1. I’m from Hubei, and I Always Wanted to See the Sea
I’m from Hubei, and I grew up inland. Where I come from there is no sea. From childhood, everything I knew about the sea came from books, from television, from photographs and videos other people had taken. People tend to feel an inexplicable longing for something they’ve never seen but keep hearing about. That was the sea for me. I talked about it for years and never once got close to it.
Later I traveled to the coast a few times. I went to Qingdao, I went to Qinhuangdao, and that was as far as it got. Each trip was short — two days, three, four — long enough for a look and a few photos, and then back to work. Even those few days I remember clearly: standing on the shore, listening to the waves push up one after another to my feet, and suddenly all the tension would drain out of me, no thoughts left in my head, my chest feeling as if someone had patted it gently twice. Then the train carried me back into the city and the feeling scattered, and the next day I was squeezing onto the subway and sitting in my cubicle again, as if those days had been borrowed.
So a wish stayed lodged in me: to find a city by the sea and live there for a while. Not for a few days — to settle in, for a year, two years, long enough to watch a whole round of spring, summer, autumn, and winter, to see that the sea in winter is not the sea in summer, to see what it looks like in rain and what it looks like when it freezes. While I was working I didn’t dare look at that wish too closely, because looking at it only showed me it was impossible. After I quit, it turned into a real plan.
Traveling and living somewhere are two different things. I only figured that out later. Traveling is going to look, and leaving when you’re done looking. Living somewhere is getting through the days: where you buy vegetables in the morning, whether the room is cold in winter, who you call when something small breaks, which hospital you go to when you’re sick, whether being there alone will wear you down. What I wanted was the second, not the first. I wanted to live out the daily business of ordinary life again, there on the edge of the sea — clumsily, if that’s how it came out, as long as I was the one living it.
Now that I wasn’t working, I had a sum of money in hand, enough for a few years without worry, and only one thing left to decide: where to stay. I’d drawn up conditions for myself, and really they were simple — sea, quiet, few people, cheap. The one that mattered most was cheap. With no job there’d be no income; every cent would come out of savings and would have to be counted. This wasn’t me putting on airs. It was arithmetic. With only RMB 800,000 to your name and a plan to stay off work for a long time, the places you can live aren’t chosen by you. They’re chosen by that number. The more I did the math, the clearer it got, and in the end I accepted it.
So I never once thought about “where to go for fun.” I was thinking about something else: whether I could live on as little money as possible and make it last. That idea looks like nothing much, but every road that comes after starts from it.
There was one more hard condition: few people. After seven years in Beijing, the thing I could least stand was crowds — people pressed body to body in the subway, packed shoulder to shoulder on the street, shouting over one another in the malls. It isn’t that I hate people. What I can’t stand is that feeling of being pushed along by a crowd — nobody knows anybody, and still you have to move at everyone else’s pace wherever you go. So the place I wanted should have nobody in winter, nobody on the beach, few people on the streets, quiet to the point of desolation. Only desolation lets me relax. Silver Beach was exactly that: a place most people turn their noses up at, and places people turn their noses up at usually aren’t crowded.
2. I Thought of Qingdao First, Then Went East Looking for Cheap
At the very beginning I wanted to go to Qingdao.
Qingdao is the most famous, it has the sea, and the city itself is beautiful. Mention the seaside and it’s the first place anyone thinks of. When I looked into Qingdao I had a soft spot for it: if I could settle there, nothing would be better. The city is clean, the climate isn’t bad, it’s not too far from the interior, and it would be easy to get home later. I even thought that if I could live in Qingdao for a year or two and see all four seasons by the sea, the whole trip would have been worth it.
Before I left Beijing I looked up a lot of information, and once I had, I crossed it off — the cost of living in Qingdao was too high. Renting a place came to about RMB 1,000 a month. That figure means nothing in Beijing, but by then I had no salary, and RMB 1,000 a month in rent was money pulled straight out of savings, month after month for years. I multiplied it by twelve, wrote down RMB 12,000 a year in my head, thought about how many years the money I had could last, and gave it up. Forget it. I’ll look somewhere else.
