1. After the Covid Test, I Stared Out at the Buildings
One afternoon in July 2022, I was at the office getting a Covid test. Back then a Covid test was part of the daily routine. The line started at the door of the office building and stretched all the way to the flower bed, curled around once, then curled around again. It was hot, and the line barely moved. Nobody in front of me talked. Nobody behind me talked either. Everyone stood there looking down at their phones. When it was my turn, I opened my mouth, a swab went in and twirled twice against my throat, and that was that. I went back inside, sat down at my desk, and looked out through the glass.
Outside was nothing but buildings. Square, gray, packed shoulder to shoulder, slicing the sky into a thin strip. Some had glass curtain walls; some were painted a beige that had long since faded. I had sat in that seat for seven years and had never once found them good-looking. That year housing in Beijing had hit RMB 100,000 a square meter. I had done the math: my salary wasn’t low, my housing fund wasn’t low either, and it still wasn’t enough to buy a place in this city — nowhere close. If I stopped eating and drinking and saved for decades, it still wouldn’t be enough.
I stared at those buildings for a long time, and then a very simple thought surfaced: this kind of life doesn’t really seem to have any point.
Once the thought surfaced, I couldn’t push it back down.
That day I took the bus home. We got stuck on the Second Ring Road and didn’t move. I sat by the window and watched one building after another slide past, and the same sentence kept turning over in my head: is this how the days are going to keep going. Outside the window was someone else’s city. Inside the window was me. I was thirty-six that year, seven years in Beijing, and in this city I had paid rent, worked overtime, seen a few movies, had two relationships that went nowhere, and had nothing else to show for it. Suddenly I wanted very badly to get off the bus.
The thought looked like it came out of nowhere, but it had actually been building for years. It wasn’t like a match, where one strike and it catches. It was more like the motion-sensor light in the hallway — dark most of the time, and it only comes on when you walk past. Thinking back on it later, nothing special happened that afternoon. No argument. Nobody yelled at me. No bad news. I just finished the Covid test, went back to my seat, and glanced out the window.
That was all.
In my seven years in Beijing, a day went roughly like this: up at seven, wash, head out, walk fifteen or twenty minutes to the office, eat breakfast in the cafeteria, go upstairs, sit down in my cubicle. At noon I went to the cafeteria, came back and dozed a while, then sat some more in the afternoon. Off at five thirty, home, groceries or takeout, watch my phone for a bit after eating, go to sleep. And the next day the same thing again. It looked respectable. In fact it was a clock that had been wound up, chiming at the same hour every day. I sat in that building for seven years. What did I actually do? I couldn’t tell you. How many people did I get to know? Couldn’t tell you that either. The days weren’t lived through. They were used up.
It wasn’t the first time the thought had come, either. The first few years of work were fine — I was young, and everything still felt possible. But the further along I got, the more the days felt like a thick quilt pressing down on me: as long as you don’t move, it just sinks a little deeper. It’s not that I never thought about leaving. Every year when I wrote my year-end review, I thought about it once. Every year after the New Year, riding the train back to Beijing, I thought about it again. And when I was done thinking, I put it back where I found it and went to work. That’s how it sat there for seven years.
I moved twice in those seven years. When I first arrived I lived in a five-square-meter partitioned room in a shared apartment, for four years and three months, until the landlord wanted the place back. After I moved out I rented a thirty-eight-square-meter studio of my own. Well equipped, newly renovated, with a kitchen, a bathroom, and even a television in the bedroom. Rent was RMB 6,500, plus an extra service fee. More than half my monthly salary went to rent alone. I accepted it — for a place of my own, for the quiet, for that little bit of shabby freedom, I was willing to pay.
I lived in those thirty-eight square meters for three years. In three years I hammered in almost no nails, because I knew I wouldn’t be there long. That feeling is hard to explain: you live in a room, you pay rent on time, you keep the days looking presentable, and underneath it you always know the place isn’t yours — you’re just borrowing it for a while. Beijing was the same for me. I spent seven years there, and in the end I was just borrowing.
2. I Came Out of a Small Town
I grew up in a small town in Hubei. A small-town kid. A small-town test-grinder — or, in the uglier phrase people use online, a small-town kid who tested into a top university and still ended up with nothing. I’ll own every one of those words, because they all describe the same thing: I came out of a very small, very quiet place, studied my way into a big city, and then grew a little more uncomfortable there every single day.
