What Do You Do All Day?

The question

It comes in two versions and they mean the same thing. Don’t you get bored? is the polite one. What do you actually do all day? is the one people ask when they have stopped being polite.

I answer it honestly, and the honest answer starts badly. The first winter was the emptiest stretch of my life. Not because there was nothing to do here — there was a great deal — but because for the first time in years nobody had told me what the morning was for. What I had lost was not the work. The work had been unpleasant and I had wanted it gone. What I had lost was the schedule, and the schedule had been doing my deciding for me for as long as I had been working.

Boredom, in the form people mean when they ask me this, is not a property of the place. It is a habit left over from being booked. In a city an empty hour is empty because it sits inside full ones; take the full ones away and the same hour loses its outline, and a man who has spent years being handed an outline does not know what to do with that. He sits in a room at eleven in the morning with nobody expecting anything from him, and he reads the feeling as a fault in the coast. It isn’t. It is unfamiliar.

Then there is the part I would put in front of anyone thinking about this, because it is the one thing here that will genuinely hurt you. From October the visitors go, and by December this coast is nothing but the landscape. The landscape does not talk. You can stand at the water’s edge for two hours and nothing will be said to you, and if you have not learned to say something to it yourself, sooner or later your mind will not hold. I wrote that in the third autumn and I have not had a reason to take it back.

The same entry says something else that belongs here. I do not recommend this place to a young person for the long term. A season, yes — come for a summer, see it, that is a real thing to do with a summer. But people need new things, and a person who has run out of new things here should leave, and leaving is entirely reasonable. Nobody should be talked into staying.

So when I say the answer to what do you do all day is not things to pass the time, I mean it. There are three things I do, and after those a longer list that other people here use, which I will give, because the list is what most people are actually asking for. The three come first, and the order matters.

The week stops meaning anything

Before the three, the change underneath them, because it is why the empty hours here are not the same shape as the empty hours in a city.

For most of my adult life, time had two states: working day and rest day. Everything was measured against the first and spent waiting for the second. When I stopped, the second state stopped being special and the two collapsed into one. Every day became the day off. I wrote it down at the time in a way I still find funny: the days stopped being like a draught animal, because there was no longer a yoke to be out of.

Then the calendar changed, which took longer and went deeper. I stopped keeping the week and started keeping the moon. This coast runs on tides and markets, and both run on the lunar month, so that is what a day is called here — the fifth, the twentieth, the twenty-fifth. The spring tides fall on the first and the fifteenth, and those are the days for clamming and for standing at the water. The markets rotate through the villages on a fixed cycle: the first of the lunar month at Changjiazhuang, the second at Gongjiazhuang, the fifth at Xiaotan, which is mine, four minutes’ walk from my building. I no longer remember Monday, so I no longer dread it. I no longer remember Friday, so I no longer plan a release for it. I became, and I noticed this in writing, an unusually attentive observer of the weather, of whether the wind is up, of how far along the moon is, of whether the tide is coming in. Whether it is Tuesday I could not tell you.

That is the mechanical part. The part that matters is what it does to an hour.

In a city, spare time is a gap in the schedule. It is defined by what is on either side of it, and because of that it can only ever be a break. Here, spare time is the whole substance of the day. Nothing frames it, nothing is coming after it, and so it takes on a weight the same hours never had in Beijing. The man who came in August had a holiday; the man who stayed into December made an arrangement. I do not think either of them is wrong. They are describing two different objects.

The first thing: looking

The first thing I do here is look at things. It costs nothing, needs no equipment, no ticket, no companion and no skill, and it is the only interest in this chapter that cannot be used up.

In my first winter I tried to write down what had started reaching me. In a big city, light and noise and dirty air wear a person’s senses down until he stops noticing much of anything. Here they came back. What they came back to: the stars, which are not a figure of speech on this coast because there are no street lights out past the last compound; a dog barking somewhere in the empty buildings; wind going through pine needles, which is a different sound from wind going through anything else; the boom of a big wave on the bar; the long slow rise and fall of a small one; the damp salt smell off the tide; the fish-and-rot smell at the market on a market morning; magpies and sparrows, which stay all winter, unlike the swallows; earthworms turning in wet soil; a weasel crossing the road at a flat run.