I kept looking down the coast and got to Weihai. I’d heard of Weihai long before — clean, quiet, and fairly well known. I looked up the city proper, then Huancui District, and it was RMB 700 or 800 a month. Still too expensive. Seven or eight hundred a month comes to nearly RMB 10,000 a year. I weighed that ten thousand in my mind, set it down, and kept going.
Further on I got to Rongcheng. Rongcheng is a county-level city under Weihai, also on the coast, with a decent environment, and the shoreline there feels wilder. Rongcheng had two problems. One, the rent wasn’t cheap either. Two, there wasn’t much written about it online. Since I had to find a place to live from scattered words on the internet, a city with little written about it is painfully hard to figure out — the few things I wanted to know, like which neighborhood has easy access to groceries, whether there’s heating in winter, whether there’s a hospital nearby, nobody had written any of it down.
When I make a decision, I go by the words online. If a city has plenty of posts and someone has seriously written about what it’s like to live there, I dare to go. If there’s little information, I have no footing, and I won’t hand myself over to it. That’s how Rongcheng got crossed off — not because it was bad, but because I couldn’t see it clearly. Looking back it’s a bit of a shame. To this day I’ve never been there.
So I went through them one by one, crossing them off one by one. First Qingdao, then Weihai, then Rongcheng — all of them turning around on the Jiaodong Peninsula, and every switch was subtraction on the same question: living there a whole year, what would it actually cost. The more places I looked at, the clearer the ruler in my head got. It wasn’t measuring which place was prettier. It was measuring where a man my age, with this much money, could stay the longest in peace.
Only later did I understand that I wasn’t choosing a city back then. I was choosing a number. As long as a place was cheap, I could accept it being farther, colder, emptier. As long as a place was expensive, I couldn’t afford to live there no matter how pretty it was. It was the first time in my life I’d picked a place that way, and the first time I understood that money really does decide where a person goes.
At the time I was also carrying a judgment I never said out loud: I wasn’t going to pick the best place. I was going to pick the place I could afford. Qingdao is nice, so is Weihai, but those places are made for people with jobs and money. All I had was a lump of savings, and what I needed was a place that would make that lump last as long as possible. Once I saw that, everything after it got easy. I no longer had to compare which city was more beautiful. I only had to figure out which one was cheaper.
I lined up the numbers for all four places and did the math. A rental in Qingdao came to about RMB 1,000 a month, so RMB 12,000 a year. In Weihai’s city center or Huancui District, RMB 700 or 800 a month, nearly RMB 10,000 a year. Rongcheng sat in about the same bracket. Silver Beach was RMB 3,000 or 4,000 a year. For the same year of living, the most expensive place and the cheapest differed by more than three times. Spent at Qingdao prices, my savings would last a noticeably shorter time. Spent at Silver Beach prices, it would stretch out a long while more. To me, those extra years were life itself.
3. “Ghost Town” Was a Name Other People Gave It First
Searching further down the coast, I found Rushan Silver Beach.
Silver Beach was famous online — famous enough that I didn’t need to search for its scenery. Everyone called it the ghost town, right off the bat. That name came from other people first. The first day I saw it I was taken aback, and wondered how a place name could have anything to do with ghosts. Only after seeing it again and again did I understand: it wasn’t an insult. It was a way of saying that the place had so few people it was frightening.
Why ghost town? Because there were far too many buildings and far too few people. Twenty-odd kilometers of coastline were packed with towers, all the same color, all the same shape, laid out row after row toward the sea. In peak season there were still people, but once July and August passed and the weather turned cold, most of them left, and by winter nine rooms in ten stood empty. At night, looking up from the foot of a building, the whole block was dark, with only a scattered light or two in the windows. That’s why they called it a ghost town.
