what seemed like breathtaking speed. It wasn’t just graphics that were improving - games were increasingly incorporating online multiplayer modes so you could play against others online but this unfortunately required reliable, decent internet, something we certainly didn’t have.
But nerds find a way.
We started frequenting local Internet Cafes. Most Chinese at the time (average wage roughly $50-100 USD a month) couldn’t afford a computer so you’d have people working or browsing the web, but there were a lot of games being played too. The Chinese were overwhelmingly into the Real Time Strategy (top down view, controlling tanks and stuff) game Command & Conquer Red Alert. Us foreign kids preferred the sci-fi setting and gameplay of Starcraft, another RTS. We’d bring our game CDs, probably the only legally purchased software on the continent, sign up for a few hours of time, and install Starcraft. And thus would commence a few hours of multiplayer bliss, complete with the highs of victory, the agony of defeat, overlaid by a never ending stream of trash talking.
Trash talking became my specialty - I made it my goal to unnerve my opponent as much as possible, which was an extension of my philosophy on the basketball court. Our fellow Chinese gamers got a kick out of us cheering and hollering insults across the place, and we certainly attracted plenty of attention. But we were still paying by the hour, and it wasn’t the most, uh, ergonomically friendly experience.
Starcraft, one our favorite LAN games
You might be picturing a Starbucks or Panera Bread with computers, or maybe one of those sleek Asian internet cafes, or possibly some kind of cool Blade Runner setting. Or hell, maybe you’re just picturing a clean room with tables, machines, and chairs.
You would be wrong.
These cafes were more like dystopian computer access points built in the middle of a war zone. The cafes were cramped. Like, really really cramped. Think Chinese budget airline cramped, may you never know the experience. The average height of a Chinese man is 5’7” and at the time I was 6’2” so let’s just say it was uncomfortable.
Internet Cafes were usually located within un-renovated concrete store fronts, about the size of a bus, with a roll-up corrugated metal door. Basically, an unfinished concrete storage unit. You’d pay a dollar an hour, sit on a low stool, touch elbows (and maybe other body parts) with the person on either side, and if you were smart you’d bring your own mouse and mousepad. You touched the keyboard as little as possible. Anywhere from 20-30 stations would be setup against each wall and you learned to deal with the constant jostling from people trying to walk down the “aisle”.
These places always felt like death traps. Even as teenagers, we stuck to ones that weren’t underground and had very clear egress - the risk of fire was real, and not just from the cobbled together equipment and dodgy electrical wiring jammed into a far-too-small room - it was the smoking. Every Chinese man past puberty smoked, which meant we were packed together with our majority-male companions in a hot, tiny, overcrowded room chock full of dangerous electronics with no ventilation. While everyone chain smoked. For hours. It was awful, and we needed an alternative.
We tried using our school’s computers, which had a network, but it was a proprietary Novell ring based thing which didn’t work super well with all games. The math teacher responsible for the network didn’t like us installing our stuff, but we managed to bribe him by promising to do routine maintenance chores on the machines. That worked pretty well until our principal walked by one day, saw us playing computer games and having fun after school, and we were quickly banned. Nothing pissed him off more than seeing his captives enjoying themselves!
You have to remember too - back then, installing a game wasn’t the most straightforward thing. I’ll bet at least 1 out of 10 installs would fail, often because of weird hardware problems or some kind of driver issue. Windows would commonly crash. Troubleshooting these botched installs was tough on slow dialup internet as well. The world was also quickly moving towards needing pretty decent machines to play the latest games, so school computers and even the Cancer Cafe machines weren’t going to cut it long term.
The writing was on the wall. We needed to figure out an alternative.
Until the mid-nineties Chinese couldn’t own property. Housing was the responsibility of your work unit, and the same went for foreigners. A company would procure housing that would then be allotted to their employees. That began to change with the introduction of long term (90 year) leases - Chinese and foreigners could now sort-of-buy property. This meant my father’s company said goodbye to the hotel suites they were renting, and “bought” a couple dozen units on the other side of town.
This was super early in the transition to private dwelling ownership, so there weren’t many of these housing developments under construction, and lots of other foreign companies (and foreigners) bought units in the same complex. Thus, myself and most of the kids I went to school with (and all my Starcraft buddies) found ourselves living within the same housing complex.
It was probably one of the most multicultural neighbourhoods in the country and there are countless stories of moving into our “finished” complex that had no roads, no garbage pickup, intermittent plumbing, and unreliable electricity.
The property development was named “复康花园” or “Fukang Huayuan” in pinyin, which loosely translates to “The Garden of Abundant Peace”. For you non-Chinese speakers, it’s pronounced “Foo Kong”, OK?