My distaste for cities goes back a long way. I don’t like high-rises. I don’t like traffic and crowds and the endless racket of human beings. I like quiet places with mountains and water, trees and flowers, birds in the sky, dogs on the ground. The big city has none of that — only steel, concrete, glass curtain walls. Every building looks about the same, and every city looks like it came out of the same mold. The people walking around inside seem to be wearing the same face, too.
Chekhov wrote a line I carried with me for years. He said that anyone who has caught even one perch in his life, or seen the thrushes flying south in autumn even once, watched them cross the countryside in flocks on a clear cool day, will never want to be a city man again — he will long for that free life until the day he dies. The first time I read it, something caught in my chest. It felt like he had written me. When I was small, back in that town, on summer nights I’d spread a mat on the roof to cool off and sleep there until dawn, and when I opened my eyes the sky in the east had already gone red. That was the first sunrise I ever saw. Later I studied and worked and moved from one city to the next, and I forgot about sunrises and sunsets entirely.
My first picture of Beijing came from a train ride. In September 2004 I got into a university in Changchun, took a train for the first time, and passed through Beijing for the first time. A slow train, overnight, with my father, my mother, and my older brother. It was already noon when we pulled into Beijing West. A little girl in the seat across from us said “please” in very proper Standard Mandarin, and I still remember it. Where I come from, nobody spoke Standard Mandarin in daily life, and nobody was that particular about manners. A distant aunt in Beijing drove out to pick us up and made a point of going around to Chang’an Avenue so we could see Tiananmen. I stretched my neck out in the car and stared, thrilled. My uncle treated us to a meal, and that same afternoon my father and I got on the train to Changchun and left. That was my look at Beijing — a quick one.
Later I did a two-and-a-half-year master’s in Shanghai, then went to work in Chongqing. In between I came to Beijing once for an interview, and stayed in a short-term rental, and also in group housing and a basement. The interview went smoothly — they were short on people and there was almost no competition. With time on my hands I went alone to the Temple of Heaven and stood a long while by the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, looking at the sky there, watching the swallows dart in and out under the eaves. Beijing’s sky was very blue; Chongqing is a fog city, gray all year round, and you rarely get blue like that. It was around then that I decided, to myself, that I liked the north.
By 2015 I’d been in Chongqing two years, was twenty-nine, and could see thirty coming. Thirty sat in my chest like a stone. I kept feeling that if I just stayed in Chongqing, what came next was a house, a marriage, a child, growing old — the whole thing visible from where I stood. I didn’t want that. I wanted to see a bigger city. Guangzhou and Shenzhen were too far south; I was already sick of Shanghai; Beijing was the only one left, and it was the capital — who wouldn’t want to go. That year my brother had already gone ahead to Beijing. We’re twins, and we usually think alike, so I went too.
At the end of July I flew into Beijing on a night flight. It was a middle-of-the-night flight because it was cheap. We landed around two or three in the morning. No buses, no subway, and I couldn’t bring myself to pay for a cab, so I dragged my luggage to a bench in the terminal and lay there for a few hours. When the first airport train left in the morning I got on. Twenty-five RMB for the ticket, and I thought it was outrageously expensive.
I’d rented the place online beforehand. The agent took me upstairs, opened the door, and I froze. A five-square-meter partitioned room: a double bed against the window, a wardrobe against the door, a desk, and just enough floor left for standing room, for me. Rent was RMB 2,300 — more than three times what I’d paid for a small apartment in Chongqing with a kitchen and a balcony. I put down my bags, sat on the edge of the bed, and didn’t say anything for a long while.
The room faced north, no balcony, one window, and the sun barely reached it. The household on the north side had the master bedroom, with a balcony and sunlight. I wasn’t used to walking through other people’s rooms to hang laundry, so I hung my washed clothes inside, which filled the whole room with damp. And I couldn’t open the window — not that I didn’t want to, but I didn’t want to leave the door wide open and let people see how I lived. So that room was dark, damp, and airless year-round. At night I’d come back, open the door, turn on the light, and the four walls would close in. I’d drop my bag on the desk, sit down, and sometimes do nothing at all, just sit.
Over those shared-apartment years I had two roommates. Both married, both alone in Beijing — one had left his wife and kid back home, the other had brought his wife up and squeezed her into the master bedroom. Roommates like us, apart from splitting the utilities, barely spoke. I lived with one of them two years and never knew his full name. Once I got up in the middle of the night for water and ran into a roommate in the living room. We both froze for a second, nodded, and went back to our rooms. That kind of distance is more awkward than a stranger’s, because we were obviously living in the same apartment.
That five-square-meter room is where I stayed until the fall of 2019 — four years and three months.
