On the fifth day of the lunar month the market sets up just outside the gate of my compound. It runs on the fifth, the tenth, the fifteenth, the twentieth, the twenty-fifth and the thirtieth — six mornings out of thirty, and only in the morning, and only for as long as the sellers feel like standing there.
That was where most of my shopping happened. One morning in late March I bought a week of vegetables for eleven yuan, about a dollar and a half: potatoes, a cabbage, a bag of bean sprouts, four eggs, and a bundle of greens I could not have named if you had asked me. It fitted into one plastic bag. I carried it home one-handed and went up four flights of stairs with it.
I start here because the question people actually ask me is not whether it is cheap out here. They already know it is cheap; the rent figure travels around the internet by itself, without me. What they want to know is the two ends of it. Where money comes from, when there is no job. And what happens when something goes wrong, when there is no employer standing behind you.
So this chapter is a ledger. Money out. Money in. And then the page at the back that nobody ever sends you a bill for.
The year, item by item
In March I sat at the table I use for everything — eating, writing, and the small amount of arithmetic I still do on paper — and added up a year. I did it with a biro on a sheet of A4, in one column, and the total surprised me even though I was the person living inside it.
It came to 9,730 yuan. About $1,350. Here is the column.
Rent — 3,500 yuan a year (about $490). A two-bedroom flat with furniture, north-south facing, sun in the living room most of the day, ten minutes’ walk from the water. The first year it was 4,000; the second year the rent did not move, and with the agency fee on top it came to 4,500; when the lease came up again the asking price was 3,500, because in a town where most flats have nobody in them, a tenant who pays on time and never calls about repairs is worth more than the extra five hundred.
Property management — 270 yuan a year (about $38). This pays for the gate, the sweeper, the grass being cut and the bins being emptied. It has come down over the years; in my first year it was 506, then 500, now 270. I have never asked why. Nobody has ever asked me for the difference either.
Food — 3,600 yuan a year (about $500). That is ten yuan a day, and most days it is less.
Electricity and water — 1,200 yuan a year (about $165). A hundred a month on average, and that average is doing a lot of work. In summer it is close to nothing: the sea breeze is the air conditioning, and the window is the whole system. Winter is where the money goes, because there is no central heating and the heating has to be bought one kilowatt at a time. Water is 3.05 yuan a tonne (about 42 cents); electricity is 0.555 yuan a kilowatt-hour (about 8 cents); gas is 3.28 yuan a cubic metre (about 46 cents). The unit prices here are not a trick. They are just ordinary. The reason the bills are small is that almost nothing is being switched on.
Gas — 50 yuan a year (about $7). Fifty yuan. For a year. I have looked at this number many times and it still seems like a mistake. It is not. I cook once a day, briefly, and I am not boiling anything for an hour. The blue flame comes on, the food is done, the flame goes off.
Broadband — 350 yuan a year (about $49). The only line item in the whole ledger that is buying something other than survival. It is how the next section of this chapter is possible.
Phone — 600 yuan a year (about $83), fifty a month. I rarely call anyone. Most of that fifty is the price of still existing on paper somewhere.
Transport — 60 yuan a year (about $8). A second-hand bicycle bought for 180 yuan several years ago and still in use; the whole cost is its slow depreciation. I ride it to the market, to the beach, along the coast road with no particular destination. There is no meeting to be late for.
Drinking water — 100 yuan a year (about $14). There is a machine in the compound that takes coins or a card. I fill a container, carry it up, drink it.
That comes to 9,730. Then add the things that do not deserve their own line — toothpaste, a toothbrush, soap, a towel, a pair of socks now and then, a new inner tube for the bicycle when a steel wire goes through the tyre. Call the year ten thousand yuan, about $1,400.
Ten thousand yuan. In the city I came from, a single room in somebody else’s flat cost more than that in four months.
For a long time that comparison was the one I used, because it is the one everybody understands. The last place I rented before I left was a five-square-metre partition cut out of an old flat — a bed, a desk, a wall you could hear through. The first year it was 2,300 a month. The second year, 2,800. The fourth year, 2,900. I eventually moved to a one-room flat of thirty-eight square metres with a kitchen and a bathroom and a television in the bedroom, and it cost 6,500 a month plus a service fee, and I paid it, because I had reached the point where I would rather pay anything than share a flat with another person.
And buying was not an option to be considered and rejected. It was not on the table. Flats in that city went from seventy or eighty thousand yuan a square metre when I arrived to a hundred thousand by the end. The flat I was renting, if I had wanted to buy it, would have cost at least 3.8 million yuan — around $530,000 — before the fees. And since I did not hold the city’s household registration, I could not have bought it anyway without five years of continuous social insurance contributions. That is the door. You pay into the system for five years to earn the right to take on a mortgage you cannot afford.
