The interview
I live on the coast of Shandong, in a strip of holiday flats that empties in October and stays empty until May, and one evening in the second week of November a student interviewed me for an hour about it.
He was in the last year of an anthropology degree and writing his thesis on work — on the part of my generation that has stopped doing it, and on what it does instead. He had found the diary. Most of his questions were about money, which is reasonable: if you are writing about people who do not work, money is the first thing that has to be explained, and I spent most of the hour explaining it.
The question I remember came at the end, and it was really two questions.
Would I go back to Beijing?
No, I said.
And if the job were different? Not the job I left. A job that paid a lot, that was easy, that did not follow me home — no pressure, no one watching the clock, my time still my own. The two things that had made the last one unbearable — the pressure, and the pandemic that was still strangling everything in those years — both of them gone. If a job like that existed, would I take it and go back?
I did not answer straight away. He noticed that I did not, so he waited, and the honest answer came out in two halves, and the second half is what this chapter is about.
The word he kept using was tang ping, lying flat. It has been in circulation since about 2021, and like most words that get attached to a generation it means less than people think it means. It is not a programme. It is not a movement. It is the sentence a person says to themselves when they have worked out that the deal on offer — the hours, the rent, the commute, the reviews, the promotion that is four years away and might not come — is not worth what it costs to sign. Some people say the sentence and keep working anyway. A few of us act on it. There is no membership.
The two times I went back
I have been back to Beijing twice since I left.
The first time was at the end of August, three years ago, for about a week. I had not planned it as a test of anything. I went to see people, and to satisfy an itch that I could not quite name, and I wrote it all down in a set of diary entries under the heading Beijing Notes.
The second time was a real experiment. In October, my lease on the coast ran out, and the flat I was living in went back to the landlord. A relative of mine has a flat on the northern edge of the city that is usually empty — a work flat, outside the sixth ring, in a village at the foot of the mountains, with heating. It cost me nothing. So I went there intending to stay for the winter: to sit out the cold in a warm room, read, write, and think about what to do with the next stretch of my life. I was going to give the city a proper trial, with a bed of my own and no rent.
I stayed a long while. This chapter is what I learned in that stay, and in the week three years ago, and in the hour on the phone with the student.
Beijing, in September
The bus from the coast to Beijing costs 150 yuan, about $21, and takes eleven hours. It leaves from outside the gate of my compound at 6:50 in the morning and puts you down in the city at five in the afternoon, which is why I do not take it often. It stops at three service stations so that everyone can go to the toilet. Going north out of Shandong, the land flattens and the sky changes colour. In Jiaodong there are still hills and blue sky; somewhere around the border into the North China plain the blue goes and does not come back. By the time the bus reaches the checkpoint at the edge of the municipality — where everyone has to get off with their identity card — the air looks like something being kept in a jar.
I wrote a line at the top of that diary: going from Silver Beach to Beijing is like going from an empty snow mountain to a busy steel mill.
I stayed with the same relative, on the northern edge of the city, and spent the week doing what I used to do: walking. The subway station nearest the bus stop was hidden behind green construction hoarding, and I went round it three times before I found the entrance, which is the kind of thing that only happens in a city built at that speed. I went through Deshengmen, which used to be my transfer point when I lived here — from there you can reach the Drum Tower, Shichahai, Nanluoguxiang, Jingshan, Beihai — and I thought about how much of my life in this city was spent standing on a platform changing lines.
I went out to Shahe, where the young people live because the rent is cheap. In the morning peak there was a queue outside the subway station a hundred metres long, folded back on itself, people standing in it patiently because they had done the arithmetic and this was the cheapest way to be in Beijing. The queue moved at a reasonable speed and I was inside in seven minutes, and then the platform had its own queue, and I got on the third train. When I made it in, the carriage was packed tight enough that when I sneezed, with no room to turn away, the man beside me turned his whole body. A minute later two other people sneezed, and I stopped feeling bad about it. I stood in that carriage and thought: all of these people are getting up at six to travel an hour and a half so that they can earn money to pay for the flat they are never in, and then travel an hour and a half back. I used to be one of them. I do not want to be one of them again.
