I grew up inland.
The first time I saw the sea I was already an adult. A few of us went to Qingdao for a long weekend. The wind was stronger than I expected. I was standing on the sand looking down at my feet, and I nearly lost my glasses.
Three days. That was all it was. I thought about that water for years afterwards.
So when the sentence landed on the bus, the next sentence arrived almost at once.
Then go to the sea.
Go for a year.
That summer I had one thing to do every evening.
I got back to the flat around eight or nine, turned on the light, boiled water, and carried the laptop onto the bed and sat against the headboard with it on my knees. The room was quiet except for the fan. I looked up places.
The first thing I typed into the search box was Qingdao.
Qingdao is a good city. Sea, beer, red roofs, plane trees. I looked at rents. A decent one-room place, several thousand a month — about what I was already paying in Beijing.
I looked at the number for a while.
The sea is free. Living beside it is not.
Delete.
Next one down. Weihai.
Weihai is much smaller than Qingdao. Clean, quiet, cheaper. I found a few places I liked, and then I noticed that the prices I was looking at were for the city centre.
The city centre was not cheap either.
By then I had worked out one thing clearly. I was not going to have an income. A thousand yuan a month is twelve thousand a year. Where I was going, twelve thousand a year would rent a flat for three years.
Delete.
Further down. Rongcheng.
Rongcheng is a county-level city under Weihai, a little further east, near the end of the land. The rents dropped again.
Still not cheap enough.
Delete.
And then, that night, four characters I had never seen before: Rushan Yintan.
Silver Beach.
What people wrote about it was entertaining.
It has two nicknames. One is “ghost town.” The other is “the Hegang of the seaside.”
Hegang is a coal city in the far north-east where flats got so cheap they became a national joke — an apartment for the price of a used car. Somebody had taken the joke and moved it to the coast.
Where the ghost town came from, the posts were thorough.
The whole area is a holiday resort. They built a great many buildings, one after another, strung out along the shoreline for several kilometres. Flats there sold for two or three thousand yuan a square metre. In Beijing it was a hundred thousand. Thirty or forty times cheaper, and nobody was buying.
Almost everyone who did buy was a retired person from somewhere else, and what they were buying was a month or two of sea air. So there are two months of life here — July and August. Children everywhere in the water, the beach packed, restaurants and barbecue stalls and guesthouses coming up like mushrooms after rain, a music festival on the sand, noise until ten at night.
Then the first of September comes, and two thirds of the people leave.
After that it turns cold.
Almost none of the buildings have central heating. The winter wind comes in off the water. Nobody wants to stay.
So in winter at Silver Beach, one person can have a whole building to himself.
I looked at the words “ghost town” for a long time.
Other people read ghost town and see ruin. They see rot. They see a trap.
I read it and saw: few people.
That summer the place was in the news. Several long features about it — retirees who had been talked into buying flats they could not sell, prices collapsing, ghost town, the Hegang of the seaside, a place where young people go to lie down.
I read all of them.
Then I checked my own position against them. I was not buying a flat. I was not looking for a girlfriend. I was not getting married. I was not having children. Those four lines, and every trap on the list was already behind me.
What was left was the one thing I wanted.
Cheap.
And then there was the number that came with it.
Three thousand-odd yuan a year.
A year.
My rent in Beijing was seven thousand a month — eighty-odd thousand a year.
One month’s rent in Beijing would pay for two years at Silver Beach.
One year’s rent would pay for more than twenty.
What I felt was not excitement.
It was lightness. The way you feel when somebody says you can put down a thing you have been carrying so long that you had stopped noticing the weight.
Later I found a nastier post.
Somebody wrote that a lot of the flats there had been bought to keep urns in. The old people bought the flat, and when they died the box came up and stayed in the apartment. So there were plenty of ghosts around at night.
The post was meant to put people off.
I laughed.
I am not afraid of ghosts.
The things I am afraid of are all alive.
The one part I could not settle was where I would actually live.
I could not go and look at anywhere. I was in Beijing; the flat was seven or eight hundred kilometres away. Letting agents online will tell you anything, and I had seen enough listings where the photographs belonged to one flat and the address to another.
