Twice a day I went to the sea. Once in the morning, once before it got dark.
The walk to the sea takes twenty minutes. In Beijing, the walk to the metro and then from the metro to the office took about the same. I thought about that more than once — the same twenty minutes, going to the sea, or going to work. It did not seem like a coincidence, and I could not make it mean anything, so I left it where it was.
After two weeks that was still the only thing in my day, so I started going the other way as well — north, into the streets, to the supermarket, to whatever was open.
Almost nothing was open. That is how I found the markets.
There is no supermarket in the ordinary sense. There is a chain called Jiajiayue where you can buy vegetables, eggs and meat, and the staff will tell you, standing right there in the shop, that it is cheaper online.
The real shopping happens on market days, and the market days do not follow the week.
They follow the moon.
The first of the lunar month, there is a market at Changjiazhuang. The second, one at Gongjiazhuang. The fifth, one at Xiaotan, which is five minutes from my flat. And so on round the district — seven or eight markets in all, staggered, so that on any day of any month, somewhere within reach, one of them is open.
I had to learn this. In Beijing, if you wanted a market, you went on Saturday.
Here, Saturday is nothing. Here the days have names like the first, the second, the eighth, the fifteenth, the twenty-third — and the twenty-fifth and the thirtieth are the good ones, because they are the fullest.
What is sold is mostly what you would expect and a few things you would not. Vegetables from old people who grew them. Shellfish. A man with a machine that grinds sesame paste. A woman selling sheets and quilt covers out of the back of a van. A cosmetics counter under a tarpaulin. The fish I could not name, so I photographed them and looked them up afterwards, one by one, and learned that there is a fish called the sea ghost, and that a mantis shrimp is a shrimp and not a mantis.
The odd thing is that the market is where I stopped knowing what day it was.
There is a second clock here, and it is the tide.
The tide also follows the moon. The biggest tides come a couple of days after the full moon and the new one — so, on the third and the eighteenth of the lunar month. That is twice a month. If I stayed a year, I would see twenty-four of them, which is a number small enough to count.
Before going out I would check when the water was high, on the phone, the way you check the weather, and try to time it so that I arrived at the top of the tide.
In the city you leave at nine and come back at six and the water has nothing to do with anything. Here the water was the appointment.
I am not sure how to explain what that does to a person. It is not that time slowed down. It is that time stopped belonging to anybody else.
Nobody was waiting for me anywhere. There was no Monday. There was no weekend. I would wake up and my first question was about the water and my second was whether the market was on.
Some evenings I could not have told you what day of the week it was. Most evenings. I would have to stop and work it out, and usually I got it wrong, and it did not matter in the slightest, because nothing in my life was arranged by the week any more.
There is a line I half-remember from school, about a man who lived so far from the world that he did not know one dynasty had replaced another, let alone two. I had always taken that as an exaggeration.
I was not far off it.
The district is bigger than it looks and emptier than it sounds.
Two hundred-odd compounds, they say, built in the boom years when the coast was going to fill up. It did not fill up.
There is a night I remember, walking home late, when I looked up at one of the blocks — seven floors, twenty-eight windows — and not one of them was lit. Not one. On the streets where people do live, a block will show two or three windows out of thirty.
The commercial street has been closing for years, shop by shop. What is left between the shutters is letting agents: dozens of them, each a glass door with flats taped up inside — location, floor area, price. Two or three thousand yuan a square metre in those days. A few years later it would be a thousand. Nobody was buying then either. It was the worst possible moment to be selling anything, because nobody could travel, and nobody knew when they would be able to again.
I walked that street nearly every day. It is the kind of thing that ought to be depressing, and I want to say honestly that it was not. A street with nothing on it is a quiet street. I had come from a city where you could not hear yourself think.
There is one amusement park. It has a name out of a children’s book, and a gate built like a castle, painted the colour of the sea, with towers on it. Inside there is a roller coaster, a big wheel, and a yellow duck the size of a house.
The nucleic acid test is done at the entrance.
So every few days I stood at that gate and looked in at the whole thing standing still — the cars parked on the track, the duck, the empty sky over it. Ten months of the year there is nobody in there. I do not know who owns it or how it stays open.
I thought about that more than I probably should have.
Then came the cooking.
I should be clear about the starting point. In seven years in Beijing I had not cooked one meal. Not one. There was the canteen at work, where lunch cost almost nothing and was edible. There was a supermarket downstairs. There was a 7-Eleven two hundred metres away. And there was — the real reason — takeaway. Anything you wanted, at any hour, for a few yuan, at the door in twenty-five minutes.
None of that exists here. There is no takeaway in the ghost town. There is no delivery. If you want to eat, you cook.
The first thing I made was rice, and I made it badly. It came in a ten-kilo bag and I had no scissors, so I opened it with a pair of nail clippers, a little at a time. I had no bowls and no chopsticks yet, so when it was done I ate it out of the pot with a spoon, standing up.
