I came back to the coast on the ninth of March.
Coming back is not quite the word, because when I left I had not decided to return. But I opened the door and the wind was the same wind and the salt was the same salt, and I knew where I was supposed to be.
From that day to the fifteenth of December I stayed in Rushan — two hundred and eighty-two days, and I did not leave once. The number is the spine of this section. A man in a small town who does not move for two hundred and eighty-two days, and has no interest at all in what the rest of the world looks like.
I wrote in my diary on every one of those days, without a break. Which is why I remember all of them.
By the third year I was good at it.
I slept when I wanted, got up when I wanted, ate when I wanted. The clumsiness of the first two years was gone. When I arrived I did not know which day the market was, what time the tide came in, where the bicycle repairman kept his shop. Now I did not have to think about any of it.
I also stopped going to the sea so often.
The first year I went every day, sometimes twice. The second year, less. In the third year I only had to know that it was there, and that it was not going away, and so I did not need to look at it. That sounds cold. It was closer to relief.
What I did most that year was sit in the sun. I would find a breakwater out of the wind and sit with my back to it and let myself go black, black enough that I could play on my phone inside my own shadow. The sun in the north is dry. It does not hurt, it only warms you. I was dark that year and pleased about it.
In the evening I still went out for the sunset and mostly missed it. On the ride home the west would suddenly go red — there must have been a gap in the cloud, and the sun caught in it — and I pedalled hard and got to the lake in time to watch half a red disc drop into the cloud. The people on the bridge had seen the whole thing. They were lucky. When I want a thing badly it does not happen; when I stop wanting it, it arrives. That is how most things go.
When the light goes out of the sky there is a blue hour afterwards, ten or twenty minutes of it, the sand black, the water pale, everything level. Almost every clear evening in the third year I was outside for it. I have no photograph of it that is any good. There is no photograph.
Autumn is my season, especially after October, when the tourists leave and the supermarket and the market square and the seafront all empty out and there is nothing left on the coast but wind. Fewer people, more sky. In summer I always miss winter.
Winter is a different matter. When the wind gets up you cannot go out. Not being able to go out is a real problem for me; stay in long enough and I start to sink. So I do not force it. I wait for the wind to drop.
Winter has its own things. Once the leaves are down the magpie nests show, one in each bare tree. Coots float in flocks on the river and the tidal lake; they are residents, they do not leave. Sometimes a hoopoe.
One day this summer it hit thirty-six. On the coast that is rare, so I stayed in with the curtains shut and went out at dusk, when the sea breeze took the heat off the day. That is the good thing here. The heat does not last, and neither does the cold.
For a while I lost track of the lunar calendar and thought it was the twenty-eighth when it was the twenty-ninth, and the next morning would be the first of the month. No calendar in the mountains, and you do not know the year when the cold ends. Two thousand years old, and exactly right.
The rent was still paid direct to the landlord, 3,500. Plus a 1,000 deposit and 200 of gas up front: 4,700. A year of eating and living came to a little over ten thousand.
Where it came from: the interest on my savings, and the internet. The interest shrinks every year; the banks keep cutting the rate. The internet brought in about 9,000. Three years of not working: 6,000, then 8,000, then 9,000.
Writing those numbers down, I nearly laughed. Not ten thousand a year. Not a thousand a month. And I did not touch the principal once.
Money does not worry me much, because the place is cheap. I wore a pair of slippers for three years, forty yuan, and this year bought another pair, thirty-eight, online, brown, fake leather.
One thing I should be clear about: I have no social insurance.
When I quit, the pension, the health cover, the whole arrangement, stayed with the job. Which means that if I get ill, I pay for it myself. Nobody is coming. There is no card to show at a hospital desk.
A man who does not work must not get ill, and must not have an accident. In three years I have not been ill once. So I live carefully: on the coldest days I stay in, at midday in summer I stay out of the sun, and I keep away from crowds.
With no health cover I invented my own check-up. I read my digestion: smooth, and I am fine; not smooth, and I eat less, sleep earlier, let the body come back. There were a few bad weeks. I went round and round about it until a doctor’s video told me what it was — a functional disorder of the gut, from late nights, sitting still, and anxiety. All three, in full.
That year I wrote two hundred and eighty-two days of diary.
I counted. Three books: three hundred and eighty thousand characters, then eighty thousand, then three hundred and forty thousand. Eight hundred thousand in all. I cannot say what that much writing means. I only know that I have always liked to write, and that on a day when I do not write I do not know how to get through the day.
The diary is not for anyone to read. It is a true record, a note to a future version of me. It is also something to do. Doing nothing at all gets boring too.
I kept making videos and writing, but I changed how I did it.
For two years I chased the numbers: watching them, pleased when they rose, miserable when they fell, which is only hiring yourself another boss. In the third year I stopped. I wrote what I wanted and posted what I wanted. Once the traffic owns you, it is a job again.
The comments stay switched on and I never read them. The messages are off. I do not want to be disturbed.
I also started teaching myself to build small things on the computer — small tools, small apps — that might one day earn a little money. It never came to anything. I liked the process anyway. One man, one machine, nobody to talk to.
What the year actually contained were small things, so I will put a few of them down.
I fell in love with shredded potato. Two potatoes, one green pepper, a few cloves of garlic. Fry the pepper, add the potato, stir, soy sauce, salt, vinegar at the end, keep it moving. Potato is the staple, so there is no rice to cook, and I eat it out of the pan, which saves washing a plate. I cut it thick. I am not good at cutting. It gives me time to think.
The other version is plain rice with a bag of shredded kelp, or just a few drops of soy sauce on the rice. A few drops of soy sauce on white rice is the best thing there is.