Behind that name, really, was another thing: too many buildings had gone up, far more than there were people who needed them. They couldn’t be sold, and they couldn’t be rented at any real price. All a landlord wanted was to get the place rented out for the year, so it wouldn’t sit empty and rot in his hands. Understand that, and you understand everything about Silver Beach. Those empty towers aren’t scenery. They’re debt — the landlords’ debt, the developers’ debt, stacked there in long strings.
The name sounded alarming, but what I saw was its other side. Lots of buildings, so no one fighting over them; no one fighting, so the price comes down. Cheapness was Silver Beach’s disease in other people’s mouths. To me it was exactly the advantage. I knew very clearly back then that I wasn’t going there to invest and wasn’t going there on vacation. I was going to find a place I could stay in for a long time and afford. Other people fear emptiness. I don’t. Other people fear desolation. Desolation is what I was after.
Strange as it sounds, at first the words “ghost town” grated on me too, and after a while they settled into something comfortable. Those two words are like a threshold, keeping out the people who don’t want to come, and that keeps the price pressed down low. If everyone praised the place and everyone rushed to grab it, the rent would long since have stopped being RMB 4,000. I’ve often thought since that the reason I could settle here wasn’t good judgment. It was that I happen not to be picky — not about liveliness, not about convenience, not about any of the things other people care about.
Back then only a handful of people were doing their own media in Silver Beach, and I went through what they posted, one item at a time. Honestly, what I was looking at wasn’t the scenery. It was how the daily life worked: RMB 3,000 or 4,000 a year could rent you an apartment, vegetables were cheap, water, electricity, and gas were cheap, and a man could live without eating meat; in winter there was no heating, the room was cold, and you had to figure out your own way — an electric blanket, two quilts, and once you’d made it through, you were fine. They also talked about the parts that weren’t pretty, and that actually made me trust them more. I don’t trust a place that only gets praised. If a place is good in every way, somebody isn’t telling the truth.
Three or four thousand a year. In Beijing I’d been paying more than RMB 6,000 a month.
Those posts about Silver Beach talked about winter too: the peak season lasted only about two months, with the most people in July and August, and once September passed, people left in waves; by November and December there was almost nobody on the streets, most apartments had no heating, the rooms were too cold to sit still in, and at night you depended on an electric blanket and two quilts; apart from the sea there was nothing to do — no movie theater, no mall, and young people couldn’t stand it. Most of the people writing this were resentful, and the more I read the more settled I felt. They complained it was bleak; I said bleak was exactly what I wanted. They complained there was nowhere to go; I said I didn’t want to go anywhere to begin with.
I had never once been to Silver Beach, had never taken a single photo there, and yet in my mind I had already moved in. I knew that going by the internet alone was a risk, but what I wanted was cheap, and as long as the cheap part was real, everything else could be worked around. Sea, quiet, few people, cheap — and the one that mattered most of the four, Silver Beach gave me.
There was one more thing I was clear about back then: people said Silver Beach had poor facilities — no mall, no hospital, nothing lively to join in. None of that was a problem for me. In seven years in Beijing I’d had no social life and no dinner invitations I couldn’t get out of; after work I just went back to my room and stayed there. A man who already likes being alone, moving to a place where no one bothers him, is simply living the life he wanted ahead of schedule. People who fear loneliness can’t live in Silver Beach. Back then I didn’t think I was one of them.
4. I Paid a Thousand in Deposit Before I Ever Got There
Once Silver Beach was settled, all that was left was finding a place. I was still in Beijing, the apartment was in Shandong, and between us were more than a thousand kilometers. I couldn’t see the place, couldn’t touch the walls. All I had were photos online and other people’s word.
I found people online. First I talked to a few bloggers who lived in Silver Beach year-round and did their own media, and I talked to agents too. I asked about the smallest things: what the rent actually came to, how the property fee was calculated, whether there was an agent’s fee, how cold it got in winter, whether there was a hospital nearby, how far you had to walk to buy vegetables. None of this would be worth mentioning in Beijing, but at that point every one of them mattered to whether I moved myself there. I asked in detail and they answered patiently, and by the end of those conversations I understood Silver Beach better than a hundred photos could have shown me.
