The Second Year

The second autumn, I knew what was coming.

That is the whole difference between the first year and the second. In the first year everything arrived as news: the wheat, the ice inside the window, the first morning in May when I could walk out barefoot. In the second year the same things arrived as a schedule. The quilt went into the cupboard in the first week of May. The wheat came up in the field ten minutes from the flat. The coast filled in June and was full in July. The old people went home at the end of October. I did not have to look any of it up.

Knowing the order of things is not the same as being tired of them. But it is where being tired of them begins.

Here is the number that describes the second year better than anything I could write about it.

In the first year I wrote every day — from the week I arrived in July 2022 to the end of 2023, several hundred thousand characters, a book’s length twice over. In the second year I stopped. Not all at once: first every few days, then once a week, then there were runs of months with nothing in them, and at the end of a season I would write one summary of the whole of it and call that the record.

I have thought about why, and I am not going to make the answer prettier than it is. In the first year everything had to be put down because everything was new and I did not trust myself to remember it. In the second year I trusted myself. That is all. Nothing else changed. It was the same sea.

The work, meanwhile, had quietly turned into actual work.

I spent most of it making videos. They had started in the first year almost by accident — a camera on the bicycle handlebars, a voice over the top, a few hundred viewers, then a few thousand. By the second year it was what I did with my days: filming, cutting, writing the lines, reading them out loud, answering the comments. How much is the rent. How cold does it get. Is there a hospital. Is it true that there is nobody.

I answered all of it honestly for a long time before I understood something about the questions. People were not asking for information; information is everywhere and costs nothing. What they wanted was to hear it said — to have somebody stand inside the thing they were thinking about doing and confirm it existed. There is a market for that. I was standing in the middle of it, and I am not going to pretend I did not take the money.

The second year’s arithmetic: about 12,000 yuan spent, about 18,000 in interest, and about 8,000 earned — six from the videos, two from a short book I put up online. I write those three down because they are the three that matter and the three I can check. The interest had already fallen; the rates were cut twice that year. The videos were getting harder to grow. Neither frightened me. I had run the numbers often enough to know that the numbers were not the difficulty.

That year I also began a little English every day. It has no use here. I did it the way I did the cooking and the walking: because a day with nothing in it is a day to be got through.

Now the snow. Everything else in the second year I could press into a paragraph. The snow I will give you whole, because it is the only thing in two years by the sea I would call an event, and because I do not expect its like again.

Weihai is ninety kilometres up the coast, an hour and a half by bus, thirty yuan. In the middle of December the forecast said the temperature would drop on the fifteenth and it would snow hard from the sixteenth, for a week. I had not left the flat since Xinjiang in October — two months — and I had read somewhere that a city with both a sea and snow is the most romantic city there is. Whether that is true I still do not know. I decided to go and see.

I called the driver the day before, the way you do here: there is no bus station, and he picks you up at the gate of whichever compound you live in. He said it depended. If the road was bad in the morning he was not driving. I called in the morning. He said he was driving. And then it started.

There is a kind of snow here that does not happen in Beijing or in the northeast. It is called sea-effect snow: in winter the sea is warmer than the land, and when the cold air comes off the continent and crosses that warm water it picks up moisture and carries it inland, and the hills of the peninsula stop it, and it comes down. If that means nothing to you, it is the same machine as the snow that buries the towns downwind of the Great Lakes. On the ground it is not the amount. It is that the wind is enormous, and it takes the snow and drives it sideways, spinning, into your face, and keeps doing it for days.

On the fifteenth, the bus north. Snow starting at the beach — a few flakes and a lot of wind. Past Wendeng the flakes thickened, and I kept wiping the inside of the window with my sleeve to watch: villages going by, the roof-ridges carrying a thin white line. At eleven we were in Weihai, and it was sleet, the pavement shining. The lane of restaurants was mostly shut. I went to a city park where people say the swans winter, walked the whole of it and found nothing, and was composing a complaint about liars when I reached the far end: there they were — twenty-odd of them, loose on the water, a few with their heads tucked so far back they looked dead. A sign said do not feed them. Somebody feeds them.

I walked north along the coast — a lighthouse, a big picture frame on the seawall with a queue waiting to be photographed inside it, a fishing harbour with the boats dusted white — until the wind off the water drove me inland, and then up a low hill to a viewpoint over the headland. That was where the wind stopped being weather and became something I had to survive. I went up with my back to it. At the top the sea was all white foam, my hands stopped answering, and I took the photographs anyway. Then down, in the dark, to a bus stop on an empty street, where no taxi came until one happened to pass.

The hotel was seventy-eight yuan a night, which tells you what a winter here is worth. The woman at the desk offered me a bigger room with a window, and I said yes without thinking. Do not do that in Weihai in December. The window was a pane of ice. I ran the heating at thirty degrees until I turned the light off, then turned it off too, because I cannot sleep with that noise — and woke at two, slept again, woke at six frozen through. In the morning I moved to a room with no window at all and was warm for the first time in a day.

And outside the door it had snowed all night.

I want to be careful here: it is easy to make this sound like a postcard, and it was not a postcard. The wind walks you backwards down the street. The snow comes at your face in handfuls and does not melt; it piles on your eyebrows and on the rims of your glasses until you cannot see, and you take the glasses off and find your own bad eyes are better than the glasses were. The few cars going past had their lights on and the flakes spun in the beams like something alive. I walked from the hotel to the beach, one boot-print at a time, and stood on a beach that was white all the way out to the water, and the water was nearly black, and the snow came down in tufts the size of your thumb.

