Wandering
“No job. Wandering about. Observing the human race.”
After two years by the sea he had to know: was this the best place for him, or simply the first one he had tried? One winter, four provinces, and an experiment conducted in real time.
— About this volume —
After two years by the sea a doubt set in, and it was a reasonable one: was this the best place for him, or simply the first place he had tried? A man who has only ever tested one life cannot claim to have chosen it. So in late October 2024 he packed a bag and left.
He began in Beijing — not the Beijing he had known inside the Fourth Ring Road but a village at the foot of the mountains outside the Sixth, where his brother had an empty dormitory with working heating. He stayed through the smog, rode the subway to the furthest reaches of the network for seven yuan, walked to the Great Wall at Jiuyongguan, revisited the parks of his twenties, and found that the city no longer fit him. “Crowded places, noisy places,” he writes, “not one of them is worth going to.”
Then four months on the road. Yunnan and its market towns. Tibet, where the altitude climbed past four thousand metres in a single afternoon. Guangdong, where he spent Chinese New Year among the ancestral halls and village arches of the Pearl River delta. Hainan, where he learned that the island has a dry side and a wet side, and that winter is a different country in each.
He was not sightseeing. He was running an experiment, and he says so plainly: could any of these places be home? He watched crowds, counted costs, tested climates, noted how his body felt in each one, and kept writing every day. The answer he came home with was the one he least expected — nowhere was better than the empty town he had left.
This is the shortest and fastest-moving book in the series: five chapters, four provinces, one winter. It is also the hinge on which the whole series turns. Without the leaving, the staying would not mean anything.
— Table of contents —
5 chapters, as they appear in the book.
— Highlights —
— Quotations —
English first, original Chinese beneath.
“No job. Wandering about. Observing the human race.”
不上班，四处游荡，做人间观察。
author's note
“Crowded places, noisy places — not one of them is worth going to.”
人多的地方，太过喧嚣的地方，没一个值得我去的。
from the diary
“I am optimistic, though: the optimism of a man who has seen through everything and decided nothing matters.”
但我也很乐观，一种把什么都看开了、觉得什么都没意义的乐观。
from the diary
“We can't settle here, just as we can't buy the flat or the car. Those things were never going to be ours.”
可是我们又不能定居下来，就像我们没钱买房买车一样，那些东西都不属于我们。
from the diary
“Seen that way, the red sun in the smog takes on something romantic, almost artistic.”
这么一联系，雾霾中的红日倒有了一丝浪漫和艺术的气息。
Beijing · 北京小住
“The sea. My home.”
大海，我的归宿。
chapter title