The spring, first.
The quilt stayed on the bed until the tenth of May. I know the date because that was the day I put the jacket and the long trousers away and went out in a T-shirt and shorts and sandals, and the quilt went into the cupboard and a blanket came out.
That was the day the year turned over.
From the middle of April until the middle of June I watched a field of wheat.
I had never seen wheat. I am from the south of the country; what I know is rice. And I had lived in cities almost all my life, so I had never watched a crop either — I could not have told you what a young wheat plant looks like, or when it comes up, or what it does.
There is a field ten minutes from the flat, on the way to the sea. So for two months I looked at it nearly every day, and I can tell you what it did. It starts as a patch of grass. It gets taller and stiffens. By the end of May there is a head on every stalk, and the head fills out and goes from green to a kind of grey-yellow. In the middle of June they cut it.
I missed the day they cut it and saw only the stubble.
There is a book title about standing in a field of rye. I have never read the book. But I stood at the edge of a wheat field every day for two months, and I am not going to apologise for how much it meant to me.
June is when the coast starts filling up. Not fast. The first week of June there is nothing; by the end of June there is traffic on the road at the weekend.
July and August, it is full. Not the kind of full you get in a city — full for here. Every child within a day’s drive who has grandparents willing to rent a flat for a month is here, in the water, with a plastic bucket. The night market opens at six and the smell of grilling gets into the block behind it. On Saturdays there is music on the beach. The buses start carrying people who are not old.
And the sea stops being mine.
That is what a season is, I suppose. I had it to myself from November to May: the whole coast, four or five people in a kilometre. Then for two months, a hundred.
In summer I went barefoot. There is no reason not to — the sand here is fine and clean and pale, the water is cool rather than cold, and the beach is flat and shallow for two hundred metres so there is nothing to step on. From May until the national holiday in October I did not wear shoes on the beach once.
I swam. I am not a swimmer, but the sea here is so salty and so shallow that swimming is not really the question — you float, and you stand up when you feel like it.
There is one thing I did not do all year, and I am still annoyed about it.
Clamming.
At the lowest tide the whole flat is exposed — a kilometre of mud and wet sand — and people go out onto it with a bucket and a short-handled fork and dig. I watched them for a year. I watched an old woman fill a bucket in forty minutes.
It is not difficult. You find the hole, you see the little mound of sand pushed up beside it, you put the fork in at an angle and lift. That is the whole method.
I never did it. The reason is not physical. To work the flats you need a bucket, a fork, boots, and someone to tell you which holes are worth the effort, and you need to know what you are looking at when you have dug something up — and none of that is in any book. You get it from the person next to you. I did not have a person next to me, and I was not willing to stand in the mud being obviously new at it. So I stood on the dry sand and took photographs, for a year.
That is the price of the arrangement, and I knew the price when I took it. I am not complaining. But it is a real thing that I did not get to do.
Somewhere in the middle of that, the rains came.
July is the wet month. Six weeks of it, off and on — not the long grey weeks you get in the south, but heavy showers that come down hard and stop, usually at night, and leave the air so thick that the bed is damp to lie on. I had been telling everybody that the north is dry. The north is dry, except here, in July.
The frogs started that month and did not stop. There is a ditch along the field outside the compound, and after the rain it filled, and at night it was a wall of sound. One frog is nothing. A hundred frogs is a thing you feel in your chest. I went out with a torch and looked into the water and it was full of them, and full of black commas of spawn, and a week later the commas had become commas with tails, and then they had four legs and a tail, and then they were frogs.
I am not sentimental about it. It is only that I had not stood next to anything like that since I was a child, and nobody had ever told me it was still going on.
Summer ends at the end of August, almost on the day.
There is a set of twenty-four dates in the calendar here — the two solstices, the two equinoxes, and twenty others in between, one about every two weeks, with names like the start of heat and the end of heat. In the cities nobody pays them any attention. On this peninsula they are exact. The heat ends on the day it is supposed to end; the temperature drops into the twenties that week. I had to look it up the first time. After that I stopped arguing with it.
Then school starts, and two thirds of the people in this district get into their cars and go home. The night market shuts. The music stops. The water, which had been grey-green and full of children, is clear again within a week.
Autumn is the best of it.
From the end of August to the end of November — and I will say this plainly, because it is true — the sea is clear, the light is low and long, the sky is a hard blue, the wind drops, and the temperature sits somewhere between warm and cold for ten weeks without moving much.
By the end of October the old people have gone too. At that point the district empties completely, and the phrases I had been using in my head stop being a joke.