Looking back, I can’t even explain to myself how I lasted those seven years. Every year I thought about leaving; every year I didn’t. And I didn’t stay because I couldn’t bear to leave. I stayed because I was afraid — afraid someplace else would be worse than this, afraid I didn’t have enough money to last, afraid that at my age nobody would want me. Once a person starts being afraid, the years just go by, one after another, and the longer it goes the less he dares to move. So I waited until I was thirty-six before I would go. Those seven years weren’t held onto by anything. I held onto them myself.
3. The State-Owned Job Was Fine, Except You Could See the End of It
I worked at a state-owned company, doing the most ordinary white-collar work there is: nine to five, sitting in an office, reading documents, writing reports, going to meetings, year after year. In fairness, plenty about the place was good. The rules held, unlike some places where things change overnight; you worked when you were supposed to work and got your holidays when you were supposed to get them, two days off at the weekend, time off for every festival; the salary came on time and the benefits were decent — they paid out money at New Year and other holidays. The housing fund contribution was high; at one point mine was five or six thousand a month. After the salary came in and the mandatory insurance and housing fund came out, what was left was enough for one person. The first couple of years I genuinely thought it was a good place.
To be specific: the cafeteria was in the building, two RMB for breakfast, five for lunch, and you could eat all three meals at work, weekends included. Come festival time they handed out so much it wouldn’t fit on your desk — rice, flour, oil, fruit, pastries — more than I could eat, and I mailed some of it home. If you got sick there was supplementary medical coverage that reimbursed a percentage; I collected a whole stack of receipts from the pharmacy. It all sounds trivial, but for a young person drifting in a strange city, it was real stability. I enjoyed every bit of that stability, and I understood every bit of it too: none of it could buy off the sentence in my head — this is not the life I want.
But a state-owned company has its own kind of pressure — you can see all the way to the end of it. You know exactly what your future looks like: sitting in an office your whole life, sitting until you’re old. Want to be a senior executive? You won’t be. You’re a foot soldier in the ranks. If you really went after it, you’d have to fight your way up a level at a time, saying a great many things you don’t believe yourself, and I couldn’t do that. So the way up was invisible and impassable. What was left was to sit where you were.
As time went on, the work started to get hard to do. More rules every year, more review from top to bottom every year. To get anything done you had to push it up through level after level of approval; to make one decision you had to walk it through the process level by level, a mountain of paperwork. If the people above thought your idea didn’t work, then it didn’t work, and you changed it. And it wasn’t only the review from above — I did plenty of reviewing myself. A lot of sentences went through my gut before they came out of my mouth, checking whether they might cause trouble. After a while a person shrinks. He shrinks down to the size of a single seat.
Let me give you an example of what that review feels like. Once I was handling something that shouldn’t have been a big deal, and I rewrote the paperwork seven or eight times. First submission: wrong format. Fixed the format: insufficient basis. Added the basis: the wording wasn’t appropriate. Changed the wording: now it didn’t match the line coming down from above. By the fourth or fifth round I no longer knew what I was even changing, I was just adjusting it to order, over and over. In the end my boss said, let’s just go with the first version. I laughed inside and said nothing. There was no shortage of this, all year long. The line my boss used most often was, be an honest man, do things by the book. And the book kept getting fatter, with a pile of exceptions inside it, and when it came down to your desk you were still the one guessing.
Then we got a new boss who didn’t understand the work. Fine — but he wouldn’t stay out of it. He had to get involved, had to direct. You’d be working on something that wasn’t even hard, and he’d say this part’s no good today and that part’s wrong tomorrow, and one sentence from him flattened everything you’d done and you started over. You couldn’t get any meaning out of the work; all that was left was exhaustion. I had gone into a state-owned company thinking it would be easy, a steady paycheck with no drama. Instead the reviews and the random meddling left me more worn out than I’d ever been outside. Again and again I’d come out of the office, stand at the bottom of the building, watch the people going by, and want nothing but to go home, lie down, and be alone.
Spend seven years in a place like that and what you know best is your colleagues’ faces; what you know least is your colleagues. People came and went — some left before a year was up, some after a few years, some planned to retire there. We were thrown together by the work, and the moment we clocked out we were strangers. In seven years I never had a colleague I could call a friend. The first couple of years I still wanted to get closer to people; after that I stopped. We sat in the same room, each of us guarding his own cubicle, owing each other nothing, close to each other in no way. Sometimes I thought it probably wasn’t their problem, and it wasn’t mine either — the place simply doesn’t grow closeness.