The buildings were architected in the ever-classic Soviet brutalize-your-soul style. Each apartment block would have 4-5 “gates”, which were stairwells that opened out to a pedestrian-only street which was flanked by buildings on either side, and each gate had two apartments on each floor. The law in China at the time was that any building seven floors or higher must have an elevator, so naturally all of these buildings were six stories tall.
Our complex wasn’t large by Chinese standards, but probably contained something like fifty buildings. There was a semi-permeable sort-of-wall around the complex, and teenage guards in ill fitting uniforms “patrolled” the neighborhood armed with broomsticks and whistles despite the fact that the serious crime rate in China was statistically zero.
Remember - this was local Chinese housing, in the nineties, so any kind of “gated community” perception that’s forming in your head needs to be replaced with scenes of the apartments from Chernobyl. After the explosion and abandonment of the city.
I don’t even really have any pictures today because it was so nondescript and ugly - what was the point? There we were, living in China. In a relatively dense sort-of-gated-community. Nothing to do. Except computer games. We just didn’t have a suitable digital arena.
One day, I had an idea. I was heading to college in a couple years, and I’d need a computer, to do Important College Work. Contention was already high for the family computer, and thus I put forth my proposal - my parents could buy me my college computer now, and I’d throw some of my own money in for Important Upgrades like a 3D accelerator (Young Nerds: what we today call a GPU, except it was 3D only, and well, I don’t care to explain more).
The proposal was accepted, and finally, I had my own computer, in my own room! I didn’t have to compete with the rest of the family for screen time! This the 2nd best thing that had ever happened, after getting my LEGO 12V train for Christmas when I was seven.
I set my sights on something I’d been dying to learn: computer programming. The problem was, there weren’t a lot of resources online, and there wasn’t anyone I could ask for help. The software industry was essentially non-existent in China, but I found another American who was an actual programmer. Like a lot of foreigners in the city, he even lived in my complex!
Somehow I managed to persuade him to teach me C++. I think my dad worked out a payment that involved a buffet dinner each month at the Sheraton hotel, the only nice restaurant in town. Every week I’d go over for a couple of hours on a Wednesday and learn about variables, memory management, data structures, pointers, and work on my first masterpiece: a program that would build an index of how many times each word appeared in a text file.
I don’t remember who had the idea originally, but eventually we wondered if we could build a neighbourhood computer network. How would it work? Most of my friends lived within one building, which made things easier, but Programmer Teacher Friend and, more importantly, my 2v2 Starcraft Teammate, lived in another building that was separated by a plaza that was probably 50 meters wide.
To further complicate matters, they were at the far end of the building, which would easily add another 50 meters of length. Could we build a Local Area Network (LAN) that big? At the time, the standard for normal ethernet networks was 10megabits per second over twisted pair CAT4 (I think? Maybe CAT3?) cable. The problem was the maximum length for ethernet cables of that standard was no more than 50 meters. Ethernet cable also, well, looked like ethernet cable, and we didn’t want our cables to attract attention from any maintenance personnel.
Network hubs at the time (you had to pay more for a switch) often supported coaxial cable running in a 10Base-2 configuration plus ethernet. Picture the cable that comes into your TV box: that’s coaxial cable. The good news was that 10Base-2 had a max distance of roughly 100 meters, and that was just the distance between hubs, so you could run longer if you had a hub acting like a repeater.
The tradeoff was speed - 10Base-2 was limited to something like 2 megabits per second, but that was still super fast for games. The better news was that because coax cable looked just like TV cable, we could hide it next to other wiring where no maintenance person would mess with it.
The topology that we settled on was to run coax between gates at a height of about 10 feet above the ground alongside all the other TV cables. At each gate, I had a friend on the 2nd floor who would house the hub out on their balcony. We then ran ethernet cables vertically from our apartments which connected to the hub.
What would it cost? Computers at the time didn’t come preinstalled with ethernet ports, so we all had to buy network cards and get them installed. The hubs were a couple of hundred bucks each, and we’d need several.
I built a financial prospectus and roughly 15 friends were convinced to pony up cash. I bought something like 1000 meters of coax, another 500 meters of ethernet cable, and learned how to crimp the ends on each type of connection.
I seem to remember the whole thing cost about $150 bucks from each person, which meant we’d recoup our investment after about 150 hours played. Not bad.
Phase One was hooking up the apartments in my gate, which was located on one end of the network. We tossed the cable out the window, crimped the end connectors, zip tied things as best we could, and I hooked up my pal in my gate. We turned everything on, assigned IP addresses (no DHCP built into these hubs) and it worked! It was fast!
We fired up a game of Quake2 and marveled at our sub-25ms ping times. But this was just one friend, and we needed to move on to Phase Two - Connecting The Gates. There was no way I was asking permission to do this. The default answer from Chinese authorities tends to be “no” when there’s anything out of the ordinary (a philosophy shared by our principal).