That summer I watched a lot of videos on Bilibili, the video site. Two people in particular — both from somewhere else, both lying flat in this ghost town. They filmed the flats they rented. Two rooms, eighty-odd square metres, under three hundred yuan a month. They filmed the market, the winter sea, the ice on the inside of the window. The editing was rough, the camera shook, they talked slowly and said the same thing three times.
But they were real.
I watched all of it. Then I added them on WeChat and got pulled into a few local groups with names like “Silver Beach Mutual Aid.” Some of the people in there had been living on the coast for three years. Others were still in Beijing like me, working in the daytime, checking prices at night.
One of them wrote that he had been there two years and that his rent was four thousand a year.
I copied that sentence into a notebook.
It was the first moment the whole thing felt real, instead of something I was doing to myself on a laptop at midnight.
The same notebook had another list in it, one I had written myself. What I would be giving up.
No central heating. No takeaway. No convenience store two minutes from the door. No shopping centre, no big supermarket, no parcels delivered to the building, no taxi whenever you want one. No wide roads. No grand parks. No cinema. No museum.
No well-dressed girls on the street.
I stopped at that last line and read the whole list out loud.
Fine. All right.
I kept the list. I never threw it away. Every line on it turned out to be true.
In the middle of all this I wavered once.
Somebody asked why I had to go north at all. Wenchang, on Hainan island down in the south — sea, beaches, cheap rent.
So I checked.
Wenchang was cheaper than Beijing. Next to Rushan it was several times the price. And Wenchang would have people in it.
People.
Delete.
The thing I have been afraid of all my life is not poverty.
It is noise.
There was a second reason. I am from the south, but I went to university in the north-east and then spent seven years in Beijing, and my body had got used to a northern winter. One of the videos said the winter at Silver Beach was “not cold, if you are from the south — you do not need heating.”
I read that line three times.
I know what a winter without heating is. I grew up in one. The cold comes up through the floor and into the bone, and the quilt is damp, and getting out of bed in the morning is an act of will.
So I decided I would rent somewhere with heating. Pay a little more. It is only cold for three or four months.
The money could wait.
That night I stayed up with the map.
Shandong sticks out into the sea like a hand. Weihai is on the eastern edge. East of Weihai is Rongcheng. And in the southern corner of Rongcheng, a holiday district belonging to a county-level city.
From Beijing you take the high-speed train to Weihai, then an hour and a bit on a coach. Seven or eight hundred kilometres, give or take.
I zoomed in and out and in again and looked at all that blue.
I wanted somewhere the sky was whole.
Now the part that matters most.
Money.
I had worked in Beijing for seven years, and I had saved one million yuan — about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
I need to be exact about this, because it is easy to tell it the wrong way round.
I did not save a million and then decide to leave. I decided to leave, and found that I happened to have a million.
The order matters. The first version is a plan. The second is luck. I have never been much of a planner. I have mostly been lucky.
With the million, I began doing the arithmetic.
Twenty thousand a year. Fifty years.
Fifty years.
I do not know whether I have fifty years. Nobody knows that.
But when the sum came out, something in my chest let go.
I was not really calculating how long the money would last. I was calculating how many days I had left in which nobody could tell me what to do.
I did that sum many times. At night when I could not sleep. On the subway in the morning. Standing in the corridor at the office with nothing in my hands. It always came out the same.
That summer, doing the sum was the closest thing I had to praying.
One more thing has to be said.
I was not planning to stop working for good.
I was planning to rest for a year.
Foreigners have a word for it — a gap year. Rest, get better, then go back to Beijing and find a job like the one I had, and carry on.
A year. Just a year. I even believed it.
The truth is that I was not thinking about consequences at all. Not the risks, not the what-ifs, not afterwards. None of it.
For another month I kept it hidden. In the daytime I was the most normal person in the building; at night I was the one about to run. I kept the two halves well apart. The more ordinary the days were, the lighter the nights got.
I even enjoyed the hiding.
The year after — I never thought that far.
I only thought: I want out of Beijing. Out of Beijing.