Then there was the sun, which became the actual subject. In the first winter I got curious about something trivial — why Shandong people eat so much steamed bread — and looked it up, and the answer turned out to be light. Wheat needs long hours of it, Shandong has the light, so Shandong grows wheat, so Shandong eats flour. One step further and I wrote down something I have not stopped thinking about. Light decides a great many things. Without the sun there is nothing alive on this planet; the sun is where the chain of cause starts. Laozi says the Dao gives birth to the one, the one to the two, the two to the three, the three to the ten thousand things. The sun is the Dao. And then the sentence that made me put the book down: in Beijing people agonise over apartments, and the root of the agonising is light — a better flat is a flat the sun gets into for more of the day. What people are competing for, underneath everything, is sunlight. I spent years paying rent for a south-facing window and calling it a commute. Here the whole apartment faces the sea, the sun comes in the south side at about ten and goes at about three, and in winter it reaches the bed.

Two trees. In May of the first year I wrote that outside my window there are exactly two, one of which is a cherry and the other of which I have never identified. In spring the cherry flowered pink and moved around in a light wind, and I decided that for my purposes every tree that flowers pink in spring is a peach tree, which is wrong, and which I still do. In summer there was fruit — small, and honestly not worth eating, four or five to a mouthful with the stone bigger than the flesh. I ate some anyway. What I wrote was that the taste was beside the point and the colour was the thing, one red dot at a time against green leaves and blue sky. There is an old line about cherries turning red while the banana leaves turn green. This peninsula has no banana leaves, so I look at the cherries.

Afterglow. This is a dry northern coast with a lot of wind, and cloud does not gather here easily, so a good sunset is scarce. In my first three years I saw perhaps four I would call memorable. I remember all four. After one of them I wrote — and this is the most sentimental thing in this chapter, so it can stand alone — that a person only lives for a few moments, and that afterglow is one of the kinds of moment. Being there costs a walk of ten minutes.

And on the clearest nights, the whole sky doing what the sky does, the same constellations at a different angle every month, taking a year to come round. I learned which ones swing over the water in autumn and which do not come up until spring. Tao Hongjing, who lived in the mountains and refused to come down, wrote that a thing like this can be enjoyed by oneself but cannot be handed to another person. I have not found a better description of the whole arrangement. I am looking at the sky over a sea, there is nobody here, and I could not give this to you if I tried.

That is the first thing, and I want to be plain about why it is here. It is not that nature is beautiful. It is that this is the only interest I have found that costs nothing to hold, that nobody can take away, that does not need a second person, and that will still be available on the last day. From the smallest things I take my share of happiness; against the size of the world I dilute what hurts. The world here is very large and completely indifferent, and that is not a defect in it. It is the useful part.

The second thing: writing it down

I keep a diary. One entry a day, without a break for long stretches — a full year the first year, and the habit has held since. This is the second thing, and the reason I started is the most practical reason in the chapter.

I was looking back and could not find the years. The grinding of the office and the pressure of the city were long gone, and so, I discovered, were some of the people and some of the things — because back then I did not keep a diary. That is the whole argument. Those years exist nowhere. There is no second copy. If I want to know what I thought about anything before I started writing it down, I cannot find out, because I did not write it down and now it is gone. It is not a literary loss. It is like discovering you never saved the files.

What a diary is, then, is not literature. I wrote that history has to be recorded honestly, that I am recording my own history, and that this is worth doing — that it does not need polished writing, only truthfulness, because one person’s history is also history. Mine is one man recording one life in one small place, and that is still a record of something, made at the time, by someone who was there.

Three things it does that are worth naming.

It gives the day a reason. This is the one people who have never done it find hardest to believe. I wrote that what separates a person from animals and from grass is the ceremony of taking things seriously — that a festival matters, that love matters, that a photograph matters, that a diary matters — and that this ceremony is what gives a person a reason to go on. A day written down is a day that happened. I do not have a better account of why I get up.

It gives the mind somewhere to go. I started writing partly because of a specific problem. I had worked things out to my own satisfaction, too much, and the result of that is a tendency to fall into emptiness: nothing left that anyone can teach me, nobody able to control what I do, living only for myself and sometimes not clear on what for. So I decided to write — to put the conclusions down, sort the thinking, dig at it and see what was underneath. Maybe I would find a reason to be alive in there, and some pleasure.

It is practice. The first three months here I spoke to nobody at all, and I noticed I had lost the ability to speak properly — not the concepts, the delivery. Reading the day’s entry out loud was one of the things that fixed it. I still read the diary aloud sometimes, and I read video scripts aloud, and between them my mouth has stayed in working order in a town where I might otherwise not use it for a week. Writing is not only a way of thinking here. It is quietly a way of keeping the instrument.

