I spent three days in Weihai and then took the coach.
There were ten of us on the bus. An hour and a half along the coast, then a little inland, through towns whose names I could not pronounce, then down to the sea again.
Silver Beach is not a town. It is a strip of coastline inside a county-level city called Rushan, which belongs to Weihai, and it is made of buildings: several kilometres of them, laid end to end along the shore, with the sea on one side and nothing much on the other.
That is the whole idea of the place. Somebody drew a line along the coast and built on it.
The agent met me at the gate of the compound I had chosen online.
Local woman, quick, sensible shoes, phone going the whole time. She had three flats to show me. The first was high up and faced the wrong way. The second had been shut up too long and smelled of it. The third was on the fourth floor, two rooms, and when she opened the door the light came all the way down the hall to meet us.
Two bedrooms — one facing north, one facing south — and a balcony facing south.
Eighty-odd square metres, which is around eight hundred and sixty square feet. In Beijing I had been living in forty-odd.
I walked through it twice. In the south bedroom the sun lay right across the bed, to the far edge, and the whole room was warm for no reason at all, because the day outside was cold.
In Beijing my flat had one small balcony facing east. There was sun on it after seven in the morning, and by eight the sun was gone. The landlord called that good light, and I had not argued with him.
I said I would take it.
The numbers were all on one page.
Rent: four thousand yuan.
A year.
Then a property fee of five hundred and six. A deposit of a thousand. An agent’s fee of two hundred. Water and electricity prepaid at the property office. The whole thing came to less than what I had paid in Beijing for a single month.
Beijing: seven thousand a month, eighty-odd thousand a year, for a flat half this size with no sun in it.
Here: four thousand a year, for twice the space and a balcony facing the sun.
The man in the chat group who had helped me look at the flats put it in one line — what you pay in Beijing for a year would keep you here for twenty.
I did not say anything clever about that. I signed it, paid it, and took the keys.
The water card is worth explaining, because the whole local economy is in it. You put a hundred yuan on the card and it holds a hundred and twenty. A seven-and-a-half-litre bucket costs fifteen. Filling the bucket at the machine on the corner costs one and a half.
I put my suitcase down in the hall and went to the sea.
Twenty minutes’ walk. I timed it on the way back to be sure. Twenty minutes.
The sea was wider than I had any use for. The beach was flat and went on and on. There was almost nobody on it — two figures a long way off, doing something with the sand, and that was all.
Behind me the buildings stood in rows, going off up the coast for kilometres, and most of the windows were dark.
Is this it? I thought. Is this the thing they warned people about?
What I felt, standing there with my shoes in my hand, was not excitement and not triumph. It was relief — the kind you feel when a dentist finally takes the thing out of your mouth. The weight was simply gone, and I could not remember what I had been carrying.
The beach nearest my compound, I would find, is the busy end. There was litter on it that first afternoon, and the water had the flat look water gets when a lot of people have been standing in it. But there is more than twenty kilometres of coast here, and further along the sand is pale and hard and the water is clear, and you can walk an hour and meet nobody at all.
I wrote something in the sand with a stick, the way you do. I am not going to put it down here. Then I stood and watched the sea take it back, which took about two minutes, and felt pleased with myself in a way I would have found embarrassing in Beijing.
Walking back, I got the measure of the place.
There is one commercial street and it is mostly shut. Not shuttered for the season — shut for years; you can tell from the plastic and the dust. Between the closed doors there are letting offices, dozens of them, each with a window full of flats, and the prices printed on them: two or three thousand yuan a square metre. Cheaper than Beijing by thirty or forty times, and still nobody was buying.
The restaurants I could find were few, and the few looked like somewhere you would eat once. I had a bowl of beef noodles for ten yuan, in a room with nobody else in it, and watched the street through the window and counted the people going past. In half an hour I counted four, and three of them were old.
There are a lot of stray cats and dogs. You see them along the road at any hour — one asleep in the grass, or four of them chasing each other round a corner, thin and cheerful and not afraid of anybody.
The buses come every half hour and stop running at five. If you want to go three kilometres, there is a little electric cart that will take you for five yuan. That is the public transport of the ghost town, and it is enough for the people who live here, because most of them do not go anywhere.
In the whole afternoon I did not see one person who looked like they had a job.
Towards evening, in my own compound, a dozen or so of the old people came out and sat along the foot of one of the buildings with a board and a pack of cards, and stayed there talking until it was dark. I watched them from the balcony for a while. It looked like a good way to spend an evening, and I did not know a single one of them.
There was one thing I had to do every day, because I had come from outside the province: a nucleic acid test.
The checking was strict and constant, and I understood the rule well enough. If I was supposed to be tested and I was not, and somebody noticed, they would take me to a hospital and keep me there. Nobody had to threaten me about it. It was simply the price of standing where I was standing.
The one mercy was that there was no queue.
In Beijing I had stood in a line that curled round a flower bed in the full sun, and the person in front of me and the person behind me had both been looking at their phones. Here I walked in, opened my mouth, and walked out, and the whole thing took four minutes, and the man doing it never looked at my face, only at the back of my throat.
The first night I had almost nothing in the flat.
My quilt and mattress had not arrived yet. The mattress that came with the place was thin and hard, so I slept on the sofa in the living room with my coat on top of me. The fridge hummed all night and I could hear it from the bedroom.
And outside, the dark is different here. I had thought I knew what dark was.
The lamps in the compound are set far apart and they only come up when something moves, so between one and the next there is nothing at all, and if you stand still you are standing in real black. I saw a man walking with a torch once, and the torch was brighter than the streetlight. Somebody told me the lamps had not been properly finished; the compound was meant to be bigger than it turned out to be, and the town had run out of people before it ran out of road.
By five in the afternoon it is going dark. By six there is nobody on the street.
In the whole compound that night, three windows were lit. Mine was one of them.
And there is no noise. That is the part I was not ready for. No traffic, no television through the wall, no one talking under a window, no square-dancing group in the yard with a speaker on a trolley. I lay on the sofa and listened, and what I heard was the fridge, and once a dog a long way off, and then nothing. If you dropped a needle on the floor in that room you would have heard it land.
I grew up in the country. I thought I knew quiet. I did not know this quiet.
I woke at seven, because I was sleeping in the living room and the living room faces south, and by seven the light was on my face. In Beijing I had been woken by an alarm for seven years. I lay there a while in the light, listening to the fridge, and then got up, and there was nothing in the day that had to be done.
Then I went out on the balcony and looked up.
Stars.
Not a few. Not the two or three you can point at and name. All of them — the whole sky, thick with them, close and clear, so many that you cannot pick out the constellations because there is no room between them.
I had not seen the stars in years, and I want to be exact about why, because it is not that the stars had gone anywhere.
In Beijing the air is thick, and there is light everywhere — headlights, streetlights, the windows of thirty-storey buildings, screens, signs. Living in a city like that you do not see the stars, and — this is the part that gets me — you do not notice that you are not seeing them. You forget the sky is up there at all. I lived seven years in Beijing and could not tell you a single thing about the sky above my own building.
Here I had a balcony facing south, sun all day, and stars at night, and I was paying four thousand a year.
The sea, and the stars.
The things I wanted turned out to be this cheap.