That kind of tired isn’t physical. It’s three in the afternoon, the office so quiet that all you hear is keyboards, you’re staring at the screen and it hits you that you have no idea what the thing in your hands has to do with the world. You want to stand up and walk around, and then you think that the second you stand, the whole room can see you. So you keep sitting, waiting for the end of the day, waiting for the weekend, waiting for the year to finish, and then waiting for the next one. The days pass like that. Nothing hurts, exactly. You just have less and less left in you.
4. The Third Year of the Pandemic, and I Hadn’t Been Home in Three Years
2022 was the third year of the pandemic, and everyone had been carrying it for three years. The Covid test had become a required daily course; you scanned a code to get into a building, showed a code wherever you went, filed a report to travel for work, and by the time the report was approved something had changed at the other end and you couldn’t go. Records of every kind, checks of every kind, following you wherever you went. Those two years I rarely stopped to think about what freedom was, because thinking about it did no good.
More to the point, I hadn’t been home in three years. At the end of 2019 I meant to go back, didn’t manage it, and it was just as well I didn’t. In 2020 and 2021 the company encouraged everyone to spend New Year in Beijing, and I answered the call and stayed. In 2021 they said on paper that you could go, but approval went up level by level, the application was a nuisance, and in the end the people above probably wouldn’t have signed off anyway, so I figured I shouldn’t make trouble for them. Three Spring Festivals, all of them alone in Beijing.
My mother called me. She asked why I was always sighing, and said if I wasn’t happy in Beijing I should just come home. I said, come home and do what? She didn’t know either. There was no answer. So I could only keep drifting outside. She didn’t mean anything by it. She just hadn’t seen me in three years and she missed me.
That July a relative posted in the family chat about someone’s kid getting into Fudan, telling my nephews to follow that example, study hard, and get into a good university themselves one day. The college entrance exam had nothing to do with me anymore, but seeing a message like that still sank something in my chest. Excellence, striving, success — these things are like a ruler that gets pulled out and laid against you at any moment. Around here it feels like only success deserves respect, and not succeeding makes you a cripple, written off. And how much does a person have to put down for success — put down being happy, put down his health, put down any consideration for other people, put down any feeling for a blade of grass or a tree. Is it worth it. I don’t think it’s worth it.
That Mid-Autumn Festival in September I was alone in my rented room. I went out at night to look for the moon. There was mist in the sky and the moon was red, like the skin of an apple. A row of people stood by the roadside holding up their phones to shoot it. I took one too. A phone can’t capture what the moon looks like, and I didn’t mind. It just struck me suddenly that this was more or less how I’d spent every holiday in those seven years — alone, in somebody else’s city.
The lack of freedom at work, plus the lack of freedom in my life all those years, stacked on top of each other until I couldn’t take the weight. I’m a kid who grew up in the countryside, raised in open country; I was born liking free, empty places. The city was getting harder to stand every year. So that afternoon, looking out the window at the high-rises, I already had the answer: I don’t want to do this anymore. Quit.
5. July 19: I Made Up My Mind
July 19 was a Tuesday, and it was hot out. That evening my boss posted a notice in the department group chat: there was one nomination slot, and whoever got it would go into the talent-recruitment pool. Anyone interested should sign up as soon as possible, the deadline was Friday, and afterward they would settle Beijing residency for the best candidate.
I read it and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Here I was about to leave, and this shows up — as if it were dangling bait in front of me on purpose. Honestly I hesitated for a while: should I apply, should I stay. Then I let it go. There were piles of forms to fill in, piles of documents to prove, and the process would take ages, and I had already decided to leave and didn’t want to stay a day longer. Besides, even with residency I couldn’t afford a house; and even if I could, I didn’t want to be a mortgage slave paying off a loan my whole life. That settled it. Not applying.
I was a little afraid my boss would see that my heart wasn’t in it. Almost everyone at the company had residency; I was the only one who didn’t. Not even applying — people would surely think something was wrong with me. It turned out I was overthinking it. Nobody cared whether I applied, and nobody cared whether I was leaving, whether I was leaving Beijing.
I didn’t know who to tell about the decision. Not colleagues — that had to wait until I’d actually resigned. Not my parents — they’d worry and try to talk me out of it. And there was no point telling people who had nothing to do with it; they wouldn’t understand. But it was stopped up inside me, and if I didn’t say it out loud I’d suffocate. In the end I told only a few close friends. One urged me to finish out the year and take the year-end bonus before leaving. Another urged me to get the residency first and then leave. I turned both down. No year-end bonus, however big, was worth it; and residency was no use to me since I wasn’t looking for a girlfriend, wasn’t getting married, wasn’t having kids. I couldn’t keep getting hooked on these things. I had to be a person who held firm.