Later I asked a net friend in Silver Beach to look at places for me. He already lived there, and could walk to any of them. He looked at one apartment after another for me — which one faced south, which one was on the street, which one had a vegetable stand downstairs — and sent me photos and told me about each. A thousand kilometers apart, we closed the deal over a single phone. He didn’t know me from anyone, and he was willing to make several trips on my behalf. I’ve never forgotten it.
In the end I settled on one: a decently located compound, fourth floor, two bedrooms, and the place looked new, roomy, and bright. Rent RMB 4,000 a year, deposit RMB 1,000, agent’s fee RMB 200, with the property fee and the water, electricity, and gas paid by me.
The requirements I gave my net friend were simple: it had to face south, it had to get sun, and it had to be cheap. Everything else was negotiable. On the facing south part I was firm — after seven years in north-facing rooms in Beijing, I never wanted to live in a place that couldn’t see the sun again. When he picked this one out for me, the first thing he said about it was that it faced south and got good light. I knew the thing had been done right.
I hadn’t even seen the apartment, and I paid RMB 1,000 in deposit first. I sent it over the internet, and after I’d sent it I sat there a while. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous at all — a thousand isn’t much, but it meant handing myself over to people I’d never met. Then I thought: if it goes wrong, I’m out a thousand, and that’s all; if it goes right, I’ve got a place I can live in for a long time. With that, I sent the money. Looking back now, that thousand was the best money I spent in all these years.
To this day I don’t know what my net friend looks like, how old he is, or what he does. I only know he was renting a place in Silver Beach too, having gone there a few years before me. That’s how it goes between people sometimes: a thousand kilometers apart, separated by a screen, something gets done on a little goodwill, and then you each go back to your own life. Half of that thousand was rent. The other half was a bet I placed on a stranger.
I tied up the loose end in Beijing as well. I settled the accounts with my agent and got back nearly RMB 6,000 in deposit. The money I’d handed over came back, and with it the last thread holding me to Beijing went to zero. Those days a sentence kept running through my head: if you don’t go out, you won’t run into problems; if you don’t run into problems, you won’t solve any problems. So going out is a very important thing. I believed it completely — every trouble gets solved by stepping forward, and then stepping forward again. Sitting in a room thinking about it solves nothing.
5. The Direct Train Had Been Canceled
I’d looked up the route in detail beforehand.
Back then Rushan had no high-speed rail, only regular trains. There was a direct train from Beijing to Rushan that ran all night, thirteen or fourteen hours, and you slept on the train and arrived. I’d planned to take it. I hadn’t even bought the ticket, and already I felt settled — it was just a matter of getting through one night, and the next morning I’d open my eyes and see the sea.
I checked in September — it was there. I checked in early October — still there. And then, in the exact two days before I was supposed to leave, the train stopped running. I refreshed the page over and over. It really was gone. First I didn’t believe it and tried other dates, and it was still gone. Then I accepted it. I don’t know why it stopped, and there was nowhere to ask, so I could only guess: during the pandemic there were too few passengers, one train carried almost nobody, running it was a loss, so they’d simply canceled it. I’d never once been caught by a cancellation before. The first time I was, it was the day I was leaving.
No way around it — I changed the route. High-speed rail to Weihai first, then a transfer from Weihai to Rushan. A place I’d have reached on one line now had to be split in two, with checks, code scans, and registrations the whole way, and a queue every time I changed trains.
On the morning of October 23 I dragged my luggage out the door. Beijing South Station was nearly empty — a tenth of what it would have been in 2019, I’d guess. The taxi didn’t dare stop at the station entrance; they’d get fined for stopping, he said, so he dropped me on the outermost road and hurried me out of the car. I had only one suitcase and one backpack, already traveling light, and it still felt like too much.