Here, the roof costs 3,500 yuan a year.
Why the year comes out this low
The rent gets all the attention, but it is less than half the story. Take the rent to zero and a person can still spend a fortune in a coastal town, and plenty of people do. What makes the number small is not one line. It is a series of decisions that all point the same way.
I eat twice a day, and I cook once. Around midday, when the light is best, I cook. One pot of rice, one dish, sometimes two. I eat half, and the other half waits. In the evening or late at night, when I am hungry again, I heat it up. I am not working, I am not carrying anything, I am not burning much. There is no reason to eat three times, and it is easier not to.
I do not eat meat. Not for a religion, not for a cause. It got heavy — that is the only honest way to describe it. It sat in the stomach and took hours to leave. So the food is vegetables, tofu, potatoes, cabbage, and eggs. Eggs because the protein has to come from somewhere; that is the one thing I watch. A day of this is a few yuan.
I drink water. Boiled, from the tap, in a glass. Not tea, not coffee, not beer, not cola, not any of the drinks that come with a label and a price and usually a sugar. There is nothing ideological about this one either; I stopped wanting them. In a city, drink is a large and invisible line item — the coffee on the way to work, the bottle at the desk, the round at night. It is also the line item most people never add up.
I do not order food. There is delivery here, in a thin and expensive way, and I have never used it. I do not have the app. Cooking is cheaper than ordering and I am home anyway.
I do not eat out. Restaurants here are cheap by city standards and still several times the cost of eating at my own table, and I have never liked the noise in them.
I do not have a social life to pay for. This is the big one, and it is the reason the ledger looks the way it does. No dinners to host, no wedding gifts, no round of drinks, no trip taken because four other people wanted to go, no keeping up with what anyone else has. Most of what people spend money on is other people — either on their behalf or in front of them. Remove the audience and a surprising amount of the spending simply does not occur.
I do not buy clothes. I have clothes. They are several years old and washed pale and they are soft and they fit. Nobody here is looking, and I am not performing for anyone, so there is no reason to replace something that still does its job.
I do not get sick, which is a different section of this chapter, and a much more expensive one.
Add all of that up and you get ten thousand yuan a year, of which thirty-five hundred is the roof. Which means the entire cost of my existence — the food, the light, the heat, the water, the internet, everything that keeps a body running — comes to roughly 6,500 yuan a year, about $900, or about eighteen yuan a day. About two and a half dollars a day to be alive, in a year when a single coffee in the city I left cost thirty.
I want to be careful about how I say the next part, because it is the part most easily misread. None of this is deprivation performed as a virtue. I am not enduring anything. The reason I eat potatoes and cabbage is that I like potatoes and cabbage, and the reason I do not own a second pair of shoes is that I have no use for a second pair of shoes. The saving is a side effect of losing the appetite, not a discipline imposed on top of it. People imagine this life as tightening a belt. It is closer to no longer wanting the belt.
Where the money comes from
The expenses are the half of the ledger that anyone can copy. The income is the half that surprises people, because there is no job behind it and there has not been one for years.
I do not have one income. I have six, and each of them is small. WeChat — both the article side and the short-video side — plus Bilibili, Toutiao, Baidu and Douyin. I have an account on most of the platforms that pay ordinary people for content. What I write, I paste into all of them. What I film, I upload to all of them. The money each platform pays is poor, and it varies by platform, and some months one carries the rest. But they add.
Here is what that has actually produced. Take this year first, month by month, because it shows the shape of it.
January and February I was travelling in Yunnan, moving around, and I published almost nothing. Those two months brought in three or four hundred yuan a month, never over five hundred — about $40 to $55. I came back to the coast at the end of February, when it was still cold and I still had no inclination to do anything. In March the weather turned, I started going out again, and I started filming and writing again; that month all platforms together came to about 1,000 yuan, about $140. In April I published more, and two or three things travelled further than usual, and the month came to about 2,000. May came to about 2,000 as well — about $280. Five months, January to May: 6,000 yuan, about $835.
That 6,000 is the number I keep looking at, because five months of this year has already equalled the whole of my first year doing it.
The whole series goes like this. I resigned in the summer of 2022, and the second half of that year I earned nothing at all. 2023, my first year publishing anything, I had no experience and almost no audience, and the entire year came to about 6,000 yuan. 2024: about 8,000, roughly $1,110. 2025: about 9,000, about $1,250. It has gone up every year, not because I have got cleverer but because the archive gets bigger and the audience accumulates, and because I kept going when the numbers were insulting.
Two things are worth saying about this income, and the second one is the reason it is not larger.
