July. A Saturday, somewhere in the middle of the day. I am on a bus, going home.
Home is the wrong word. What I am going back to is a flat I rent. But in Beijing everyone calls it home — the place where you sleep — and after a few years you say it too, without hearing yourself.
It is hot. The bus has air conditioning and the bus is full, so the air conditioning does not count. I am standing by the back door with one hand on the rail and my phone in the other. I stopped looking at the phone ten minutes ago; I am just holding it. My forehead is against the window. The glass is cool, and then the cool is gone, because I have been leaning there.
July in Beijing is one long day of sun. The asphalt goes soft and smells of tar. I had been out running an errand, and by the time I was heading back I had stopped feeling much like a person.
Somebody on the bus is watching short videos with the sound all the way up, flicking through them one after another, laughing out loud every few seconds. Nobody says anything to him. Neither do I. Everyone on this bus has trained for this: no one looks at anyone.
Outside, buildings.
Twenty floors. Thirty. More. They stand shoulder to shoulder along both sides of the road, one rank behind the other, and the light comes down through the gap between them in a strip, thin as a knife cut.
That strip is what I have learned to call the sky.
I have been calling it that for seven years.
I grew up in the country. Where I grew up you could stand anywhere and look up and the sky was whole — you got all of it, one end to the other, with the clouds and the wind and the rain moving through. In Beijing the sky is a crack. On a good day, a crack. On a bad day there is no sky at all, only the back of the building across from me, six metres away, and somebody else’s air-conditioning unit dripping down it.
The bus moves a hundred metres and stops.
I know the building outside by heart. Every window the same size, the same square, stacked floor after floor, perfectly aligned. Boxes. Little boxes, in rows.
When I was a kid, the neighbour upstairs kept pigeons on the roof in a cage exactly like that. Wire mesh, one bird to a square, a tin can hung beside it for water. The pigeons lived their whole lives in there. As far as I could tell, it never occurred to them that anything was wrong.
That is a mean thing to say and I know it. But after seven years the buildings had stopped looking like buildings to me.
Some days they looked like lockers. Some days like the row of drawers in a mortuary.
One winter I came home after midnight and looked up at a whole wall of windows, all the same size, all of them dark.
The word that came into my head was urns.
I do not remember thinking anything else. I walked the rest of the way home and went to bed.
A hundred thousand yuan a square metre.
I saw the number first in the window of the estate agency at the gate of my compound. After that it followed me around. Fifty square metres, five million yuan — about seven hundred thousand dollars. A down payment that empties two sets of parents. A mortgage of ten or fifteen thousand a month, for thirty years.
I have done the arithmetic. I have done it many times.
Doing that sum with my salary is like putting your tongue against a bad tooth. You know it will hurt. You do it anyway. I am not working out whether I can afford it — I have known the answer for years. I am working out why I keep doing the sum.
Seven years. It has never once come out differently.
Where I live now is better than where I started. Forty-odd square metres, one room and a living room, seven thousand a month. One small balcony facing east. There is sun on it after seven in the morning, and by eight the sun is gone. The landlord calls the position “good light.” I did not argue with him.
Seven thousand a month. Eighty-odd thousand a year.
Seven years of rent — how many square metres of that building is that? I do not do that sum. I have never once asked myself.
Seven years.
In July 2015 I arrived in Beijing.
The flight was in the middle of the night, because that is when it was cheap. I landed at two or three in the morning. No buses, no subway, and I was not going to pay for a taxi — and anyway a taxi would not have helped, because the letting agent was not there and nobody was going to open the door for me. So I lay down on a bench in the airport arrivals hall and slept for a few hours.
At dawn I took the first airport train into the city. Twenty-five yuan. Robbery.
I had two bags. One rucksack, one big suitcase, both packed solid. That was everything I owned.
I had rented the room online beforehand. A classmate from university went to look at it for me. He said it was fine, so I assumed it was fine.
The agent opened the door and I stopped in the doorway.
Two metres by two and a half. Five square metres. A double bed against the wall and the window. A wardrobe against the door. A desk. What was left was a place to stand.
Two thousand three hundred yuan a month.
In Chongqing I had rented a whole furnished studio — bright, roomy, with a bathroom, a kitchen, a balcony — for seven hundred.