Through the station, onto the train, it was masks the whole way, and checks without end: Covid test, travel code, whether you’d been vaccinated. After a few hours the strap was cutting into the backs of my ears. Next to me sat a young mother with a three- or four-year-old child, just the two of them, with a suitcase and a bag. The child couldn’t sit still, so she kept telling him stories, one after another, her voice very low. I looked out the window and wondered what it is that carries a person forward.
On the way I found myself a little amusement. You had to wear a mask the whole train ride, so I got to wondering, what about drinking and eating — do you take it off? I remembered a joke I’d seen: a reporter interviews a resident who is eating and asks him, why did you take off your mask? The man answers, because I’m eating. Just that one line, and I laughed on the train for a long time. When a man has nowhere to go, he has to find himself something to be happy about.
I hadn’t taken high-speed rail in over a year, and I didn’t think much of it myself. Later a friend commented under my post: I haven’t been on a high-speed train in three years. When I saw that line, it hit me that the same thing lands on different people with completely different weight — I’d simply had no chance to travel far in over a year; she hadn’t been able to get on one for three years. I read that line twice and sat quiet for a while.
6. Weihai: My First Time That Close to the Sea
As the train passed Yantai, I saw a line of sea through the window.
Just a line of it, lying far off along the horizon, and I hurried to raise my phone and shoot, my hand shaking a little. The sea was much higher than the land, as if it sloped down from up above and met the sky at the far edge. I didn’t understand how that worked, and later remembered I’d seen something similar at Qinghai Lake. That whole stretch I did nothing but stare at that line of blue, all the way to Weihai.
It was nearly five when I reached Weihai. Leaving the station I registered my information and took one Covid test, and they let me go. By the time the taxi got me to where I was staying, the sky had gone dark, and I’d missed that day’s sunset.
I stayed in a guesthouse, a bit over RMB 100 for the night, high up in the building, in a room with a sea view. Standing at the window I could see the sea at night, though I couldn’t make out its color; all I could hear was the wind blowing hard, whooping, and the waves rolling up on the sand in line after line of white. I didn’t know whether the wind had just happened to pick up that day or whether it was always like this by the sea. That question took me three winters to dare to answer.
No sooner had I settled in than my phone got a robocall, reminding me that after arriving in Weihai I had to be tested three times in five days. The call recited several different scenarios — what to do if you’d come from another province, what to do if you’d come from within the province, what to do if you’d come from a risky area within the province — and after listening for a good while I still couldn’t make sense of it. I was only staying three days, so I just decided to go once a day, one test a day, the least hassle.
I took a hot shower, felt human again, and hurried outside. It was only a five-minute walk to the sea. There were few people out at night, and the shore was cold and dark. I stood there and looked for a long time — it was the first time I’d ever been this close to the sea. The wind off the water had no fishy smell to it at all; the air was good to breathe. The water where I stood was the water of the Yellow Sea, of the Pacific, not the water of an enclosed sea, and I figured it must be livelier and cleaner than those. The sea wind was genuinely cold, though; after standing a while you had to pull your coat tight. I even wondered to myself: with wind this strong, would living here long make a person prone to rheumatism? Wondering or not, for those half an hour I felt comfortable and calm, a calm I’d never once had in that building in Beijing.
I walked along the shore, from the Shandong University Weihai campus at one end to Huoju Eighth Street, and back — four or five kilometers, with very few people the whole way. I’d meant to follow Shenyang Road and find a restaurant for dinner, but when I got there a lot of the shops had closed, so I went to a supermarket, bought some things, and carried them back. That night I discovered how cold the seaside actually is — at the end of October some people on the street were already in down jackets, and even with my coat wrapped around me I felt the wind pouring in at my collar. I’d always thought the seaside was a place you went in summer. Who’d have guessed that once its wind picks up, it bites harder than the inland.