Later someone asked me: if they’d given you residency the day you joined, would you still have quit? I thought about it. Probably not. With residency I’d have wanted to buy a house; with a house I’d have wanted to marry; married, I’d have had a kid; and with a kid I’d have spent my whole life circling those things, walking the road I’d already walked all over again. It was terrifying. It was precisely because I didn’t have residency that I was completely free — a man coming and going with nothing on his back, owing this city nothing.
My lease was up on October 23. If I put off quitting until next year, I’d have to renew for another year, and the rent was outrageous. I didn’t want to rent again, and I didn’t want to put it off.
Those days my head was a mess. Making the decision is one thing; walking toward the day, one day at a time, is another. I was waiting for September 1 to come and afraid of it coming, both at once. At night I tossed and turned, half excited and half scared — I still had more than a month before I actually spoke to my boss, and in that month I couldn’t say a word to anyone, I had to keep going to work as if nothing had happened and keep everybody in the dark. I worried about how I’d live after I quit: what if the money ran out, what if nobody would hire me again, what if my parents found out, what then. But the moment I walked into the office, sat down in my cubicle, and faced the endless email and process, another sentence would rise up in me — I’m done. By the end there was only one thought left: I’m going.
Now, the money. This wasn’t a whim and it wasn’t spite. When I quit, I had RMB 800,000 in savings and another RMB 200,000 in my housing fund account, which added up to exactly one million. The RMB 200,000 in the housing fund was my own money, sitting in that account the whole time, available to withdraw whenever I wanted. It had been saved up bit by bit since my twenties: what I skimmed off my salary, what I put aside from year-end bonuses, what got paid into the housing fund year after year. I’m not particular about food or clothes and I don’t have hobbies, so apart from meals, rent, and the occasional book, most of it just stayed in the bank.
One thing I want to be clear about: I didn’t quit because I’d saved up a million. I quit because, at the moment I wanted to quit, I happened to have a million. Those two sentences sound about the same. They don’t mean the same. If I hadn’t had the money, I probably would have gone anyway, only I’d have gone more panicked. With it, there was one dry patch for my feet to land on — even if I had no income for a long stretch, I wouldn’t starve.
Those days I went downstairs every evening for a Covid test. The last one had been the day before yesterday, and tomorrow it would be day three, and I was afraid of forgetting, so I just went and got it done. The line wasn’t long; a few people ahead of me, all looking down at their phones. Standing there, it suddenly struck me how absurd the whole thing was: the most important thing in a man’s day is to open his mouth and let someone stick a cotton swab in and jab it. Then go home, take off your shoes, wash your hands, sit down. Outside the window, the lights of the city. Inside, only me. I sat there thinking, what kind of life am I actually living.
6. Let Me Just Finish Out August for the Paycheck
August was the month when the whole company took its vacation. It was basically summer break — everyone saved up their annual leave and took it all at once, ten days in a row. I had seven days, split across three weeks: two days, two days, and three. That month the office was nearly empty, my bosses were gone, and I did essentially nothing.
Why didn’t I resign in August? Two reasons. One, most of my colleagues were away in August, there’d be nobody around to process the paperwork, and it would be inconvenient. The other, more important — for the whole month of August I didn’t have to work, and the salary kept coming and the housing fund kept getting paid in. I wanted to coast through that month’s pay and leave in September. So I did nothing in August and collected the salary and the housing fund along with it.
What I actually did that month was carry my personal belongings home from the office, one load at a time — mostly books. Books are heavy, and I didn’t have a car, so I could only take one bag a day: go home at noon, bring a few more in the afternoon. I often asked myself why I bought so many books. A man with no place of his own shouldn’t be buying books and hoarding them in the first place. Eventually I sold a batch through Duozhuayu — seventy-seven books, RMB 890 total. I couldn’t bring myself to sell the thirty-six-volume complete Jin Yong, and I couldn’t bring myself to sell the old books I’d picked up at Panjiayuan either. Those I boxed up and shipped to a friend’s place.
Those books had been accumulated bit by bit over the years — a set of classical texts from Zhonghua Book Company, odd volumes picked off secondhand stalls, and that Jin Yong set, thirty-six books, the very ones I’d read when I was a student in Changchun. They were too heavy to move and I couldn’t bear to throw them out, so I split them up and mailed them: some to a friend to keep for me, some back home. A man with no house of his own doesn’t even have anywhere to put a few books. It was while moving that I understood — the heaviest thing isn’t the belongings. It’s what you can’t bear to let go of.