And the point about quality, because this stops most people before they start. Do not wait to be good at it. I wrote that whether the writing is good or bad or however it comes out does not matter, and that continuing to write is itself the good thing. This is the only interest in this chapter with no performance standard of any kind. There is nobody to satisfy. If the entry is three sentences of nothing, that is a valid entry, and it is the one that lets me find out in five years what an ordinary Tuesday in the winter of the fourth year was like.

The third thing: pointing a camera at it

The third thing is the camera, and I started it for two reasons. Most people assume the second one is the whole story.

The first reason is that I wanted a record. A video of a market in February, of the ice on the inside of a window in January, of what the water looks like when the wind is wrong — none of it can be recreated later. The diary covers what I thought. The camera covers what was there.

The second reason is money. I will not pretend otherwise and I will not inflate it either. In my first serious year of it I wrote, honestly, that making videos was my only source of income. I laughed at myself in the entry and I will leave the laugh in. Over a year it comes to a few thousand yuan: not a living, a contribution toward the rent.

What I did not expect was that it would hand me a social life. I declined almost every invitation to meet anyone — I had come here precisely to not do that — and yet for three years I was answering strangers every day. They asked about the place, and then about their own lives, and I answered and occasionally argued, and the arguing was the closest thing to company I had. Later someone told me to treat the argument as entertainment, and I took the advice. But for a while it was real: writing to the internet daily in a town where I might go a week without using my voice for anything else.

And now the part anyone thinking of doing this should read twice. In the eleventh month I wrote that as soon as the filming was for money, the whole thing became less interesting. The purpose stopped being clean. What it actually costs is not the money, it is the attention. Every day you have to think of a subject. Then go and get footage of it, which means leaving the house on days you did not want to. Then the narration. Then music. Then a cover image. Then the subtitles line by line, because the auto-captions are always a little wrong. Then the title, which is a separate skill and one I am bad at. Then you publish, and then you sit there refreshing the numbers. Then the comments arrive, all of them, including the unfriendly ones, and you answer them, because that is what you do now. I wrote that by the end of it I had spent hours at a screen doing nothing good for my eyes, my body or my temper.

Two things followed. The first is drift: I noticed that information gets less attention than feeling — that what people wanted from me was not the price of a flat or the state of the water, but a mood about their own lives — and gradually I started giving them the mood, which is a different job from describing a coast. The second is that I discussed subjects I had no wish to discuss, because the questions kept arriving and the questions had traffic. I put that in the diary too, without excusing it.

So the honest end of this section is a line rather than a lesson. The camera is the one thing in this chapter that can turn into a job, and the moment it does, it stops being a hobby. Mine stayed small on purpose. What survived all of the above is not the money and not the numbers. It is that people watched, and some of them came here because of it, and some of them wrote to me, and a few of those I later knew as friends. That is what the camera bought me. Everything else was a business, and a bad one.

What other people do here

The list, then, for people whose interests are shaped differently from mine. None of it needs justifying and none of it needs a fortune.

Reading. Winter is the season for it, and this coast has more winter than most places. I reread a fourth-century collection of anecdotes about men who refused to take office and spent their time talking, and found it suited me: a hermit by the sea is a late and minor salutation to the same tradition, and for me writing is what those men did with their mouths. Reading and writing are two directions of one current, and both need the same thing — a long unbroken hour with nobody at the door. This town has nothing but that.

Films, which I lost the taste for, and that surprised me enough to be worth reporting. I told a friend I had stopped watching films and listening to music altogether: what I had instead was the sea and the river and the sun and the moon and the stars, birds and insects and wind and surf. My own life had become the novel and the film and the music, and I could make things as well as receive them. Text has no sound; most of what is on a screen now is noise, and it takes a quiet town to notice how much of it there is.

Exercise. Walking, cycling, swimming, hiking. I rode forty kilometres to a headland and back and nearly gave out on the return leg with nothing in me but a bun. I walked sixteen thousand steps in a day going to the sea twice. I wanted to swim in the sea for two years and did not, for a reason that will sound ridiculous to anyone who has not been alone: there was nobody to watch my clothes on the beach. The retired neighbours walk in pairs, the widowers walk alone, and everyone walks every day, because walking is free and it is what there is.

Fishing. The tidal lake and the small river that runs across the fields to the beach, mostly the retired men, with a rod and a folding stool and a plastic bucket, in the wind, for a whole afternoon. Nobody catches very much. Nobody seems to be there for the fish.

Clamming. Twice a lunar month the tide goes a long way out and several hundred people go with it. The sand is flat and fine, with no rock and no mud, so the only method is digging, which limits you to what lives in sand. It is not a way of feeding yourself; nobody lives on it. It is a way of spending a morning outdoors with a bucket, in a crowd of people all facing the same direction, at the level the water has just left. That is the whole point of it and it is enough.