Weihai’s roads rise and fall — up a slope, down a slope, and in between you go through a tunnel. I’d been in Beijing so long that I assumed every city should be flat and squared off, forgetting there are other kinds of cities in the world. The street signs were written in three scripts — Chinese, English, Korean — and there were plenty of Korean-flavored restaurants on the streets. I don’t know what this little seaside city has to do with Korea, and it just felt new to me. Some place names end with the character gang. There are a lot of pines along the streets. Shandong people love garlic and scallions, and in the cars, in the elevators, there was always a sharp, pungent smell.
Those two days I even toyed with the thought of just staying in Weihai. I really did like the city — clean, quiet, with roads that rise and fall, and the sea right at its edge. But the moment I thought about rent, the idea scattered: RMB 700 or 800 a month, nearly RMB 10,000 a year, and my money couldn’t take spending like that. Liking a place is one thing; liking it won’t feed you. I’d seen the sea, and I kept going east.
The next day I went to a few more places: the Big Picture Frame, the First Bathing Beach, and the Jinhai Bay boardwalk. I went to Huoju Eighth Street at night, and when I got there not a soul was around — just me, standing there, taking a photo. Truly no one: the streetlights were on, the road was empty, and I stood there a while, finding it strange and good at the same time.
The things I did in those three days sound monotonous when I say them out loud: walk, take taxis, get Covid tests, look at the sea. I didn’t go to a single one of Weihai’s famous Korean spots, and I didn’t try a single dish the internet recommended — I can’t write a travel guide and don’t intend to learn. Down there I did one thing only: walk a little, then stop and look at the sea.
Back at the guesthouse I turned off the light and lay down. In the dark I could hear the surf outside, pushing in, wave after wave. Sometimes the sound was noise, sometimes a lullaby, and as I listened I stopped being able to tell the difference. Before I fell asleep that night a very tacky thought surfaced in me: if only I could afford an apartment in Weihai — ah, there it is, houses again. Really tacky.
7. Sunrise at Half-Moon Bay, Clams at Xiaoshi Island
The next day I got up at four thirty, having slept only three hours.
Before bed I went back and forth for a long time: should I go for the sunrise today or tomorrow? I checked the weather — clear today, cloudy tomorrow, and cloudy means no sunrise. So it had to be today. I set the alarm and lay down, afraid the whole time I’d oversleep, and the more I tried to sleep the more awake I got.
Half-Moon Bay was a spot someone had recommended online for watching the sunrise. I brought two phones — a new one with a SIM card, for shooting photos, and an old one without a card, set up on a stand just for a time-lapse. I lined the two up on a rock and stood beside them like a little market stall. It wasn’t light yet when a woman passing by told me, you won’t see the sun standing here, the little island is blocking it, you have to go further on. I hurriedly packed up the stand and ran north, and when I got there the sun was only minutes from leaving the water. If not for her one sentence, I’d have gotten up that morning for nothing.
Before the sun came up a thin crescent moon still hung in the east, and I could even see its darkened half, as if someone had lightly traced it in pencil. The sky kept changing, and the sea changed with it — red, blue, white, gold. I wanted to describe it, and found my words weren’t enough. In the end all I could do was photograph it — and even a photograph falls short of the eye. So I can only say: come and see it for yourself.
A girl nearby asked me to photograph her and her boyfriend, the two of them leaning together, smiling so sweetly. I pressed the shutter twice and caught those two seconds for them. Traveling alone spares you the trouble of looking after someone else, and costs you the pleasure of having someone take your picture. You can’t have both, and that saying is exactly true.
After the sunrise I ate breakfast at a roadside stall, went to a testing point for my Covid test, and then walked from Half-Moon Bay all the way to the Gate of Happiness. In Haiyuan Park a lot of small boats lay moored, rising and falling with the water, and seabirds flew over them. Across the water was Liugong Island. I didn’t go over; looking at it from a distance was enough. The closer I got to the Gate of Happiness, the more people and cars there were, and I found I didn’t want to walk anymore — I like a seaside with few people and quiet, and in a crowded place I can’t stay no matter how good the view is.
