August was the month the office rested.
Most of it was holiday, and the pay came anyway.
So I did not resign in August. I waited the four weeks out. It was the last thing I took from the company, and I am not going to dress it up as anything else.
On the first day of September I went to my manager’s office and told him I was leaving.
I had rehearsed that conversation for a month. It took twenty minutes.
He was polite about it. He asked whether I was sure. He said that if it was about the money, the money could be looked at. He said that people had left before and come back. He said I should not make my words too final — always leave yourself a way back.
I said it was personal reasons.
Those are the four characters I wrote on the form: personal reasons. They were not true. He knew they were not true and I knew he knew. We both preferred them to the truth, because the truth would have meant saying out loud, in that office, on a Thursday morning, that nothing was wrong with the company and everything was wrong with me.
Leaving that place was not one act. It was a form.
The form had eighteen boxes on it. Information technology. The union. The canteen. The archive. The household registration. The pension. The medical insurance. The housing fund. Logistics. The little shop. Eighteen departments, eighteen people, eighteen small squares to be filled in and stamped.
If you know who to find, you can finish it in a week. I have heard of people doing it in a day.
I was not in a hurry. There was no longer anything in the world that could make me hurry. So I did it two or three boxes a day, and let September run out through my hands.
What I remember is the stamps.
You find the person. They look at your form for a while. They ask two questions they are not interested in the answers to. Then they take out the small red stamp, press it on the ink pad, and bring it down on the paper. Done. Next door.
There is nothing dramatic in that, which is exactly why I remember it. A system had agreed to let me go, and it let me go in the only way it knows — one square at a time.
The news travelled by itself.
A colleague came over to check. I said yes. He said: I envy you. Let’s have a meal before you go.
I think he meant it. Leaving on your own takes a nerve most people do not have. The ones who cannot leave are not weaker. They have a mortgage, a car loan, a child in school, a wife from here, parents two streets away. The door is open for them too. The price is just different.
Several of them assumed I had found something better. That was the only reason they could think of, and I did not correct them. When you say nothing, people fill the space in for you, and what they fill it with is usually kinder than the truth.
There were farewell dinners — more than one. Barbecue, dumplings, a cake in the big meeting room. An older colleague told me about the fights between the managers, half of which I had heard and half of which I had guessed. He said the ones who stay are the ones who have seen everything and stopped wanting anything: you keep your head down and count the years to the pension. He said it without bitterness. He was describing the weather.
Somebody said, don’t cut off your social insurance.
I said I would think about it. I have not thought about it since.
The twenty-sixth of September was my last day at the office, or the last day I planned to go in.
I had imagined the last day would be a large day. It was not large. It was a Tuesday.
I signed off the final two squares. I went down to the little shop by the canteen and spent what was left on my meal card on things I did not need, because the money on it expires at the end of the month and I had only just found that out. Then I handed the card back, which was the last square on the form.
I stood in the corridor for a minute. In seven years, the best minutes of my working life had been spent standing in that corridor doing nothing.
Then I left.
My flat in Beijing was paid up to the end of October. So after I stopped working I still had a month in the city, with nothing to do.
I decided to look at it one more time.
Seven years, and there were still places I had never properly seen. I had always meant to go. The trouble with living somewhere is that you never go.
I went to the Forbidden City on a weekday. There were almost no tourists, but a great many brides. They come in Chinese wedding dress, at any time of year, to have their photographs taken against the red walls. I sat on a bench in the shade for a long while and watched a photographer move a girl’s chin, then her hands, then the fall of her sleeve. She had to hold the same smile for a very long time. I do not know why I found it so restful.
I went out to the Lugou Bridge in the south-west. There is not much to look at. What I liked was the getting there: an hour and a half on a bus, half an hour on the bridge, an hour and a half back, a window the whole way, flat country going past, low old buildings, people standing at the roadside dressed nothing like the people in the city.