On August 28 the company paid out the thirteenth-month salary early. It usually came in October, and I’d assumed that leaving in September meant missing it, but it landed ahead of schedule. Call it a windfall; I’d saved up a little more and could lie flat for a while longer.
In August I saw people online who’d quit their jobs and gone traveling, gone to live in the mountains, gone to live the life they wanted. I was happy for them and anxious for myself. They were braver than me, they’d figured it out sooner. I’d burned a full seven years in one place, wrecked my health, turned my hair white, used up whatever fight I had in me, before I finally moved. I know everyone has his own pace, and I still couldn’t help feeling I was slow, that I hadn’t amounted to much. Luckily, it wasn’t too late.
What was left of my time I spent checking off landmarks. Since I was leaving, I’d see the places in Beijing worth seeing one more time. The Bird’s Nest, the National Museum, the southeast corner tower of the Ming city wall, Tiananmen, Jingshan, the White Pagoda in Beihai Park, Wangjing SOHO, the White Dagoba Temple, Sanlitun, the “Big Pants” building, CITIC Tower... one place at a time, standing there alone, holding up my phone, taking a photo with nobody in it but me. Seven years in Beijing, and I had never once said goodbye to a city this carefully.
During that phase I covered a lot of ground and saw a lot of things that weren’t worth seeing. The National Museum, for instance: I hit it during summer break, and the place was full of schoolkids, noisy, shoulder to shoulder, the glass cases throwing back the light so you couldn’t see anything clearly. I walked through once and left. The Temple of Heaven, though — I went back, and again it was the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests. It’s my favorite building: round, three tiers of eaves, going up toward the sky a tier at a time. I sat at the edge of the plaza and looked at it, absorbed, and something in me went quiet. By then I already knew that in two more months I’d be leaving this city.
August 31, the last day of August. I almost forgot the Covid test again. The last time I forgot, the guard downstairs absolutely would not let me into the building and I lost a day’s work for nothing. This one was the last one — tomorrow, September 1, I was going to tell my boss I was done.
7. September 1: I Told My Boss I Was Quitting
On the morning of September 1, I went to talk to my boss. I’d been holding it in for over a month, and once I actually said it out loud, it wasn’t hard at all.
I said it was entirely personal, nothing to do with the company. I was tired of Beijing, the money I made couldn’t buy a house and couldn’t get me married, and drifting like this wasn’t sustainable — I wanted to go home. As for what I’d do at home, I said that was for later. In fact I had no intention of going home, and I had no intention of telling my parents I’d quit. I just needed a respectable way to put it, so we could part on good terms.
There was a bellyful I didn’t say. If I had said it, it would have gone something like this: I can’t do this anymore, one thing after another reviewed level by level, a boss who doesn’t know the business standing over my shoulder telling me what to do, half a day’s work flattened and started over, meetings long and empty, worn down until I don’t feel like a person. But I knew that saying it wouldn’t help. This is how the environment is, and the man sitting across from me couldn’t change it either. He was just better at putting up with it than I was. So I didn’t say one hard word. I finished politely.
My boss was polite too. He told me to think it over some more, and never gave me a hard time. There was work to hand over, and losing an old hand for a new one would be a headache for him, sure. But that was no longer my problem. He said, you’re welcome back anytime. I said, I don’t expect to come back.
That afternoon I went to HR to ask how to process the paperwork. I’d assumed a state-owned company would have a ready-made template for a resignation letter. Nope, I had to write my own. So I wrote one line: reason for leaving, four words, personal reasons; last day, end of September, once the handover was done. My boss signed it. Then the senior boss called me in and talked to me for an hour. I gave him the same speech.
The real trouble was the clearance form — eighteen blanks on it, one for each of eighteen departments, and I had to go get each one signed and stamped: social insurance, medical insurance, housing fund, the corporate annuity, personnel files, the union, logistics, IT, and so on. The company had two office locations, one for the business side and one for administration, and I ran back and forth between them with the form. I didn’t know most of the colleagues I needed, and had to go ask each of them in turn. By the fourth day I had twelve of the eighteen blanks filled.
One blank meant going to the union, and the woman in charge wasn’t in that day and told me to come back tomorrow. One meant returning my access card, and since I wasn’t leaving until the end of the month I figured I’d hang on to it. One meant handing back the paperwork for the corporate annuity, and I wasn’t even sure whether I had one; it took me a while to find the right person. Mostly I was running up and down a building with a form in my hand, knocking on doors, giving my name, watching someone glance at it, stamp it, and say okay. In those seven days I met people I’d never dealt with in the previous seven years. And by the end I found out that after seven years in that company, I didn’t really know anybody.
