The lease ran out on the twenty-fifth of October. The landlord, who by then was finding it hard to rent the flat to anybody at all, offered to keep me on at 3,500 — a year, not a month. I said no.
Two years of things had piled up in that flat: a bicycle, two pans, a rice cooker, a kettle, a chair I had carried up four flights, a quilt, an electric blanket, plates. I gave all of it to a friend I had made at the beach, who had a car and no money. I did not decide to come back — I want to be exact about that, because it is easy to say afterwards and be wrong. I packed one bag, left the rest with him, and did not know whether I would see any of it again.
Three days in Qingdao on the way. It is prettier than where I live — the coast there is rock instead of sand — but it is a place to visit, not somewhere I could afford to live.
Then the train west. There is a long bridge north of Qingdao, and once you are over it the sea is gone, and I did not see it again for four months. After that, the plain: flat, enormous, brown, wheat fields with no wheat in them, and the air getting dirtier by the hour. I sat at the window and understood that I had walked out of the only place that had ever suited me, on purpose, to go and check whether anything else did.
My brother’s flat is in a village at the foot of the mountains north of Beijing, outside the sixth ring. He is rarely there. It is warm — actual heating, which I had not had for two winters — and quiet, and from the window you watch the sun go down behind a hill. The rest of it was bad, and I am not going to pad it out.
The air. On the second day the smog came down and stayed. Four days running I could not see the hills a kilometre away. By the third day the inside of my nose was black. I had spent two years in air you could drink. Two clear days in twenty-five.
The dryness. In two years at the beach I never once felt a static shock; here I got one taking off a jumper, and then one every day. My lips split and stayed split. And I did not go to the toilet properly for twenty-five days. I put that in because it was the reason I left.
The loneliness, which is a different thing from being alone. There were no young people in the village, only old ones. The persimmon trees were the best thing in it — bare branches, not a leaf on them, forty orange fruit on each — and they were also the sign that nobody was left to pick them. My brother’s cat had lived indoors for seven years and had never caught anything bigger than a bat. I thought: I would rather be a stray. A stray lives four years and sees everything; a house cat lives fifteen and sees one room.
The distances: two hours to the city, three to a friend, one way. That was the only thing I brought back from Beijing — how big the place is, and how much of a life it eats.
After twenty-five days I bought a ticket out, via Fuzhou, 460 yuan. I spent the evening in the new airport south of the city, which is vast and clean and almost empty, watching a red sun go down through the glass, and thought that I would happily live in an airport.
Dali is an old town on a lake in the west of Yunnan, and a friend from the beach had gone on ahead and told me to follow.
He was living in an urban village — a village the city has grown around. Four-storey houses put up by the families who own the land, pressed so close that you can step from one roof to the next, twenty rooms to a building, rented to builders and traders and a few young men who have decided not to work. His room was 260 yuan a month; with water and power, 285. No kitchen, a shared bathroom, no light. We ate noodles for nine yuan twice a day, and after two months the shop knew him by name. I slept ten nights on his bed, which was low and wobbled. That is the honest picture of a cheap life in a beautiful place.
We walked, because that was what there was to do and everything else wanted money. One day, forty-eight thousand steps — my record — twenty kilometres along the lake to a village pier and back. We went up the mountain behind the town, along a stream so clear you could drink from it; in the middle of winter the trees were in flower. In a village beyond that, a woman lived alone with seven cats. She had been there more than a year and said she was trying to work out what a life is for. I admired her. I did not envy her.
After ten days I knew. Dali is a place to visit.
Two reasons. The first is that the cheap life there is worse than the cheap life I already had: a worse room, worse cooking, worse walking, and for the same money I could have a big flat on the beach with sun on the bed at eight in the morning and nobody overhead. The second is the lake.
The lake is not the sea. Once you have lived with the sea, every lake looks too small.
I wrote that down at the time so that I would have to keep it. It is still what I think.
Lijiang is an old town higher up, in the hills, with water running down the middle of the streets. It is prettier than Dali and more touristy, which surprised me; usually the more touristy one is the uglier. I took a bed in a hostel for fifty yuan a night, and from the balcony you could see a snow mountain, and every morning I got up to watch the sun land on it.