The first is that it is not a living. Nine thousand yuan a year is about $1,250. It would not cover ten days of the life I used to have. Anyone reading this who is thinking of doing the same thing should understand what they are looking at: this money is not what makes the life possible. It is pocket money on top of what makes the life possible, and I will get to that in a moment.
The second is that the ceiling on this income is not the platforms. It is my face. If I put my face on camera — if I streamed, if I did the talking-head videos, if I did the things that reliably earn the most — the income would be several times what it is. I do not. Partly it is a residue of face, in the Chinese sense: some leftover self-consciousness I have not finished scraping off. Younger people who grew up inside the internet do not have this problem; they were online before they had a self to protect, and they will point a camera at themselves in a way that would take me an hour to work up to. I know exactly what I am leaving on the table by not doing it. I also know that I am not short of money, and that I have not reached the point where being seen is worth being paid for. Other people would make the other trade, and they would be right to. I made this one.
One more thing about the money, since it comes up constantly in the comments. At some point I made a video saying I had two million yuan in savings. That was not true and it was not a slip. It was a joke aimed at a particular kind of audience, the kind that cannot discuss this life without first establishing the size of the pile; I said the biggest number I could think of and let them have it. The real figure is over a million yuan. I do not say how much over. Somewhere between one million and two million is the honest answer, and I intend to leave it at that.
The gap in the middle
Put the two halves side by side and you find the thing that this whole chapter is really about.
My expenses run between ten thousand and fifteen thousand yuan a year — about $1,400 to $2,080, and yes, those are two different numbers and I will come back to that in a moment. My income from publishing runs between six thousand and nine thousand. It has never once covered the cost. Not in the first year, not in the best year, not this year.
So what closes the gap? Savings. Money earned in offices over many years, in cities, doing work I did not want to keep doing, and not spent while I was earning it.
That is it. That is the whole mechanism. And it is the most important practical sentence in this book, so I am going to say it as flatly as I can: this life is not funded by the ghost town. It is funded by a city salary that was earned, saved, carried out here, and is now being spent at ghost-town prices.
The town is a multiplier. It is not a replacement. If you arrive here with nothing and no way to earn, the rent will not save you; you will simply be poor in a quiet place, which is a worse deal than being poor in a loud one, because at least the loud one has jobs. What the town does is take a finite pile of money and stretch it further than anywhere else in the country stretches it. A person who could live eight years in a city on their savings can live forty here. That is not a small thing. It is also not magic, and it is not self-sufficiency. It is arithmetic.
So the honest version of my situation is this. There is a pile of money, over a million yuan, sitting somewhere, and it throws off interest. The interest, plus six to nine thousand yuan a year of publishing income, is what pays the ten to fifteen thousand. The pile is the job now. It is doing the work that a salary used to do, except that it never calls me and never asks me to be somewhere at 8:20 in the morning.
And that is where the two expense figures I gave you come from. The itemised ledger — the one with the line for gas and the line for the bicycle — comes to 9,730 yuan. That is the floor. It is what a year costs when nothing happens. Some years something happens. A train ticket somewhere, a phone that finally dies, shoes that finally split, a friend passing through, a month away in a warmer place in the winter, which is a real cost that shows up in no column. On a fuller year the true figure is nearer twelve to fifteen thousand. I give you both numbers because both are true, and because a person planning this life should plan on the higher one.
The bill nobody sends
There is one more thing in the ledger, and it is the largest thing in the ledger, and it has no number next to it.
When I left my job, I left the social insurance system. In China that is a specific object, and I should explain it for anyone reading this from somewhere else. It is five insurances and one fund, paid monthly out of your salary and matched by your employer: pension, medical, unemployment, work injury, maternity, plus the housing fund. It is not really insurance in the way that word is used in some countries. It is the casing around a normal life. It decides whether you can see a doctor cheaply, whether you have an income in old age, whether you are allowed to buy a flat in the city you live in, and in practice a whole series of smaller permissions downstream. It is also administered by locality, which means the moment you stop working you have to decide, actively, what to do about it — and there is a special individual category for paying it yourself, which most people who leave a job never look up.
I did look it up. I decided not to.
The last day of that job was administrative and strange. The exit form had eighteen boxes on it, one for each department that had to sign off that you owed nothing and had returned everything: social insurance, medical insurance, the housing fund, the supplementary pension, your personnel file, your household registration, the union, logistics, IT. Eighteen boxes. I remember standing in corridors asking people who I was, having to introduce myself to colleagues I had somehow never met in all that time, which tells you how well I had done there.
At lunch two of them took me out, the way people do, and somewhere in the middle of the meal they told me the responsible thing: whatever you do afterwards, don’t let the social insurance lapse. Top it up yourself. Keep the years continuous.
I said something that I still stand behind, though I would say it more carefully now. I said: do rich people pay social insurance? Do rich people worry about a pension?