The compound is quiet like a vacuum. The beach is quiet like a desert. The street is quiet like an abandoned village.
I have said before that the ghost town was empty. In autumn it became empty, which is a different thing. There is nobody, and it is warm, and it is beautiful, and it is yours.
I did not leave the coast for five months.
Then, in early September, I went to Beijing, and from there north to a forestry town in the Greater Khingan mountains, because I had half an idea about living somewhere else.
Beijing was a mistake. I got off the train into the noise and the crowd and the grey and it took me about four hours to understand that I never had to see any of it again. I ate with friends. I walked around. I was polite. I did not have one moment of wanting to be there.
The forestry town was beautiful and not for me. I will leave it at that.
So I came back and renewed the lease for a second year.
In October I went to Xinjiang — Urumqi, Kashgar, Turpan. It is not like the rest of the country and I am not going to try to describe it in a paragraph. I will say this much: it is very large, I saw almost none of it, and I would go back.
And then I was done travelling. Not on principle. It costs money, and I had spent a lot of it that year, and I had also arrived at the point where I could not think of anywhere I wanted to see more than the place I was already in. That is not virtue. It is satisfaction, which is cheaper.
Now the accounts.
I am putting them down because people ask, and because they are the whole argument.
I have no income. I have no social insurance — no pension, no medical cover. I have savings, an amount I am not going to name, and at that point the interest on it came to a couple of tens of thousands a year. That has been falling every year since, and I know it.
I had started posting videos in my first winter. I did it to keep a record — the flat, the prices, the coast, the market, what winter is like — and I did it badly, and slowly people started watching. In 2023 the whole thing paid six thousand yuan.
Six thousand yuan. For the year.
My total spending that year was under fifteen thousand. Everything: rent, water, electricity, food, the train tickets, the flights, the hostel beds.
So the gap was about nine thousand, the interest covered it, and I did not touch the savings.
I know how that reads. But the rent here is four thousand a year, and I eat potatoes and cabbage and eggs, and I do not want anything else. The number that matters is not what I earn. It is what I need.
About food, since I have brought it up.
Two meals a day. Rice, one fried dish, two eggs. In the evening noodles, cabbage, an egg. For most of the year now I have eaten no meat, no alcohol, nothing sweet, no cola, no coffee. Water and tea.
Somebody asked me whether I got tired of eating the same thing every day.
I said: do you get tired of eating meat and drinking every day? I do not understand the question. It is not a sacrifice. I do not want the things I am not having.
Somebody else said that a man living like this must be miserable, and that if I had money I could have better pleasures. I do not accept the premise. Pleasure does not come in grades. You can be perfectly all right on rice and an egg under a clean sky, and there are plenty of people with money who are not.
That is not a boast. It is arithmetic.
I have no social life. I want to be honest that this is a choice, and that I have been offered one.
People who watch the videos sometimes ask to meet. I say no to almost all of them — I’m sorry, I don’t do that, I keep to myself. A retired man invited me to his flat for dinner once, and I went, and it was fine. A man asked me for a small favour and I did it. A woman sent me mooncakes at the mid-autumn festival, which was kind, and I did not know what to do about it. Twice, someone recognised me on the beach.
That is the entire social history of my first year in this district. I am not sorry about it and I am not proud of it. It is what I wanted.
In August, the month the place is fullest, I caught COVID.
I had gone ten months without it, mostly by going ten months without people. It came in the two months when there were people. I took some herbal stuff and drank a lot of water and was over it in five days.
I mention it for one reason. I had spent three years being told what to be afraid of, and it turned out to be a bad cold. I am not going to build a lesson on top of that. I will only say that I noticed it.
The year did one thing to me, and it did it without my noticing.
I had come here for a year. That was the plan, and it was a real plan: rest, get myself straight, go back to Beijing, find another job like the last one. A gap year. I had said the words to myself many times and I had believed them.
Then the year finished, and I did the arithmetic, and it came out the other way.
I could live here. Not for a year — indefinitely. The money worked, the food worked, the days worked. And if I could live here on nine hundred yuan a month, the question stopped being whether I could afford it and became the question of why I would ever go back.
I am not going to pretend this was a revelation. Nobody has a revelation over a bowl of rice. What I had was a year, and at the end of it the plan that had brought me here had quietly come apart, and I was standing there looking at the pieces on the floor.
If there is a better word for it than lying flat, the word is retiring early. I retired at the point where my money and my needs crossed, and I did not wait for anybody’s permission.
The year was up on the twenty-sixth of October.
I did not pack. There was nowhere to pack for.
The first year was finished. I was not going back.