Every night, in the main square, a few hundred people dance. There are only three or four movements and everybody does them, and the music does something I cannot describe. I went back every night for five nights. I never joined in.
Beyond the town the road runs to a gorge where a river comes down between two walls of rock, and then north to a Tibetan town at three and a half thousand metres, and then further up, to the far edge of the province, to a monastery under a mountain that no one has ever climbed.
We arrived in the afternoon with the peak half in cloud. Everyone said the same thing: it has been like this for days, nobody has seen it. The hostel stove had its chimney out through the roof and men round it drinking butter tea. I stood at the door and looked at the sky; it had cleared, and they said: tomorrow you will see it. You are lucky. Some people wait a week.
I was up at seven; the sun comes at eight. There was already a crowd on the platform in every piece of clothing they owned, and a man flying a drone, and the wind took the drone over the edge, and everybody cheered, which tells you what a cold morning does to people.
The light came. Nothing; then a line; then the top went red, one peak and then the next, and the crowd made a noise, and the red came down the mountain for about ten minutes, and then it was white, and then it was simply a mountain again, and people began to walk back to their cars.
Beauty is short. I had read that sentence a hundred times. I had never watched it happen to a whole mountain in front of a crowd, with the wind taking the feeling out of my hands.
Xishuangbanna is the south of the province, on the border, where it is tropical. It was the place I liked best in all of Yunnan, and I can say why in one sentence: I stepped off the train and had to take off three layers of clothes in the middle of the street.
Everything there is different — the trees, the buildings with their steep roofs, the music, slow and sweet and slightly sad, and the river, which runs through five other countries and has a different name in each. In the evening there is a night market by the water, a hundred stalls, the smell of grilled fish, and I walked up and down it every night I was there. Nobody is in a hurry.
I stayed five days and could have stayed longer. If I go back to Yunnan it will be to go there, in winter, for a month, and then home to the coast for the spring.
Then Beijing again, seventeen quiet days, and then the thing I had actually been waiting for.
I took the train from Beijing to Lhasa on the thirtieth of December, deliberately, so that I would cross the Tanggula Pass in the small hours of New Year’s Day. I did not sleep. At midnight I was in the Kekexili, which is a place with nothing in it. I pulled the curtain back and there was no ground at all, only sky, and the sky was so full of stars that I could not take it in — the whole window, packed, and bright. I have seen a lot of night skies in two years of living where there are no lights. That one frightened me a little.
I have written about Lhasa before. Both times I have gone in winter: the trains are empty, the hotels are cheap, several of the great sights cost nothing. The city sits at three thousand six hundred metres in a bowl of mountains; the air is so dry that my lips split and stayed split, and the light is so bright you cannot open your eyes. I walked around the holiest temple three times with hundreds of people moving clockwise, most of them old, a few prostrating their way around the whole circuit, which takes hours and which I did not do, because I do not know what I believe.
Then I joined a small tour, eight of us in a van, for the thing I had come for. Everyone else was younger than me; they called me big brother. We drove south for two days, past a lake whose blue does not look real, to a town near the border where we queued for a permit. That night the one I was sharing with got a fever, and I took him to the hospital, where they gave him an hour of oxygen.
The next morning we were in the lobby at nine with our bags, waiting for the last day: the drive to the foot of the highest mountain in the world, to the tent camp, to the stone that says 8,848.
The driver did not come. We waited. Then one of us looked at his phone and said: there has been an earthquake.
It was a big one, and it was in the county the mountain stands in. The epicentre was not far from the road we were about to take; the park had lost its power and its water, the road was closed, every vehicle was turned back. So we drove north with everything else.
On the way back we passed the emergency vehicles coming the other way — fire, police, army, ambulances, whole columns of them, lights on, at speed, in the mountains in winter — and I have not often felt that small. We had lost a photograph and a line in a message to friends. They were going the right way. Somewhere ahead of them were people who had lost their houses, and by the end of the day it was known that more than a hundred people had died. So we stopped complaining.
The tour was cut by a day and they refunded us 220 yuan each. The rest we did anyway: an ice river we walked on; a long white range at sunset; the great lake north of the city, frozen, booming under the surface like something moving in a locked room. At one point the driver gave us a strip of cloth to write on before we hung it on the hillside. The others wrote blessings for themselves and their families. I did not know what to ask for. I wrote: for the people in the disaster area.