I went to the foot of the tallest tower in Beijing. At its own base you cannot photograph it; it is not a building you take in from underneath, it simply stands above you. So I took a bus to a footbridge on the ring road, where the men with the long lenses wait for the light, and stood there with them in the cold wind until I had my picture.
By the end I had a small list of last places, and I worked through it. I have forgotten most of the list. I remember that the last two were a small temple and the zoo next door to it. I wanted the temple because a writer I like had used its name for a book. At the zoo I got as far as the gate and turned round. I did not want to look at animals in cages.
There was one more work thing. An autumn outing, the whole department, by bus, two and a half hours out to a valley in the western hills. I went because my manager kept asking, and because my share of the money had already been spent on my behalf.
It was ordinary country: a stream, some hills, trees not yet red. Somebody took photographs. I am in them.
On the way back the man beside me talked about his son’s school. I listened. It was a pleasant afternoon. It was also the last time, for a long while, that I was in a group of more than three people.
The flat emptied out faster than I expected.
I posted most of my books and my old clothes home — seven boxes, five small and two large — and the postage cost more than the contents were worth, which is the tax on not owning a home. In the end I left for the coast with one suitcase and one rucksack, everything I owned, and I still thought it was too much.
When I gave back the keys, the agent walked through the flat and returned the deposit: nearly six thousand yuan.
I did the sum in my head without meaning to. Six thousand, at the rent I was about to pay, was about a year and a half beside the sea. The deposit on a flat I had disliked for three years would buy me a year and a half somewhere I actually wanted to live. There is no moral in that. It is just what the numbers were.
The twenty-second of October was my last night in Beijing. The room was empty by then, and cold, because the building had begun running water through the pipes to test them for the winter, and the sound of it went on all night.
I sat on the floor with my back to the wall and my coat on, and listened to that.
I had a dream that night, or I think I did. In it my parents were reading my diary — printed out, page by page — and I snatched it back and tore it up, and they said, but it’s good, it’s really good. Then they asked: is it true that you’ve quit? And I said no, no, I’m still working.
I got up at six. The wind was high, the sky was blue, leaves were going past the window. One suitcase, one rucksack, and nothing to do but leave.
I thought of the last line of a book I like. The city and everything in it had ended; everything was going on, unrecoverably, towards the ordinary.
My seven years had ended. It had not been a tragedy. It had been ordinary the whole way through, and I had stayed too long — the way you stay in a warm bath until the water goes cold.
Goodbye, Beijing.
Beijing South Station was nearly empty. A tenth of what it once was, I would guess.
The checks took longer than the journey. A nucleic acid test from the previous forty-eight hours. A vaccination record. A travel permit. A whole apparatus, and every part of it existed to answer one question about a person: are you healthy? Because only the healthy were permitted to go where I was going.
Nobody asked me why I was travelling. There was no square on the form for that either.
I reached Weihai at about five, too late for the sunset. The room was a guesthouse on the twenty-second floor, a hundred-odd yuan a night, one wall of glass facing the water. In the dark I could not see the sea. I could hear it.
I took a hot shower, which brought me back to life, and went out. It is five minutes from there to the shore.
There was hardly anyone on the street. The season was over. The shops had their shutters down. The wind came off the water and made me hold my coat closed.
And then I was standing on sand at the edge of the sea — not as a tourist, not for a weekend, but for as long as I liked.
The next morning I got up at half past four to watch the sun come up.
I had read that Half Moon Bay was the place, and that it depended on the weather. A woman there told me the little island was in my way and that I should walk further along the shore. So I walked, quickly, and made it with a few minutes to spare.
The sun came out of the water. A thin new moon was still up in the east, pale, going dim as the sky brightened. The sea changed colour every few minutes and I had no words for any of it. I wanted to tell somebody, and there was nobody to tell, and I found that I did not mind that either.
On my last evening in Weihai I walked the shore from one end to the other and back. Four or five kilometres, and I passed almost nobody.
The wind off the water was cold. I did not mind.