The city is beautiful in some places and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But it is a machine for producing a particular face. On the subway, a hundred people look at their phones and not at each other, and the faces are not unhappy exactly — unhappy would be a feeling, and this is the absence of one. I noticed a thing about them I could not stop noticing: they were all pale. I had spent ten months on a coast, riding a bicycle with no shirt on, and my arms were the colour of a table, and every arm in that carriage was the colour of paper. There is a line here about city people being soft, and it is not true in the way people mean it, but it is true that they have not been outdoors in a long time.
I went to the Lama Temple. It is a working temple in the middle of the city, and I had not been since the first year I lived here, and I had read that it had become a place where the young go to burn incense. The reports were not exaggerated. It was full of students, most of them under twenty-five, standing in long queues to hold three sticks each, bowing at every hall, buying charms at the counters behind the altar. A few years ago I would have been cynical about it. I stood at the back with three sticks in my hand and did a couple of bows, badly, because it seemed rude not to. The summary that had been going round online was that self-reliance had stopped working and only the gods were left, and whatever you think of the theology, I understood why the queue was long.
I met friends. This was the actual reason I had come. One of them, a woman I had known for years, I asked plainly: what makes you happy in Beijing? She said: nothing. What makes you anxious? She said: a pile of things. I had no answer to that, and I have thought about it since. Another evening, a group of us ate and talked, and for two hours nobody mentioned a book or a film — they mentioned books and films only as questions: does writing make money, does film make money, and if not, what is the point. One of them told me I had turned into a snob about the city, that nothing here was good enough for me any more, that the sea was the only thing left I approved of. He was right. I did not deny it.
What I wrote down at the end of the week was not about architecture or air. It was this: I had not come to see the city. I had come to look at these people in the flesh, to prove we were all still alive and not just avatars on each other’s phones, and they were not doing well, and there was nothing I could do about it. I could not change their lives. I could only change mine. So I got on a train and went north, to a small town in the Greater Khingan mountains, and then home.
Beijing, in November
The second time was the experiment, so I want to be careful about it.
I arrived at the end of October, on the cheap indirect flight, and for a long while I lived in a village outside the sixth ring: a two-bedroom work flat belonging to a relative, empty, heated, free. I had the run of the place. The books were on the phone. There was no internet in the flat, and I was not going to pay for an installation in someone else’s house for a winter I might not finish, so I read, and I walked, and I went into the city when I had a reason. I do not drink coffee, but the internet was good at the hotel down the road, and I sat there and used it.
The air was the first thing. For the first days there was a haze that the municipality itself announced on the radio, with a colour attached — yellow, then orange — and a sentence telling citizens to protect their health. I have no interest in being dramatic about this, so I will just list what happened. The snot came out black. There was grit in my eyes that would not come out however much I rubbed, and grit on my teeth, so that after an hour outside my jaw felt like it had been chewing sand. A day without cleaning and there was a film on every surface, and if you tilted the phone screen in low light you could see the fibres on it. The sunsets were spectacular, a flat red disc going down behind a grey board, and someone told me it looked like a Monet, which it did — it looked like the Impression, Sunrise, except that his is a sunrise and this was the other one.
The dryness was worse, and nobody warns you about it. On the coast, the air has water in it all year; two winters there and I had forgotten that static electricity exists. In that village, taking off a jumper in a warm room produced a crack and a sting, and it happened most days. My lips split. The skin on my calves went into small square patches, like a riverbed that has been dry for a season, and if you rubbed them, white dust came off onto the floor. I drank water constantly and it made no difference. And the whole time I was there I was constipated, and my gums bled when I brushed, and the fix for both of those turned out to be vegetables and fruit, which I had not been buying, because in a village the shops are small and the prices are not the prices I am used to.
The village was quiet in a way that is not the same as the coast being quiet. On the coast the quiet has wind and waves in it. Here, in the middle of the day, there was nothing. Almost everyone left is old. If you take a village bus, everyone who gets on has a senior card and the machine says beep for every one of them and they greet each other with a politeness you do not hear in the city — the Beijing nin, the respectful you, in every sentence, from people I could barely understand. The persimmon trees, which every household seems to have, kept their fruit through the winter; it hung on the bare branches, bright orange, and the birds pecked at it and the rest fell into the dirt and rotted, because the people who live there are eighty and no longer climb trees. At night there were no streetlights past the main road and the whole place was black, and the one good thing about that is the stars: in the city you cannot see them at all, and out there I could.