Two days later I took the train back, reading a book by a soldier who crossed this plateau in the winter of 1910 with a hundred men and came out with seven. The mountains have not moved. Everything else has.
I went to Guangdong in February for the New Year, because a woman I had never met had offered me an empty flat in Guangzhou for a month, and because I did not want to go home. I hesitated for weeks — she knew me from the videos and I knew nothing about her — but I had nowhere else to be.
The flat was on the eighth floor of a tower in a village on the edge of the city: small, clean, hers. She came on a scooter to give me the key, and insisted on buying me dinner. We ate in a shopping centre and I did not know how to behave, because in the north you take food from the middle of the table and she was using the serving spoons, so I watched her and then did the same. She said she had stopped working before it was fashionable to say so, and had gone back to university to study medicine, because a person ought to be doing something. She owned four of these flats. She was not going to traffic me anywhere.
I spent fifteen days there, walked twenty or thirty thousand steps a day, and ate well for the first time in two years, because the food cost almost nothing. On New Year’s Eve I climbed a hill in the city and watched the lights come on; two young women came up with a camera and danced to a song from a film about Los Angeles, and I sat and watched them, and then went down and called my family and had nothing to say. That was the whole of my New Year’s Eve.
I went to the flower markets, because that is what happens there in the last week of the year — flowers, branches of peach, little orange trees, carried home on the backs of motorbikes, the streets a river of people carrying flowers. I had never seen anything like it, and I understood something that day, which is that this is not one country. In the middle of the city I found a village emptied out for demolition and then abandoned when the money ran out, without doors or windows. A man of ninety-odd sat in the street and tried to talk to me; we could not understand each other, so he wrote on a newspaper with a pen — where he had been, how many sons and daughters, his name. He gave me a business card so old that the address on it was the name the place had before it was renamed. I still have it.
I had been wrong about Guangdong.
I flew to Hainan on the tenth day of the New Year for 298 yuan, because after the holiday the flights go out empty.
Hainan is an island in the far south, tropical, and the sea there is not the sea I know. In the north the water is heavy — green or grey-green, cold even in August — and standing in front of it you feel serious. In the south it is clear and pale and light, green over white sand in the shallows and blue further out, and it does not sober you up, it lifts you. I swam in February, which is not a sentence I ever expected to write.
I went all the way round: some days in the south; a night on a huge artificial island where the towers are thirty storeys high and so close together you could shake hands across the gap; two days in the capital; and a night in a small town on the east coast, where I walked a beach alone in the rain and picked up a piece of coral so light and so finely worked that I kept it in my pocket for two days.
On the last night, the fifteenth of the first month, the capital put up a firework display over the water for the first time in thirteen years. The clouds hid most of it; a great many people stood in the parks and pretended it was wonderful.
But before the fireworks, a line of lights rose off the water and drew the face of a man in a tall cloth hat, and then a line of his writing, and the crowd around me shouted his name. It was a poem Su Shi wrote when he was sent to this island in the eleventh century, at the end of his life, at the end of a long series of exiles, and what he wrote about it — the furthest south a person could be sent in that world — was:
Hainan, ten thousand li away, is truly my home.
I am not him and nobody exiled me. But I was standing in a crowd in a far southern city in February, alone, having given everything I owned to a friend, and I understood the sentence. It hit harder than the fireworks.
Nowhere else was better.
Yunnan does not suit me. Hainan is more beautiful than where I live and I cannot afford it — expensive, brutally hot for eight months, typhoons, a life that would mean moving twice a year. Guangzhou is warm and cheap and generous and not mine. The only sea I want to live beside is the one I started with.
I want a coast, few people, quiet, a wide sky, four seasons — a place where the weather tells you what month it is. The peninsula where I live is that place: two months of summer, a dry bright autumn, a long clear winter, and a sea that in winter, after snow, is the most romantic thing I have ever seen. I went out to find somewhere better. I came back, and that is not the same as never having gone.
In March I rented a flat on the same coast, two floors below the one before. My friend brought the two years of things back in his car — the pans, the quilt, the chair, the blanket. Two years, and it all fitted in one car.
I did not have to buy anything new.