Food. This is where the coast is unexpectedly rich. Shandong grows vegetables in a way that makes the prices look like typing errors, and the apples come in more than a dozen varieties, of which outsiders know one. I ate the local apples every night one winter and worked out why they are better here than the ones that travel: the water. The fruit is full of it, and the fruit that travels has lost it on the way, or never had it. The market cakes, made by a villager in an oven I have never seen, are better than anything I have eaten from a chain. A sweet potato in a fire is better than a sweet potato in an oven, by a wide margin. Which is the conclusion I usually draw from food here: a refined life is not automatically a happier one, and the people who believe that are the ones who have tried both.

The market as entertainment. This is not the same as shopping at the market, and it took me a year to make the distinction. Once you are no longer going there to buy, the market becomes the best place in this town for watching. My first year I did not know the names of most of the fish and did not intend to buy any: I photographed the trays and looked them up at home, and learned what a sea raven looks like and that a bamboo clam is not a bamboo shoot. Later I worked out how to photograph the people, which is harder and better — set the zoom, aim past the old man at the melons in front of him, move the frame as if filming the goods, and press the shutter when he looks away, so his face stays what it was. I photographed a strong wind one day, and the vendors holding down their awnings, several of them to one pole, because the women on their own were not heavy enough and the pole was leaving. That frame is worth more to me than any landscape I have taken. In a town with no theatre and no cinema and no bar, this is the thing that happens, twice a lunar month, in the morning, and it is free.

And the rest, from what I have watched other people do: singing, dancing, chess, the erhu, photography, calligraphy, writing a novel. All of it is here to be done and none of it is organised for you. I wrote one line in the first year that I think is the real answer to the question I keep being asked, and it is not about any particular activity: a person who can find something to do will never be bored, and the only people who are lost are the ones who cannot find anything at all.

What is genuinely missing, and the way out

I am not going to sell this place. Some of the reasons people leave are real, and I will put them down flatly.

The winter is cold and most buildings here have no heating. There is little to do at night — no cinema in the half where I live, no bar, no chain restaurant, nothing open past eight. There are almost no young people; the permanent population is mostly in their sixties and seventies, and out of season the average age of the person you nod to at the water is about seventy. I have almost no friends here. And if you came hoping to meet someone to share it with, I cannot think of a worse choice in the country: the young are absent, the old are unavailable, and the rest are on holiday or working six days a week at the one shop still open.

There is a feeling that goes with that and I will not pretend it does not visit. I wrote once that here I am calm and free, and that occasionally I feel the cold emptiness people talk about — the swing between boredom on one side and pain on the other, which is the shape a life takes once you stop being busy — and that most of the time I am content. I stand by the proportions, and by the sentence too, which is not a complaint but an observation: nothing in a life is solved, including this one. The difference is that here the unsolved parts are quiet, and in a city they are loud.

And the quiet is real. This is a holiday settlement: two months of customers, ten of empty buildings. In January you can walk down the middle of a four-lane road. I find that beautiful. Some people find it unbearable. Both are available and neither is a mistake.

Then the way out, which matters more than anything above it.

If it does not work, it does not work, and there is nothing to prove. I wrote down an old saying for exactly this purpose: move a tree and it dies, move a man and he lives. Looking around, though, does not mean tourism. It means living somewhere for at least a year — through all four seasons, long enough to know what the winter does and what the people eat and how they talk — and only then deciding. A summer here is a holiday. A winter here is a decision. Most people who have tried this place and hated it tried it in the holiday season, or in the wrong month, or for a fortnight, and then reported on the whole thing.

And, for myself, I am not necessarily staying here forever. I could go to Hainan. I could go to Yunnan. I could go somewhere else and live there for a while and see. There is no vow involved and no prize for lasting. The point of living like this is not endurance; if endurance is what you have turned it into, you have turned it into the thing you left.

What I have is a place that costs three or four thousand yuan a year (about $420 to $560) to keep, that I can leave and come back to, that has nothing to offer except time and weather and water, and that is exactly what I wanted out of it. And a short list of things I do in it.

Three things, and none of them cost anything: a pair of eyes, a notebook, and a phone with a camera in it. On a clear winter afternoon the sun came in the south window at about ten and left at about three, and I sat in it for the whole five hours doing nothing except watching where it went on the floor. I wrote the day down that night. One entry, one page, nothing in it, and the notebook a page thicker. The next morning the sun came in at about ten again.