What I meant was that the whole apparatus is designed to protect you against a future you cannot fund, and I had decided that I could fund mine, and that the monthly payment was a large sum of money to hand over for a promise about a version of me that would exist in several decades, in a country changing fast enough that I genuinely cannot imagine what the rules will be by then. I had also, by then, spent years watching a system take money out of my salary every month for medical insurance and hand back almost nothing, because I hardly ever went to a doctor. There was a period when my employer would reimburse up to 3,800 yuan of medical costs a year, about $530, and every December I would panic about spending the allowance before it expired. For a few years I bought supplements at a pharmacy and posted them to my parents. In the later years I stopped bothering and simply opened a membership card at the pharmacy and put the money onto it. By the time I left, there were six or seven thousand yuan sitting on that card that I could not use up. I gave the card to my brother.
I also, across all the years I worked, went to a hospital twice. Both times for something minor. Both times the doctor gave me medicine that did nothing, and I got better on my own, the way I always had.
So my position, stated plainly, is this. I do not have a pension accruing. I do not have medical insurance. If I get ill, I pay for it myself, or I do not go. In exchange, nobody takes a monthly cut out of the small amount of money I do have, and I do not spend my days worrying about a me who is several decades away.
As for illness, my rule is a short one. Small illness I endure, medium illness I deal with as it arrives, and a serious illness I decline to treat. People find that callous, or they find it brave, and it is neither. It is a price, named in advance, and accepted, and I would rather name it than pretend the price is not there.
Because there is a cost, and I want to put it on the page rather than hide it at the bottom, because a survival guide that only tells you the good parts is a brochure.
The cost is that when something is wrong with me, I cannot find out what it is. For a stretch of the spring of my third year I woke most mornings with a dull ache low on my left side and a gurgling that ran on for a while and then stopped. Nothing dramatic. But it went on for weeks, which is long enough to start thinking about organs. I worked it out from the outside, the only way available to me: I decided it was the food, and then I decided it was the water, and specifically the first rusty run of it out of the tap every morning, which I had got into the habit of letting go before I filled the pot — the water I then washed the rice and the vegetables and the bowls in, which I then ate from. I wrote it down in my diary in case it turned out to be the beginning of something.
I do not know, to this day, what that was. That is the cost. Not the money — the not knowing.
And here is the part I did not understand until I was on this side of it. In all the years I worked in a city with good hospitals, I used to wonder how anyone could let an illness run. How do you not just go? It seemed to me like a failure of will, or a kind of stubbornness, this old proverb about avoiding the doctor. Then I moved here, and I understood it completely, and it turned out to have nothing to do with stubbornness. The proverb is not about fear of doctors. It is about the price of the appointment, and the price of the tests after the appointment, and the fact that a person who knows the price will always find a reason to wait another month and see if it sorts itself out.
That is the real bill. It does not arrive in the post. It arrives the morning you decide, again, not to go.
If all of this sounds like I am recommending it, I am not, and I would rather be clear about the alternative. If you want this life and you are frightened of that page of the ledger, you have two ways out and both of them work. You can keep working, and keep the insurance, and take this life later, when the years are banked — and there is no shame in that; the people who do that end up with the same sea and fewer nights awake. Or you can leave the job and keep paying the pension and the medical insurance yourself, as an individual, out of your own money. It is more expensive that way, because there is no employer matching you, but it is possible, and if you have money it is probably what you should do.
I did not do either. I decided I would not need it, and I decided I did not want to spend the money, and both of those statements are true at once, and you are welcome to notice that one of them is more honest than the other.
What the year came to
For the year I added up, the figures were these. Out: 9,730 yuan. In, from publishing: somewhere around seven thousand. Covered, without the principal moving in any way I would notice.
That is a whole life, on one sheet of A4, in one column, in a biro. It is not a secret and there is no trick in it. Anyone with the same starting position — a pile of savings, no dependants, a low appetite, and a willingness to live somewhere with nothing in it — could do the same arithmetic and get the same answer. The town does not do it for you. It provides the cheap rent, the cheap food, the sea, and the quiet; the rest is subtraction, and you have to do the subtraction yourself.
The one number in the whole column that is not about money is the one with no number next to it. Ten thousand yuan a year buys the roof, the food, the heat, the water, the internet and the bicycle. It does not buy anybody to stand next to you when the thing you have been ignoring turns out to be the thing. That is the actual price of this arrangement. It is paid later, in a currency you do not have yet, and I have decided, for now, that it is a price worth paying.
The market at the gate sets up again on the fifth, the tenth, the fifteenth, the twentieth, the twenty-fifth and the thirtieth. The bag is a few yuan and it lasts a week and I will be there.