There was a jar of chilli sauce and nothing else. It was very good. I want to be honest about that too.
The frying pan rusted within a week, which I later learned was my own fault.
On the third of November, a real step: I fried two eggs.
After that, vegetables. Green pepper with shredded potato. Onion with egg. Tomato with egg, which went wrong exactly once, because I cooked the dish first and only then remembered that rice takes half an hour.
There is something about cutting a potato into matchsticks. I am not fast at it and I never got fast. But it is a job the hands can do without the head, and while they are doing it, the mind goes wherever it likes.
Some of the best thinking I have ever done in my life was done while cutting a potato.
One evening in that first week of cooking I was sitting at the table with a bowl of rice, a plate of potato and an egg, and a word arrived, and the word was lying flat.
I am not going to build a philosophy on a plate of potatoes. But there is a line I like, about plainness being the one thing in the world that cannot be beaten. I do not know whether I have it right. What I took from it was smaller: that the plainest thing in front of you is allowed to be enough. A plain room, plain rice, a plain day that nobody has asked anything of you.
That is not a manifesto. It was one meal.
Something else changed, which I only noticed afterwards.
Everything got slow, and I did not mind. There was no reason to hurry at anything, because there was nothing in the day that could be late. The bicycle I bought for three hundred yuan took me three hours to assemble and I put the handlebars on backwards; it still worked, which annoyed me more than if it had not. I bought a blanket that heats up for forty yuan. I deleted the takeaway app from my phone.
I started buying things on Pinduoduo, the cheap app, which I had never installed in Beijing because it is for people who count their money. Now I was one of those people. It was, I am told, a little sad. It seemed to me entirely sensible.
Somebody asked me once: you are not working, so where does the money come from? I told him I had a few tens of thousands put by. He asked what I would do later. I said I would deal with later when it came.
That is the whole of my financial planning, and I am not going to dress it up.
And then there was the sun.
I have to write about the sun, because it was the thing I had not known I was missing.
It arrives from the east in the morning and walks across the flat all day. At eight it is on the bedroom wall. By ten it is on the pillow, so I lift the top of the quilt and let it lie on the blanket for a while, as if I were airing it. In the afternoon it is on the quilt itself, then on the wall at the foot of the bed, and then it is gone. Six or seven hours, across one small room.
I bought a rug and put it on the balcony and slept there at midday.
In Beijing I had one east-facing balcony: sun from seven to eight, and after that, nothing. People in cities talk about light as a luxury item, and they are right — it is priced. Nobody tells you what it does to you to live without it. I do not think I was depressed in Beijing. But I had got used to a body that was always slightly cold and slightly dim, and I had assumed that was simply what a body felt like.
By the end of November the weather broke.
It went from eighteen degrees to below zero in a day. Inside, eleven degrees. I bought gloves and a hat with flaps over the ears. At night I boiled water and washed my feet in a basin before bed, then got in under the quilt and stayed there.
The first snow came on the twenty-ninth: flakes so small they were barely there. Dandruff, I wrote in the diary, and I stand by it. Not enough to settle anywhere. But it was snow, and the wind took it sideways along the shore, and everyone here says the same thing about that day — that is when winter begins.
There are holes in the beach.
Hundreds of them, small and round, all over the wet sand, each with a little ball of sand pushed up beside it. They are not the work of children. They are the work of small crabs, which live in the sand and come out of it, and the ball is what they have eaten and thrown away.
I learned this the direct way. A crab the size of a thumbnail, almost transparent, crossing the flat sand; I picked it up and it pinched the end of my index finger. It did not hurt at all. I thought about it for the rest of the afternoon.
I also picked up a few small shells, good ones, the kind you keep. Then I stood there holding them and realised there was nobody on this coast I could give them to, and put them back in my pocket.
The best day of that winter — and I am not going to be moderate about this one — was the day with the sunset and the moon.
It was the third of the lunar month, a spring tide, clear and mild. I went down and watched the sun go into the water, and the sky do what it does. And when the sun was gone I turned round and there, in the west, was the new moon: thin as a thread, going down after it, setting on the same evening, a little behind.
I had never seen that in my life. You do not see it in a city, because in a city the horizon is buildings and the sky is lit, and nobody follows the moon.
I stood there until it was fully dark and my hands had gone numb, and the lamps came on along the shore one after another, and the stars came up over the water.
I do not know when it happened exactly.
Somewhere in the middle of all that — the markets and the tides and the rice and the sun on the bed — I stopped knowing the date.
Not in any dramatic way. Nobody tore a page off anything. It was simply that one morning I wanted to know something, and I reached for the phone to find out what day it was, and found that I had to think about it, and could not be sure.
When was the last time I had looked at a calendar? That was the real answer. I could not remember.