The remaining six blanks: some people were out, some couldn’t sign until the handover was done, and the union was still holding my Mid-Autumn and National Day payments. I wanted to wait for the money to come through before cutting ties. Dragging it out day by day actually suited me — if the process ran a full month, I’d collect that month’s salary too.
Colleagues took me out to eat, one after another. On September 9 some of the older colleagues threw me a send-off in the big conference room, eight people all told — we ate cake and I listened to them tell stories about the company, old stories, ugly stories, what-comes-next stories. On the 16th there was a lunch, and then a dinner; two big meals in one day, and I came home so stuffed it hurt, lying there wanting to throw up. On the 19th four colleagues got together and took me out for barbecue. A man on his way out had suddenly become the most popular person in the company.
At the send-off one colleague brought up something I’d forgotten completely. He said there was a time a boss chewed me out so badly you could hear it through the office door, and everyone felt it was unfair. It took me a while to remember — yes, that happened — but I’d long since stopped caring about it. He also said that after that boss finished yelling at me, a couple of days later he’d come around to smooth things over, hand me a few pieces of candy, drop off some drinks and stationery, and have me charmed and happy again. That’s when I understood it was a technique: knock you down first, then help you back up, so you feel you were wrong and you’re grateful to him. Seven years there, and that was the first time anyone had ever named it out loud for me.
While packing I came across a few wedding candy boxes from colleagues who’d gotten married, small and pretty. Seven years at that company, and I never took a single day of the ten days of marriage leave; the hundred-some days of maternity leave, forget it. That alone made me feel I’d come out behind.
September 26, I thought it would be my last day at the office. My boss signed off, I took photos with my colleagues, went to the shop and spent down the balance on my meal card, then handed in the empty card. All eighteen blanks were finally filled. I turned the form in to HR, and they said the certificate confirming I’d left wouldn’t be ready for a couple of days. I asked if someone could pick it up for me. No, they said, it has to be signed by you in person. Fine, I thought, I’ll come in once more.
On September 29 I went to pick it up. He typed my ID number in right in front of me, verified my start and end dates, printed it, stamped it, and had me sign. Only when I had that sheet of paper in my hand did the seven years actually come to a close. Walking out of the building, a line from Tao Yuanming came to me: long I lived in a cage; now I have got back to nature.
8. One Last Look at Beijing
Once all the paperwork was done, I didn’t have to go to work anymore. My lease ran until October 23, and for that month and a bit in between I went nowhere; I just stayed in Beijing. Since I was leaving, I’d take one more look at the places that mattered: Tiananmen, the Forbidden City, Yuanmingyuan, the Temple of Heaven, the Temple of Earth, the various parks, the various stretches of the Great Wall, the Bird’s Nest, the Water Cube, the Olympic Park, CITIC Tower. I probably wouldn’t be coming back, so I’d keep a memory of them.
On August 24 I went to Badaling for the first time. Seven years living in Beijing, always thinking it was too far, always putting it off. I went early that day and there were very few people, and the mountains still had a chill in the air. I climbed from the first tower to the twelfth on the north side and came down by the eleventh. That winding wall on the green mountains, walking up it a battlement at a time — it made something in you light up. I posted a photo of myself with the wall in a group chat, and a friend replied: you’ve got so much white hair, my dad doesn’t have that much. My dad was in his fifties and didn’t have that much white hair. I was thirty-six that year.
I also went up to the Fragrant Hills once in August. I wasn’t there to hike; I just wanted one more look at the hotel up on the hill — the Fragrant Hills Hotel that I. M. Pei designed, with a rockery in the back courtyard, a waterfall, and a very large ginkgo tree that turns gold in autumn. On the way back I stopped at the Summer Palace and took a photo with the Jade Belt Bridge and another with the Tower of Buddhist Incense. The lotuses on the lake were still open; the sky was overcast, though, and it felt a little heavy. That day I knew perfectly well it was probably the last time.
On September 3, on the subway, I saw a young woman with a canvas tote bag printed with a line: the weather is wonderful, and there is almost no money. I couldn’t help laughing. When I got home I looked it up and found it was something Chekhov wrote in a letter. Beijing is a place where the most literary people are usually the poorest — poor in a way that’s perfectly clear, and perfectly dignified.
On September 12 I cycled over to the tomb and shrine of Yuan Chonghuan. It’s tucked inside a residential compound; I had to make a reservation, scan a code, and pay two RMB for a ticket to get in. The courtyard was very quiet, nobody talking, a few bunches of chrysanthemums laid in front of the stele, and an old white cat asleep on the steps. I sat down too, petting the cat and looking at the stele, and stayed most of the afternoon. On my way out of the compound a resident was arguing with the code-checker at the gate. I live right here, the man was shouting, I’m not scanning.