There is also a lot of, uh, sensitivity in China around communications and networks and foreigners building communications networks. This was going to be a nighttime operation, and speed was critical to squeeze the work in between the semi-random patrols of the FuKang Teenage Security Heroes.
At first, we thought about donning all black and trying to hide but I felt like that would attract too much attention. Instead, we organized several groups of friends to stand at either end of the operational zone where they milled about and caused distraction. The cable runner would nonchalantly carry the box of cable and walk the route, stringing cable out behind them on the ground. At each gate, we leaned out the stairwell window and hoisted the cable up.
In China, the most vulnerable apartment to live in is on the second (British: first) floor, because all ground floor apartments have these steel cages around the windows designed to prevent theft. The cages are easy to climb and give great access the unbarred second floor windows. Or, in our case, we’d climb up and secure our precious network backbone.
Once the cable was zip-tied in with the rest of wires, you couldn’t tell the difference between legitimate TV cables and our pirate network. Stringing the cable took a couple of hours and we ended up completing our mission undetected. Finally, it was time to test - our ethernet runs had already been completed earlier, but we’d never fired up the coax backbone. The run was just under 100 meters and I was nervous that it wouldn’t work or we’d somehow damaged the cable. I screwed in the connectors.
Green lights! We started pinging other machines. It worked! We now had our own network connecting roughly a dozen apartments! I’m going to go ahead and claim this as Asia’s first ever private municipal network dedicated entirely to gaming.
There was one last problem though - Programmer Teacher Friend and Starcraft Teammate were stranded over in the other building. Separated by a huge plaza. There was no way to get across and stay underneath our length limitations unless we ran a straight line, and even that was pushing it. You can see the location of the plaza (today) below.
One of the permanent fixtures of life in our apartment complex was work crews digging up the streets. To their credit, the management company settled on using an octagon shaped paving stone that meant they could just pull the pavers up, do their work, then put them back without much effort. I managed to “borrow” the specialized tweezer-ish tool they used to pull the pavers up, but even with practice there was no way we could dig up more than 50 meters of the plaza to lay cable and not get busted.
This was a problem. I had limited leverage. My dad’s company wasn’t on the, uh, best terms with the complex management as West had met East over definitions of “complete” and “sufficient quality” and “working” and “gas is hooked up” (or even “peaceful” or “garden”) during the construction of the housing development.
But I was sick of losing games of Starcraft so I set up a meeting with the General Manager of the complex. All I needed was a compelling narrative. During the meeting, I explained that I had an important educational project that I needed to complete with a friend in another building. We needed to be able to connect computers together using a network that would under no circumstances allow us to communicate political thought in any way. My academic future in an American university hinged on this project, and it was important for communities such as Fukang Huayuan to support bright young minds in their educational pursuits. I simply needed him to tear up the street and lay a hundred meters of coax cable for me, and also to mark the cable run on their maintenance maps so we wouldn’t suffer any inadvertent cuts.
He listened politely, thanked me, and told me he’d let me know his decision soon. I knew I was screwed.
Bad news would be delivered eventually by someone else, good news was always delivered personally, right away. His assistant told me no a few days later.
I was pissed. I tried to schedule a meeting to appeal the decision but was declined. We started to look into radio transmitters - perhaps we could bridge the gap by setting up a transmitter on the roof of each building. I managed to obtain access (break in) to both roofs, but the equipment seemed prohibitively expensive - it would cost thousands of dollars for a connection with questionable latency. And what would happen if our transmitters were discovered? An unapproved, secret, foreign-operated radio link would be hard to explain to our friendly local branch of the Public Security Bureau…
A couple months went by. In addition to computers, I was really into music. I’d managed to form a grunge rock band with two other friends, and we quickly learned we could leverage our novelty as white teenagers into playing all manner of illegal rock shows. It was also something else to do! Every now and then I’d get a call from the “promoter”, who ran the local guitar shop, asking if we could be at a show in two days time, or tomorrow, or that evening, (planning wasn’t his forte) and we’d load all of our gear into a couple of taxis and head out.
The shows would be to small Chinese crowds of a couple thousand people, and we would play our hearts out, badly. Plenty of stories here, but the point is that it was quite the neighborhood spectacle as we loaded up all of our amps, guitars, drums, and other gear.
Word got around that there were foreign kids in some kind of band. They were performing regularly. It was all highly unusual. Rock music was mostly kind of illegal in the mid nineties in China. There were a lot of reasons for this, but suffice to say there just weren’t many local opportunities for exposure to music that wasn’t the Titanic soundtrack or Kenny G.