Everything took hours. The city was a two-hour trip each way at best — bus, then subway, then another subway — which meant that going in and coming out was half a day and there was no staying late, because the buses stop. I went to see one friend who lives in the east of the city, and it took three hours to get there: I left my village in the morning and reached his local shopping centre in the afternoon. He drove me back afterwards — fifty-one kilometres — and somewhere in the middle of that drive, in the dark, he said: what is the difference between this and the village we grew up in? It came out as a joke and it was not entirely one. For my part I had learned something I could not unlearn: that the size of Beijing is three hours, because that is what it costs to reach the one person you want to see.
I went back to the places I used to go, because I had been in this city for years and I knew where everything was. Fragrant Hills, the Summer Palace — I always went in by the west gate, not the busy north one, to see the sun go down over the lake with the black swans on it. The old summer palace and its avenue of ginkgo. Beihai, and the two small gardens inside it that I have always liked. The corner tower of the Forbidden City, where the moat is lined with golden ginkgo in November. Jingshan and the crowd at the top looking down at the roofs. The hutongs behind the Drum Tower. The Confucius Temple. The city wall park at Chongwenmen, where I stood and watched the trains come into the station, one green, one white. The old legation quarter, quiet. The shopping street at Qianmen, loud.
One day I walked for two hours from the village up to the pass at Juyongguan and climbed the western line of the Great Wall — the steep one — to the twelfth tower at the top, and stood there in a wind that I was genuinely afraid would take me off the wall. Another day I took the commuter train from Nankou up to Badaling for no reason except the ride, past the place where the line reverses itself on the switchback that everybody in this country learns about at school. I was not there to see the wall. I was there because the ride was a couple of hours long and it was something to do with a day that had no other use.
And the friends were the real answer. I had eight or nine people in that city I would call friends, and in all that time I saw two of them. The rest were busy, or far, or both, and after long enough away you notice that a friendship kept by messaging is not the same object as a friendship kept by sitting in a room. Everyone is working. The people I get on with best in this world are people who do not work, and there is no version of Beijing in which those people are in Beijing; they are all in places like mine. And there is one more line that cuts through all of it: they have married, most of them, and had children, and the shape of their week is not the shape of mine and never will be. Their Saturday is a child’s swimming lesson. Mine is a beach. We can be fond of each other across that, and we are, but we cannot share it. You can be alone in a city of twenty million people. In fact it is easier there, because in a city you can be alone without anyone noticing, and nobody thinks to come and find you.
After a long while I stopped. I had arrived planning to stay the winter, and I left on a night flight to the south, and the reason I gave in the diary was that there was nothing for me to do there. That is the plain version. The longer version is that I had run the experiment properly, with a free warm flat and no rent and no job and all the time in the world, and the answer came back that I did not want it.
What a city is good for
I am not going to pretend that the city has nothing. That would be dishonest, and it would also be useless, because the reader of this book is probably in one.
The city is where the money is. If you want to earn a lot, that is the only place in this country where it is available at scale, and everything the money buys is there: the flat, the car, the food, the holidays, the things you can put in the flat. That is not a small thing. A salary in a city is something like twelve times what I earn here, and the difference between those two numbers is not one of degree.
The city is where the hospitals are. On my coast the hospital is a township hospital and anything serious is a long drive away. In a city, if something happens to you at two in the morning, a car comes, and there is a bed, and there is a specialist, and the machine that can tell you what is wrong. I know exactly what I gave up when I chose the coast. It is the one entry in the column that I think about.
The city has all of everything. The coast has enough of everything. There is a supermarket, there is a market, there is a courier depot, there is one cinema and one mall with a fried-chicken counter, and if you want something specific, you wait three days for it. In a city you do not wait, and it is open at midnight, and there are a hundred of whatever it is. Some people need that. If you are young and curious and you want to eat eight kinds of food and see bands and go to exhibitions and be in a room with four hundred people, then the coast is a mistake for you and the city is correct, and no chapter in this book will change that.
So: if I had ten million yuan, or a hundred million, and never had to work again, I would live in a city. With that much money the city is the best place in the world: the advantages are all yours and the disadvantages are all things you buy your way out of. A flat with a view, a car, a driver, a private hospital, good food, a cinema you walk into without queuing. If you are rich, the city is not a compromise, it is the prize. That is not a theory. It is the same thing my friend in Qingdao told me: if you have money you live well anywhere; if you do not have money, it is down to your attitude.