On September 22 I took an hour-and-a-half ride specifically to see the Lugou Bridge. When I got there I found the bridge itself wasn’t much to look at — it was the history. What held me, though, was the ride out through the city’s edge: run-down houses, gray apartment blocks, roadside stalls, a completely different picture from the high-rises and neatly dressed white-collar workers downtown. The same city, a few dozen kilometers apart, and decades apart too.
On September 23 I went to the Forbidden City for the last time. It was a weekday, hardly any visitors, and the wind had blown all night and left the sky blue as if it had just been washed. I sat on a bench in the shade and watched people having their portraits taken, watched the photographer direct a group of girls all dressed up, posing. I watched for a long time. That night I saw the news that it had snowed in Zhangjiakou. My first thought was, will it snow in Beijing, will I get to see one before I go. The next day I saw another item: old farmers in Zhangjiakou were scrambling to bring in the potato harvest in the wind and snow, and a lot of it had already frozen, a whole year wasted.
In mid-to-late September the apartment I was living in started acting up. When the people upstairs took a shower, water ran down through my bathroom ceiling, and it smelled. The agent sent a repairman, who said the drain pipe belonging to the upstairs unit was the problem — but the pipe ran right across my ceiling, so both units had to be brought in to fix it together, one household at a time, and it dragged on for days. That’s what it’s like without a place of your own: when something goes wrong you wait and you put up with it. On October 6 my tooth started hurting again, that wisdom tooth that had grown in crooked. And I no longer had medical insurance.
Over the National Day holiday my family called to ask where I was going for the break. I said nowhere, staying home. I couldn’t tell them that I wasn’t working anymore, that I was no longer at the company.
In early October I started packing. Five small boxes, three big ones, shipped out one by one, to a friend’s place and back home. What was left wasn’t much: a bed, a suitcase, a backpack, to be weighed on the last day. I also dug out all the bank cards I’d opened over the years and canceled them one by one. Move somewhere new and you have to open a few cards there; when you leave you forget to close them; and in the end you can’t even say how many cards are in your name. It’s as if the cards had taken me hostage. I closed them all and kept two or three.
9. October 23: I Left
In early October I went out every day — took out the trash, bought boxed lunches, wandered the neighborhood. By mid-to-late October it was down to once every three days, purely for the Covid test. The trash piled up inside and I didn’t take it out even when it was full; if I really had to, I waited until after ten at night so I wouldn’t run into anyone downstairs and get asked why I wasn’t at work today. Leaving Beijing required a negative test from the past forty-eight hours, and I was afraid the result would come back late, so I took tests two days running on the 22nd and 23rd, not wanting anything to go wrong. Fifteen months without leaving Beijing, and now that I was actually going, I was nervous.
October 22 was my last full day in Beijing. High wind, a sky so blue it was almost frightening, dead leaves tumbling down the street. In the morning I gave what little I had left to a friend who lived nearby; in the afternoon I went for my last Covid test. Back in the room, it was empty — just a bed, a suitcase, a backpack. I sat on the bed with my eyes closed and listened to the time dripping past me, drop by drop.
On the morning of October 23 I dragged my luggage out the door. The weather was fine. Before I left I looked around the room one more time: the bed was still there, the table and chair empty. I’d lived in that place three years, and after I left someone new would move in soon enough, as if nothing had happened. I left the keys on the table, shut the door, went downstairs. The guard on duty knew me and nodded. I didn’t say goodbye to him.
I’d bought the high-speed rail ticket in advance, destination Weihai — my first time in Weihai, my first time at Rushan Silver Beach, and I didn’t even have a place lined up yet. Before I’d arrived, I’d already paid RMB 1,000 in deposit. But that comes later. At that moment I knew exactly one thing: I was leaving Beijing.
On the train that day I watched the country slide east past the window. A line of Su Shi’s kept running through my head: how I have hated this body not being my own; when will I forget the hustling. The night is late, the wind still, the ripples flat; from here a small boat drifts away, and the rivers and seas will keep what’s left of my life. For seven years I’d felt that my body wasn’t mine, that it had been borrowed by a job, borrowed by a city. Now I had finally taken it back.
The year-end bonus, I gave it up. Beijing residency, I gave that up too. The points-based route to residency, the company’s perk that could have gotten me there early — all of it, given up. I threw everything off. I just wanted to go.