The Third Year by the Sea
“One steamed bun, one bowl of porridge. That is enough.”
The most disciplined book in the series, and the quietest. He came back in March and did not leave the town once — 282 days, not one missed entry.
— About this volume —
He came back in early March 2025. He had been away four months, had tested four provinces, and had found nothing better. From that moment until the end of the year he did not leave the town once, and he did not miss a single day of writing. Two hundred and eighty-two days.
The book is organised by the traditional Chinese solar terms — Awakening of Insects, Grain Rain, Start of Summer, White Dew, Frost Descent, Major Snow — twenty chapters that follow the year the way a farmer would rather than the way a calendar app would. It is the most disciplined book in the series and the quietest.
What fills it is deliberately uneventful: the tide table, the humidity reading, seven steamed rolls for six yuan, the neighbour's apricot tree, a rainbow he walked into by accident, the exact minute of sunset. He cooks, he walks, he swims, he reads, he watches the gulls and the couples who come to look at the empty flats and drive away again.
Yet the accumulation is the whole point. Read day after day, the smallness becomes its own argument: that a life can be built out of weather, cheap food, long walks and a window facing water, and that such a life can hold a person steady. Midway through the year he writes an AI-assisted rap about job applications and rent; elsewhere he records, without comment, the price of congee.
The volume ends in a youth hostel in Lijiang, in a sleeping capsule, on 26 December 2025 — with the definition of freedom he had been working towards all year: “I once defined freedom as not being afraid. The definition still holds.”
— Table of contents —
20 chapters, as they appear in the book.
— Highlights —
— Quotations —
English first, original Chinese beneath.
“One steamed bun, one bowl of porridge. That is enough.”
一个馒头，一碗粥，足矣。
from the diary
“Nothing but this endless, blue, freedom.”
除了这无尽的，蓝色的，自由。
from the diary
“In this empty ‘ghost town’ I exist like a stone: silent, hard, simply there.”
在这座空无一人的“鬼城”里，像一块石头，沉默地，坚硬地，存在。
from the diary
“There is an invincible summer in me.”
我身上有个不可战胜的夏天。
from the diary
“Sleep late if I want. Go out if I want.”
想睡懒觉就睡，想出去玩就玩。
from the diary
“Sisyphus's stone rolls back down. So what?”
西西弗斯的石头，滚落了又怎样。
from the diary
“I once defined freedom as not being afraid. The definition still holds.”
我曾经给自由下过定义，自由就是不害怕。现在这个定义依然正确。
Afterword · 后记