There were other people out, but not many at seven in the morning — one dark figure ahead of me, leaving a long line of prints.

The famous street is a short, steep lane that runs down to the water, and by the time I reached it, it was crowded: tourists in so many layers they could hardly bend, and local livestreamers shouting into their phones — look at it, look at the snow, the tours are sixty-eight yuan, sixty-eight, come now. I bought one, because the thing I had come for was not in the city.

It was a ship.

The tour went east through a resort bay where the wind was worse than in town, a village of houses roofed in seaweed, a lake with more swans than the one in town; and then the ship.

It is a cruise ship that ran aground years ago and was never moved. It sits out on the sand, tilted a little, rusting. In summer people come and photograph it; in winter, in the snow, with the wind going and the waves coming in white underneath it, it is the best thing I have seen in this country. A ship that will never sail again, coming apart in public — I stood and looked at it and thought about the abandoned farmhouses behind the beach where I live, the villages with nobody left in them, all of it going the same way. I thought that if it ended here, that would have been enough. I do not say that to be dramatic. I say it because it was a real thought, standing in that wind, and I have not had it many times. Then my feet went numb and we were driven back.

The next morning the tide was far out, and the snow lay on the exposed sand all the way to the horizon, one white sheet, with the black water past it. I walked to the long pier at the eastern end of the bay. The railings and the chains along it were sheathed in ice — thick, hanging down in points like something in a cave, the snow settling on top of it. I broke a piece off with my hand. I had read that this happened somewhere else entirely, and nobody had told me it happened here. You find these things by going.

Then the eighteenth: I decided to go home. No bus. No train that connected. I stood in a ticket hall and watched the departures board fill up with delays, gave up, took a hotel for another night. The snow went on. On the twenty-second the news said the storm had run three days and nights without stopping and the snow on the ground was over seventy centimetres, the deepest on record for the province, past the old mark of fifty-four. Home, at the beach, had had snow too — but I live thirty kilometres south, and it is the difference between a blizzard and a photograph of one.

I had gone north to check a sentence I had read, and I came back with it. A place with both the sea and the snow is the most romantic place there is. I am not going to defend it. I only report that I checked.

There were more snows after that, at home this time — in December, in January, on the eighth of February, on the twentieth. Four big ones, and any number of small ones I could not name now. Each time I went down to the beach to watch: white sand, white field, the sound of water striking ice. What I did not expect was that by the end of the winter I had seen enough of it. Not tired, exactly. Full.

The season turned over again, and I watched that too. After the start of spring the patch of sun on the balcony began to retreat, until it was a narrow strip, and then it was gone: the season for sunsets over the water was over, the sun having moved north behind the land. In March, instead of going home for the New Year with everyone else, I went in the quiet week after it, by way of two old cities in Henan, and then home, which is either raining or about to rain, damp cold in the walls, the climate I like least in the country. On New Year’s Eve I had been in bed early with the light off: at home it would have been a house full of people asking questions; here it was one room and no questions.

The rest of the year, in order.

In May the flat was sold out from under me and I had to move. The agent, who had turned out to be an honest one, found me the same flat in the same compound, one floor down, and moved my things himself. It is a risk you take when you rent: somebody else can end it. I looked at prices while I was at it — the second-hand flats around me had gone under two thousand yuan a square metre. My rent for the second year had been 4,500, up from 4,000, and at the end the landlord offered me 3,500 to stay. A year, not a month. That is what a place with more houses than people does to a price.

The summer was hotter than the one before. In the first year I had no fan and wanted none; in the second, the fan ran all night, every night, and I slept under it like a man in a factory. In July the green weed came in from the south and turned the water the colour of soup for a few weeks. But the sea gave more than it took: two summers in, I was seeing jellyfish and the strange flower-like things on the rocks that I had hardly found at all the first year.

My brother came and stayed two days. He ate what I eat, which is not much, and when we went out he paid. He bought a watermelon, which I had never bought for myself in two years, and oysters, and barbecue; and we went into the water together, one of us swimming while the other stood on the sand watching the clothes. That is the only reason I swam that summer.

The autumn: a season that has always done something to me. I do not have the trick of the old poets who say autumn is better than spring. I have the other one — I watch the light going and I stop talking. The second autumn arrived exactly on time, and I knew every day of it in advance.

And the money: interest down to 18,000 for the year, spending about 12,000, the videos weakening. In August the whole thing went backwards — a month, with everything in it, that came out at minus six hundred. Nothing catastrophic. Just a month that would not add up.

Two years.

I arrived on the twenty-sixth of October, in the afternoon, with two bags and no plan beyond a year. When the lease came up the second time, I had been on this coast for twenty-four months to the day, and the landlord offered to keep me at 3,500, and I stood in the flat I had been forced to move into in May and looked at the sea through the window and could not make myself sign.

Nothing had gone wrong. That is the thing I want to be clear about. The sea was still the sea. The light was still the light. I had not been ill, or poor, or lonely in any way I would call a problem. But the second year had been the first year, repeated, and I could see the third one coming — the same wheat, the same quilt, the same week in June when the cars start arriving — and I understood I would spend it exactly as I had spent this one, one video at a time, and never once be surprised.

The first time, it was a surprise. The second time, it was a skill. I did not want to find out what the third time would be called.

I gave notice, and started giving things away.

Maybe it was time to go and look at somewhere else.