I came back to the coast on the fourth of February, the first day of spring.
Mangshi to Hefei, Hefei to Qingdao. Qingdao was in fog; no sun at all. Yunnan had had sun every single day.
I walked the seafront there for a long time. Hundreds of gulls on the pier; they go out by day and back to some island at night. More people than I expected. Do none of these people have jobs.
In a lane in the old town I found a noodle place and had a bowl of black-fish and tomato soup noodles. A big bowl. I tapped my phone on the reader and it took three yuan off, and the owner sent over a small dish of wood-ear and tofu shreds. I was very happy with it. I ate in that shop three years ago too.
Back at the hostel I ordered in: sea intestine over rice. It made me laugh. Three years by the sea and I had never eaten it. The first time was a delivery order in Qingdao.
On the sixth I went back to Rushan in a cold wind. Train to Rushan South, then the bus. Out of the station the wind hit my face and tightened the skin on it.
The bus went past everything I know. The big hill standing alone on the flat. The two towers of the sea bridge — one foot in Haiyang, one in Rushan — with the deck almost closed between them. Then Rushan itself: empty, clean roads, most of the shops below shut. In wind like that nobody is stupid enough to go and look at the sea. The old people stay in. This is winter here.
At home I put the water and the power on, dropped the bags, and put two months of dirty clothes into the machine. On the road everything is washed by hand. At home, a machine at last.
Those were the coldest days of the winter.
Minus ten outside. Eight inside. Electric blanket and the air conditioner both on, and the room came up to twelve. Two quilts over my legs and the wind still came in at the foot. Washing up, the water was so cold it numbed my hands.
For the first two days I had no vegetables at all. Instant noodles at noon. At night I cooked rice and folded in two bags of shredded kelp, which was the only way to get it down.
On the seventh of February it snowed.
It began small, like dandruff, on and off. Then it came down in clumps, and the wind drove the flakes in slanted lines. And then the sun came out with the snow still falling. Sun snow. You only get that on a northern coast.
I did not go out all day. I stood at the window. The snow lay thin on the grass, stayed in the shadows like sand, like powder, and vanished wherever the sun reached it.
At night I cooked rice again and folded in a bag of shredded kelp. It looked like nothing. It was the best thing I had eaten in weeks — after fifty days in Yunnan I could not get a bowl of that rice.
By the sea, the simpler it is, the better it is.
The Little New Year I spent alone. In the north it falls on the twenty-third of the last month, at home on the twenty-fourth; I keep neither. After dinner I heard firecrackers somewhere and was reminded that other people live here.
The flat next door is a family from Chongqing. They were there before I left for Yunnan. When I came back it was empty. Gone home, probably.
That winter I went about a month without speaking to anyone. At the market I would use four words: how much is it.
I had heard that if you do not speak for six months your speech starts to go. So I talk to myself, and I record short videos saying a few sentences. Not for anybody. To keep my mouth working.
In the middle of the month came days of thick fog. Standing at the coast you could not see the sea, only hear it, and surf in fog sounds closer than surf you can see. On a foggy day the streets are empty and I can walk down the middle of the road.
That winter I thought about happiness again.
The first year I said happiness is not comparing yourself with anyone. The third year I said you have to actually laugh, which is the outside of it. In the fourth year I got half of the rest: whatever makes you laugh is the thing that makes you happy.
In Yunnan the thing I noticed most was that people sang and danced all the time. Good food, and they are pleased; the music starts, and they dance. Happiness is not complicated. It is eating and drinking and playing, and it is moving your body.
I have never sung. I have never danced. I used to think neither had anything to do with me. Now I think maybe I should learn.
So I downloaded Yunnan songs — Dai, Jingpo, Yi, Naxi. On the cold days I stay in and play them, and I nod along.
Once I stood up and moved a bit. Nobody saw. There was nobody there.
Something came out of my mouth that surprised me: time is for wasting.
I was talking to an old friend who had just come out of a bad relationship and said that love is a waste of time. I said time is for wasting.
We are raised to believe that time must not be wasted. But a man lying by the sea looking at the sky and doing nothing — if it makes him happy, it is not wasted. If wasting the time makes you happy, the time was not wasted.
But staying indoors all winter, a person sinks.
Slowly I saw something clearly.
Boredom and emptiness are not the same thing. Boredom is having nothing to do; I have things to do. I can look at the sea, at the sky, at the seasons turning, and I never tire of those.
Emptiness is different. I have spent four years watching the world and writing it down, and I have made nothing. I record what I see. I do not make a new thing. The only cure for emptiness is to make something, and I cannot say what I would make.
There was a stretch this spring when I believed I had worked everything out. I could not find one question left that I actually wanted answered. That sounds like a good place to be. It is not. If there is nothing left to think about, the problem becomes the hours — what to put in them.
People write to me asking whether I am depressed. By the time they ask they have already decided. They want me to confirm it, so that they can be right about me. I do not reply. When a man is quiet and lives alone, that is the only word they have for it.
My one problem is still money.
In the years since I stopped working, the internet has paid me six thousand, then eight, then nine — under ten thousand a year. The interest is falling too.
They all say it is getting harder and that young people cannot find work. I do not follow any of that. I know only that my income is going down.
I set myself a target: earn another million. With that I would be settled. It is a long way off. But a man needs something to aim at, or he is a fly without a head.
