For sure, I live in Shanghai, but Shanghai is just the land of my dreams. Ever since I began remembering things, she has been the land of my dreams. […] Perhaps Shanghai is big, sailing in the time and space of civilization like a giant ship. We are like passengers on this ship. Although we are familiar with the city and have been to many streets, roads and shops, we know only part of it. Or perhaps Shanghai is small, packed in our minds. Wang Xueying 王雪瑛 (2006: 125 and 133; translation by Sylvia Yu and Julian Chen)

The cliché is that there are eight million stories in the city. But really, it's more like there's eight million different cities, each created within each of our memories.

While the modern map is a marvel of efficient geographical communication […] in other important ways it does not tell us very much at all. The New Milford map provides an excellent example in this case, for I spent nine years of my childhood among those hills, houses, rivers, and names. The map tells me where certain hills are, but I retain in my legs the physical memory of what it feels like for a child to climb them.