Down at the Jinhai Bay boardwalk I saw people crouching on the rocky flats below the bridge, turning over stones — foraging the shallows, I suppose. Local people were digging for clams in the mudflats, a bucketful at a time, and watching them I felt a pang of envy; I thought, if I dug some too, at least I’d have dinner. But I didn’t even know what they were digging or how you cooked it, so I could only stand and watch. Up on the bridge people were fishing, and I didn’t recognize a single fish they pulled up. What they were called, how to eat them, I had no idea. Confucius said that the Book of Songs teaches you the names of many birds and beasts and plants. I’m a clod-hopping inland man, and I’d have to learn all those names from scratch. Coming to the seaside is a vacation for other people. For me, half of it is school.
At noon I sat by the water for a long time. The sun was good, the wind was light, and I took off my shoes and socks and walked into the water. It was cold but didn’t sting, and standing on the sand with my feet in it, I relaxed all at once. Some people were swimming. I watched them and thought, once I get to Rushan, I’ll swim too.
Toward evening I wanted a different spot for the sunset. This time of year, from the bathing beach the sun always set behind the hills to the west, not into the sea. I walked along the road to the Second Bathing Beach. It lay behind the hills, and I thought I’d see the sun sink into the water there, but when I got there I found hills beyond hills, and it was blocked again. I did wander by accident into the fishing-and-foraging park at Xiaoshi Island, where local people were digging clams in the shallows, busy as anything. The sand was pocked with small round holes, the homes of little crabs.
As the sun dropped I hurried back to the guesthouse, sat by the window on the twenty-second floor facing west, and watched the sun sink little by little. That was my last evening in Weihai. Those days I knew very well that my time in Weihai counted as sightseeing, not living — the real days still ahead of me hadn’t started yet. I could have gone straight on to Rushan; the rules along the way left me no choice but to stop in this city for two days. But those two days weren’t wasted — sunrise, sunset, and foraging, I saw them all. If I could stay longer, I’d walk the whole shoreline from one end to the other, and maybe stumble on a few places nobody else knew about. That could wait for later. Wang Wei wrote, “Looking at myself, I have no long-range plan; I only know to go back to my old woods.” Those days, that line was what was passing through my heart. And what I loved were the two that follow: “The pine wind loosens my sash; the mountain moon shines on my zither.”
That day another thought crossed my mind: the sun rises every day, and sets every day — am I going to watch it every day? Wouldn’t I get tired of it? Once a person gets to the seaside, is there nothing left to do? Then I figured it out — as long as today meant something, the day wasn’t wasted. You took all those beautiful pictures of clouds and waves today. Do they mean nothing? Then why did you keep them.
Those two days I posted on my feed constantly, photo after photo going up, and after each one I felt a little guilty: would someone find it annoying, would someone be bothered by it. Then I thought, block me if you want — I’m not going to worry about it. But I also knew that once I got to Rushan I probably wouldn’t post like this. Once you’ve looked at the sea enough, there’s other things to do: read, write, study English, cook, sit in the sun, climb a hill, exercise, make a friend. These are things you do anywhere. By the sea is no different.
Once in Weihai a taxi driver told me Rongcheng was more worth seeing, that Naxianghai and Chengshantou were better than anything here. I made a note of it. But by then I was no longer thinking about these three days. I was thinking of Rushan as a place to put down roots and, slowly, walking through the counties and towns around it. No hurry. First I’d get to know Rushan.
On my last day in Weihai I looked back over those few days: I’d seen the sunrise, seen the sunset, seen the foraging, taken a great pile of photos and videos, and in all I’d gone to very few places — and all of them places other people had been talking about for ages. And still I was happy, happy enough to almost forget what this trip had cost. To stand on this stretch of shore, I’d quit a job I’d held for seven years and walked away from a city. That’s how people are: standing in a good place, you don’t much want to do the accounting.