I stood in that five-square-metre room and I was shocked, and disappointed, and close to tears, and the only sentence in my head was:
What did I come to Beijing for?
I did not let myself think about that question properly at the time. I lived in that room for four years and three months.
How I got to Beijing is simple enough.
My family are from a province in the middle of the country, a small place. Places like that produce one thing: scores. A kid from a town like mine knows nothing except how to sit exams, and the only way out is the number on the paper. Later somebody coined a name for people like that: “small-town swot.”
I got out. I got into one of the good universities — the ones the country decided to fund properly, the ones everyone has heard of. Relatives talked about me in a different voice.
Then I arrived in Beijing and found out a second name had been waiting for me.
985 loser.
A drawer full of certificates. A transcript with excellent marks. And when somebody asks what I actually want to do, I have nothing to say.
I dislike both names. They have followed me for years anyway. I earned the first one with everything I had. The second one came with it, free.
The job was no better.
I worked for a state-owned enterprise. Good pay, two days off a week, none of that 996 business, real holidays — the kind of job a lot of people would give a great deal for.
That is exactly why it was hard to leave.
In a state-owned enterprise you maintain relationships with your colleagues and relationships with your superiors. A small thing needs approval. A form needs a stamp. A report goes up three levels and comes back for corrections. Some of the managers did not understand the work and interfered with it daily, and every intervention created more work that did not need to exist.
And then there was the reviewing. Applications, approvals, things that are simply not allowed; self-checks, inspections, post-hoc checks. Every year a new rule. Every year a few more rails around the pen, and less room to move.
The work was not hard. It was endless.
A typical morning: I queued for one signature for an hour and a half. The man came back, turned two pages, and said, leave this one for now, we will look at it next week.
I said okay.
On a normal morning I could clear twenty emails, run the same process three times, hand a file to the next person and wait for a signature. If he was not at his desk, I waited until tomorrow. Tomorrow he came in and said something needed changing.
Change it. Get it signed again.
At first I got angry. Then I stopped getting angry. Then I learned to stand in the corridor for a few minutes doing nothing before going back to my desk. Those few minutes were the best part of my day.
Then there was the pandemic.
2022 was the strictest year, and the third one. A nucleic acid test every day. A health code checked everywhere — leaving the compound, entering a supermarket, getting on a bus, coming home again. One step outside and you were showing somebody a code.
Everybody was worn down. You could tell from how nobody talked in the queues any more.
The queue at my compound was long. Summer, full sun, the line curling around the flower beds. The person in front of me looking down at his phone. The person behind me looking down at his phone. Nobody in between saying anything. Your turn: open your mouth, swab, two turns at the back of the throat, next.
Standing in that queue one afternoon, a question turned up on its own: how many of the things I did today were things I wanted to do?
I could not think of one.
Seven years. I can put the years in a list — the first room, the second room, the third room, the same office, the same bus, the same walk from the stop to the gate — and the list tells you nothing. That is the trouble with those years. Nothing happened in them. I got older, and the rent went up, and the number in the window of the estate agency stayed where it was, and every year I understood the arrangement a little better.
People say a marriage goes stale at seven years.
I do not know why that came to me on a bus.
But something in me had gone stale.
The job was pointless. The flat was unaffordable. The rules had my whole day in a headlock. Any one of those on its own is bearable. Stacked on top of each other, they had been sitting on me for seven years.
Then, between one stop and the next, with nothing at all leading up to it, a sentence arrived. Whole. All at once.
I want out.
Not out of Beijing. Not out of the job. Not out of any one thing.
Just out.
That sentence had come before. Always at night. And I had always put it down the way you put down a call from a number you do not know.
This time I did not put it down. I let it stay.
The bus started moving again. I kept my forehead against the glass. The glass was warm now. The buildings went past, one after another after another, every one of them the same.
I told nobody. I decided nothing.
I got off at my stop and walked six hundred metres to the gate of my compound.
The lift had been broken for nearly a month and nobody had come to fix it.
I climbed the stairs. Opened the door. Turned on the light. Nobody there.
That night I lay in bed in the dark and the sentence was still there.
The way a thing stays in a room long after you have stopped talking about it.
The thought had come.
This time I did not put it down.