But that is the whole point, and it is the reason the answer is no. The city is good at that price. At the normal price — a salary — you get the disadvantages and you pay for the advantages you have no time to use. The commute is three hours because that is what the rent forces; the salary is bought with hours, and the hours have to come out of something, and what they come out of is sleep, food, knees, and the people you were supposed to be living with. You are not buying the city. You are renting the right to be tired in it. And the thing the city rewards you with, when you finally have an evening free, is consumption — a restaurant, a cinema, a mall — and I have given up consumption. A machine that turns income into entertainment has nothing to sell a man who does not want entertainment.
I will put it in one sentence, and it is the sentence I wrote in the diary while I was there: a big city is a place for making money, and if I am not there to work, it has nothing to offer me at all.
If it has to be a city, it has to have the sea
If you made me name a big city I would live in, I would say Qingdao, and I would say it without hesitating.
It is the only big city I have liked. It has a real sea — the best-looking water in that part of the coast, in my opinion — and it has an old town with red tile roofs and yellow walls on hills, which I have walked around twice and would walk around again. It is convenient in all the ways a big city is convenient, and the sea is at the end of the tram line. When I am tired of the crowds, which in Qingdao is often, I can go and look at the water, and the water fixes some of it. That is the whole argument for Qingdao: it has the thing I need, which no other large city in this country has, and it has the rest of it as well.
But Qingdao is a place I visit. It is only good for visiting, unless you are rich. The rents are city rents, the summer crowds are city crowds, and the version of the seaside you get there is the version somebody else is paying for. On the same coast, further down the peninsula, I rent a whole flat for three or four thousand yuan a year (about $420 to $560), and the beach in front of it is empty for ten months of the year. So the honest summary is this: Qingdao is what I would choose if I could afford to choose. Rushan Silver Beach is what I chose because I could not. Same water, same province, a small fraction of the price — and I am not unhappy about it. What I am is aware of it. That is the difference between the two places, and it is entirely about money.
Why the answer does not change
So the answer to the student’s first question was no, and the answer to his second question was: yes, if that job existed, I would take it. And it does not exist. I have never met a job that paid well and left you alone. The ones that pay are the ones that own you, and the owning is the price, and it is not a mistake in the system, it is the system. You can have the money or you can have the time. Nobody in this country is offering both, and if they were, they would not have to advertise.
There is a second reason, and it has grown slowly, and it is stronger than the first. After four years the wanting has stopped. I do not mean that I have decided against working. I mean the appetite is gone — the reflex that used to fire when I saw a good salary attached to something I could do. When I read about somebody who has been promoted, I feel nothing. Not envy, not contempt, nothing at all, the way you feel nothing about the weather on a day you have not been outside. That is a bigger change than it sounds, and I do not think it goes back.
And the arithmetic fits the decision, which is the reason it holds. I have no salary. What I earn from writing is between 6,000 and 9,000 yuan a year, about $830 to $1,250. A year on this coast costs me around 10,000 yuan, about $1,390, and some years cost more. The gap comes out of savings that I built up during the years I did work — and this is the part that people who want to copy this life get wrong: two things have to be true at the same time, the savings and the cost. Take away either one and the whole thing falls over. The coast is not a living. It is a place where a modest living goes a very long way.
What I get for the money I do not earn is time, and the whole of it is mine. I sleep when I am sleepy and eat when I am hungry. Nobody is expecting me anywhere. I have not set an alarm in four years. I cannot tell you what day of the week it is, most days, and when I find out I do not care, which is a fairly accurate description of being rich if you measure wealth in hours. There is an old line that describes it better than anything I could write: the employed live by the clock; the unemployed do not know that the dynasty has changed. It comes from a story about a village that had been cut off from the world for so long that when a stranger finally arrived, the villagers had no idea the Han dynasty had fallen — let alone that the Wei and the Jin had come and gone after it. That is what the last four years have felt like from the inside, in the good sense and in the bad one.
The student asked me near the end whether I was happy. I do not have a good answer to that question and I told him so, because happy is a word that belongs to a week, and I am describing a year. What I told him was the thing I actually believe: that the days here are not better than the days there, there are just more of them that are mine. Then the conversation finished, and it was past eleven, and I went outside to look at the village before bed. No streetlight past the junction, no traffic, one dog somewhere. The persimmons were still on the branches, orange, untouched, because there is nobody left in that village young enough to climb the trees.
Five days later I flew south. I came back through the city once that winter, on my way to somewhere else, and I have not been back since.