On the sixteenth of the lunar month, at ten in the morning, the tide was as low as it goes. The whole beach was mine — flat, clean, not one footprint. I walked a long way out with my eyes down and found a big moon snail, which I gave to a man standing nearby. Then I prised a small abalone-shaped thing off a rock; the locals call it a general’s hat, and my hands were full of seawater. A small crab got my finger and I yelled. It was only a small crab. I pulled it off and threw it back.
In summer I shaved my head with the clippers. Cool, simple, no small talk with a barber, no deciding on a style.
I do not actually dislike people. I dislike people without boundaries.
One example. Two men at the urinals will never take neighbouring stalls; they leave one between them. That is a boundary. Plenty of people have none. They call prying into your private life a kindness and trade it for a little private satisfaction. I do not see those people.
Once, by a field, I saw an old woman with her sheep, a few lambs bouncing behind. I wanted to say something, so I said, “You’ve got more lambs.” She smiled at me and pointed at her ear and said nothing. She could not hear, and could not speak. I stood there with nothing to do with my hands, and then left. That day she was the only person I spoke to.
So my world is small. Countryside, open ground, the sea, wheat fields, quiet nights. I only write down my own world.
In May the fruit on a tree outside my building went red on one side. I had thought it was a peach tree. I picked ten and bit one: sour. Then I saw what it was. Apricot.
In June, the wheat. I heard the combine from the road and rode over and got there as it finished the last strip, straw flying out the back, grain going into a three-wheeled cart to be spread out and dried on the square. Wheat here is cut in mid-June. It took me three years to see the rule: time moves from south to north. Henan’s wheat was ripe a month earlier; here it had only just gone yellow.
Around the solstice the ditch outside the gate, usually dry, filled up and the frogs came. A whole ditch of them, deafening. I stood there and understood the line about hearing frogs everywhere.
On the east side of the coast a shopping centre finally opened: KFC, Pizza Hut, a cinema. I used to say there was no cinema in Rushan. That sentence is history now. I do not necessarily go, but knowing it is there makes the place feel as if it is still growing.
On the eighteenth of the eighth lunar month came the biggest tide of the year. At eighteen minutes past ten it was down to sixty-eight centimetres and the flats were open. The beach was full of people digging razor clams. You cut with a trowel, find the holes, squirt salt water in, and the clam climbs out by itself, rearing up; you take the shell and pull, and it goes in the bucket. I crouched and watched for a long time. They asked if I wanted to dig. I said I had no tools. The truth is I did not want to. I could not find the energy to work that hard for one meal.
Another day I propped my phone on the platform by the race course to film the sunset, and it dropped three floors. I went down slowly to look. The back was shattered and the circuit board showed beside the camera. The screen was untouched.
The agent at the gate said I had got much thinner. I said, had I. He said really, much thinner. I stood under his eaves watching the swallows. One of them turned its backside out and shat on the mat by the door. I asked if he was going to clean it. He said no. If he cleaned it, people would stop looking and the swallows would get them on the head. I thought that made sense.
That year I understood two things.
The first was freedom.
My old idea of a good life was a quiet one, and a free one. In the third year I found out what freedom means. It is simple. It is three words: not being afraid.
If there is nothing you are afraid of, you are free. At work you were not afraid of the work; after you quit you were not afraid of what came next; if nobody likes you, you are not afraid of being alone. If you are not even afraid of dying, you are as free as a person gets.
The year I arrived I was afraid. Afraid of how to explain it at home, afraid I would never find work again, afraid of running through the savings. Then I set my jaw: worst case, I die, so what. That one sentence was all the courage I needed.
Which means not being afraid is not something you are born with. You have to be afraid first. Freedom is not a thing you get. It is a thing you let go of.
Peace is harder.
As long as you are not dead you cannot be calm; the mood keeps moving. I cannot be a stagnant pond. Su Shi wrote that his body was like a boat with no mooring — a man is a tumbleweed, duckweed, and I understand that part. He also wrote that his mind was like dead wood, and that part I am still short of. I still turn things over. I think about money. I get angry. I care what people think of me. I envy. This irritates me, and that irritates me.
So my life has a new purpose: how to get through it calmly.
The second thing was happiness.
In the first year I defined it as not comparing yourself with others. In the third year I saw that this is necessary, not sufficient. People who do not compare are not automatically happy.
Happiness is not profound. It is one word: laughing. Not a wry laugh, not a cold one — real delight, visible at once, the way a child cannot hide it.
But I do not laugh any more.
The peach blossom opened and I was glad. The frogs started and I was glad. The plane trees went yellow and the snow came down and I was glad. But my face does not show it, and I no longer rush to tell anyone, the way I did when I was younger.
Happiness is a worldly thing. You have to go into the crowd and deal with people to get it. I do not want to deal with anyone. Alone, solitary, and if you want the less kind word, a bit of a hermit.
I have watched three years of sunsets here, and three years of moons. There is one full moon a month, and the sky has to be clear, and you have to happen to look up. I did the sum once: the number of full moons a person sees in a life is very small. Having done the sum, the moon looks different.
The days run like water. The seasons come round, the sun goes up and the sun goes down, and the sky says nothing and answers nobody. I rarely laugh.
I have thought: maybe only money would make me happy, a lot of money. I know it is a cheap thought.
I am in touch with my family less and less.
They know I am not working. They do not understand what I do with my days, and I cannot explain it to them. So we stopped. I always assumed missing home was instinctive. Slowly I found that it is not. I wanted out from the beginning. I am still out.
Schopenhauer said that life swings like a pendulum between pain and boredom. I have few desires, so the swing is small. A small swing is not the same as standing still. It still goes back and forth.
Someone once said that spending two years working out a single thing is not a wasted life. It took me three.
I know what freedom is now. I do not know what happiness is.