Our music - pretty awful attempts at aping bands like Nirvana, Helmet, Silverchair, and Tool - wasn’t the point. This was an entire genre and style of performance that just didn’t exist in China. And despite the novelty, despite knowing the only way we were achieving standing ovations from massive illegal crowds was because we were strange foreign kids playing crazy music nobody had ever heard, I was still surprised when I got the question from the General Manager of Fukang Huayuan himself.
Would we be willing to perform for his Office Christmas Party?
In attendance would be the senior staff from every apartment complex in the city owned by the developer. He could pay.
Finally. The leverage I needed.
I told him I’d think about it. A few days later I had a friend drop by and say no. There just wasn’t enough time you see, and we were all swamped with studies. Our studies were more difficult as well because we didn’t have our network, of course. It’s just the way things were.
A couple more days went by, and one of his assistants called out to me as I walked back from school. They’d be happy to dig up the street and install the cable for us - perhaps we’d reconsider? The party was coming up soon and there were a number of High Level Bosses who would be there. No problem I said - we just needed the cable to be installed and verified prior to the festivities.
That afternoon, a work crew arrived, pulled up the cobbles, laid down the cable, dug trenches in the gardens, and made sure I saw them carefully marking the line as part of the Official Infrastructure. I even got a copy of the plans for my records.
Finally, the network was complete! That night my Starcraft teammate and I dominated a series of matches, and then we owned Programmer Teacher Friend in Half-life death match. 
Now it was showtime.
It’s important to understand there were only two things we did well as a rock band - we were incredibly animated on stage, and we were stupefyingly loud. Unbelievably animated, and unbelievably loud.
We played through awful solid state Chinese amps that sounded terrible and cost something like fifty bucks each. But where they lacked in fidelity, they made up for it by being nearly indestructible, really large, and really, really fucking loud.
We played them Turned All The Way Up. We played so loud it pretty much covered up for how much we sucked. You’d just get crushed by this wall of sound, and as your vision kind of narrowed while your body tried to process what was happening, you couldn’t make out much let alone hear the music.
And we loved it. This was what grunge rock was all about - living in the moment of pure musical adrenaline. Playing and jumping and screaming and performing.
To this day, I have trouble hearing in some environments. Probably worth it.
As we wheeled our massive, loud, shitty equipment into the party venue which happened to be in the heart of our apartment complex, I didn’t really know what to think.
The room was small, maybe able to hold fifty people, adorned with fake marble floors, low ceilings, and bare walls. Anything and everything caused an echo. A small silver Christmas tree with fast blinking multicolored lights was in one corner, rows of water bottles were stashed in another, and there were strings of Christmas lights and shiny tacky decorations randomly hung about.
There were three large tables for the bosses, and the other half of the room was our stage. We set up, went through a terrifyingly loud sound check, and then disappeared to a back room and waited for the dignitaries to arrive.
Peeking out at the audience assembling I saw about three dozen older Chinese men all dressed in suits, our General Manager being the youngest in the group. This was his turf, at his complex, with his reputation on the line. For a fleeting moment, one of our group wondered if he might get in trouble - instead of some kind of karaoke performance, they were going to get (probably) the loudest (maybe only) grunge rock band in Asia, playing six feet from their tables.
I wasn’t sure. Maybe we’d get in trouble too. But it was too late. And we had a debt to pay. It was time to go out there and give them all hell.
Sound check prior to the legendary Fukang Christmas Party (I have no idea why I’m wearing shorts in December)
We “played” fifteen straight songs of screaming-jumping-grunge-rock at full volume.
We did a couple Nirvana covers, we did a Pearl Jam cover, but it was mostly our own terrible stuff. It was total sonic chaos being performed in the heart of the Garden of Abundant Peace.
The end involved an encore that culminated with me jumping into the drum set and knocking everything over leaving the entire band writhing on the floor.
As we exited the floor-stage into the adjoining room with our amps still feeding back at an insane volume, I quickly looked back and saw all the bosses on their feet, applauding riotously. The General Manager was beaming.
The next day the General Manager mentioned it had been the best Christmas party ever. Did we need any more network cables laid?
Over the next few years we played tens of thousands of games across that network. More apartments joined, bringing more gamers into the fold.
Even our principal eventually connected to the network - I held his application for additional administrative processing of course. I graduated high school and headed to America for college but the network remained up and running for many years afterwards. Unmetered high(er) speed internet finally arrived too, but nothing could beat the latency of our dedicated gaming network, or the distinct pleasure of trash talking our Real Life Friends.
That cable is probably still buried there today and maintenance crews are probably still extra careful whenever they need to dig up that street. I’m also pretty sure that Christmas party remains the best the General Manager and his colleagues ever had.