The strange part is that I want money most and spend it least. I have a million saved and I do not touch it. In Rushan ten thousand yuan would buy a very good flat and I will not buy one. First, I hate to spend. Second, I have not decided to settle. Third, I am afraid that even with a house I would still feel empty.
Then there is AI.
People say it will take most people’s jobs. I do not study it. I know only that it writes better than I do.
The kind of article I write for the public account — I often feel there is no need for me to write it at all. The diary is different. What the weather was like, AI cannot see. When I went to sleep and when I got up, AI does not know. What my dinner tasted like, AI cannot taste. I feel empty, and AI feels nothing. So I keep writing.
A person cannot out-think a machine any more. What a person can still offer is clumsiness — the clumsiness of one real person doing one real thing.
And then the short videos, which cut everybody’s time into pieces. Everyone is restless. I am a little restless too.
Love I have stopped thinking about.
Love means taking someone out to dinner, and I have no money to take anyone out to dinner. Even if I did, I would not want to. With two people in a room one of them is always accommodating, and then I cannot sleep when I want to sleep or get up when I want to get up.
People ask what I will do when I am old and unmarried. What being unmarried buys me is leaving when I want and lying down when I want. I have done that sum. It is a good deal.
Lately I take the bicycle everywhere and never walk. The bicycle is fast. Fast has a problem: you are too busy covering ground to see what is on the ground. I want to slow down. Slower, and I can see the fields, hear the wind, hear the insects and the birds, see the last of the sunset.
Do not rush the road. Feel the road.
I read somewhere that how a man spends his day is how he spends his life.
I did not believe it. I half believe it now. If the day goes like this — up slowly, a while in the sun, a walk, two meals, a bit of writing — then that is the whole life. I accept it.
People ask whether I am tired of the sea after four years.
Not tired. Used to it.
The first year I went twice a day. Now I can go several days without it and not feel anything missing, because the sea is in my head. Without going out I know what colour the water is today and what the sunset looks like. Spring sea, summer sea, autumn sea, winter sea — I know them all.
The sea is different every day: that is physics. The sea is the same every day: that is eternity.
The nights here are as quiet as a vacuum. Sometimes I think I can hear the electricity.
On a night like that nothing belongs to me and everything does. The wind is free, the moon is free, nobody comes to collect.
I live alone and deal with nobody, only with the weather. I never feel lonely. I just cannot explain it to anyone.
But I do not want to become a stagnant pond.
For four years I have watched this coast and written it down. Watching and writing down are both spectating. There is nothing wrong with spectating, but do it long enough and a person goes thin.
I want to do something else. Not a spectator — a maker. After four years I cannot only be writing down what I see. I want to make something, however small.
I have wanted this since the third year. It has never landed.
I am still keeping the diary. The fifty days away were travel; back here it is the coast again. Four books now, close to a million characters.
A million characters of diary is a ledger, and there is not much literature in it. To me it is the most valuable thing I own. I used to say I had no hobbies. I do. I like writing down, one by one, the things I have seen and the things I have thought.
At the end of June I went out again.
I had not seen the rainy season in Mangshi, and my friend in Dali was leaving. I stayed a few days in Dali, then went south to Mangshi, then east into Guizhou.
Going out dissolves it. On the road every day is new: new sky, new road, new food. There is no room to ask who you are or why you are alive. You walk, you eat, you sleep, you look at the one thing in front of you.
Mangshi in the rainy season turned out to be different and the same: rain most afternoons, warm by evening, the town emptier than I had ever seen it. I did not mind. I had gone to see a season, not to enjoy one.
It works. So I have a method now: when the emptiness comes, leave.
But that is only half of it. Leaving costs money, and after a while it is tiring. Three days on the road and you start to miss home — that small quiet room.
There were also a great many small things this year.
Spring came back quickly. By the end of March the wind had gone soft. The apricot flowered and the wheat began to climb. In April the transparent jellyfish came up in the tidal lake in clumps, like plastic bags somebody had dropped into the water, except not. In May the market started selling cucumbers and cherries. In June the wheat was cut and the fields were stubble.
The three best months here are September, October and November. High sky, dry wind, few people, and the sea very blue.
On the beach after the tide goes out the small crabs leave a field of little sand balls. A flock of gulls sits on the bar at the river mouth; I walk closer and they all go up at once. Sea anemones are stuck to the rocks and pull their tentacles in when you touch them. After snow the barnacles on the stones show up very clearly. Those things grow on one stone for their whole life and do not move.
I still go out once a day. Every day is different: different wind, different light, different sea, and a different me.
One day in April I got my own birthday wrong. By the time I remembered, it had been and gone three days earlier. I did not make it up. Living alone like this, a day like that is the same whether you mark it or not.
I stopped for a long time before writing this.
At the start I assumed the book would have a conclusion. Four years — I must have learned something.
I have learned something. I know what freedom is. I know what boredom is. I know what happiness is not.
The rest I do not know.
Three days ago I thought: move to Mangshi for a year. Today I walked out and looked at the sea and thought: this is better.
Sometimes I think I have everything: the sea costs nothing, the sunrise costs nothing, the air costs nothing. Sometimes I think I have nothing: no money, no home, nothing I could hold up and show anybody.
I am still here. I still have not worked it out.
Back and forth.