8. October 26: I Signed the Lease at Silver Beach
On the twenty-fifth a friend in Beijing told me there’d been cases near the compound where I used to live. Good thing I’d left in time, or I might not have gotten out. I turned off Beijing’s health app and never dared open it again, convinced that the moment I did, it would throw up an alert. From that day on I used Shandong’s health code.
A little before six in the evening a message popped up on my phone: one case found in Huancui District. My heart dropped. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get to Rushan the next day, afraid I’d be stopped halfway again. The next morning I checked and nothing had changed, and only then did I relax.
Before I slept I wrote myself a line: tomorrow I go to Rushan, and a truly new life begins. I wish myself smooth sailing, and I wish myself happy, fearless days ahead. It sounded a little like making a wish, but those days I really did need to make one.
On the twenty-sixth I was up a little after six and went to a nearby testing point — in those three days in Weihai I’d gone once a day and was used to it by now. The day before, with no sunrise to chase, I’d slept until eight thirty, dawdled in bed until I felt like getting up, and it was the deepest sleep I’d had since arriving in Shandong. I came back, packed, checked out, and took a taxi to the Weihai bus station.
The driver was a chatty young man. The whole way he told me how the pandemic had hit him: mortgage, car loan, every figure laid out clearly. The moment there was any outbreak he couldn’t go out with the car, and still the payments came due, and he could watch his savings run down. He didn’t sound worked up as he said it, more like he was reading off a bill. I’d heard exactly the same words in taxis in Beijing — different city, same bill.
The bus took an hour and a half to reach Silver Beach. The ticket was twenty or thirty RMB, I forget exactly. There were only ten passengers on board. Before boarding you had to tell the driver which compound you were getting off at, or he wouldn’t stop. Nobody at the station stopped me, I got on without trouble, and I quietly breathed a sigh of relief — those days my greatest fear was being stopped at the last step.
As the bus left the Weihai city limits, a sentence kept turning over in my head: Beijing is surely more convenient than Weihai, and Weihai is surely more convenient than Rushan — this isn’t moving up in the world, it’s moving down. Beijing’s big events still reached my ears now and then through the phone. But Beijing’s small things — the Summer Palace, Yuanmingyuan, the Forbidden City, the White Pagoda — from now on would be only a few photos in memory. I felt a little hollow, and a little loose.
The agent came and opened the door for me. I checked the rooms, read the lease, signed, paid: RMB 4,000 rent for the year, RMB 506 in property fees, RMB 4,506 all told. The place had a few small flaws, and the agent said he’d send someone to fix them. In the afternoon I went to the property office to prepay the water and electricity and bought a water card — put in RMB 100 and get RMB 120 — and a 7.5-liter water jug, RMB 1.50 to fill it. Water was RMB 3.05 a cubic meter, electricity RMB 0.55 a kilowatt-hour, gas RMB 2.80 a cubic meter. I wrote all these numbers down. From then on, these few coins were my daily life.
After signing the lease I walked a loop around the compound, from Aegean View to Big Thumb, and back. I was hungry and ate a bowl of beef knife-cut noodles for RMB 10. There were very few restaurants along the way, and the few there were didn’t look clean. The streets were bleak, the walls peeling, with plenty of stray cats and dogs, and most of the people I passed were old folks out for a stroll. The bus came once every half hour and stopped running at five in the afternoon. A kind of electric four-wheeler called a laotoule ran around the neighborhood, RMB 5 for anything within three kilometers.
I took all of it in, and I couldn’t say I was disappointed or that I was happy. There was only room in me at that moment for one thing: was the place mine — yes, it was.
The cold was coming on fast, and I needed to hurry and buy things for the winter: quilts, a mattress pad, socks, shoes, an electric blanket, and a kettle for boiling water. I’d be cooking for myself, so pots and pans and bowls had to be bought too — if I didn’t cook, where would I eat. I made a round of the neighborhood and couldn’t find many decent shops, and I understood: the days ahead would have to be furnished one thing at a time, with me doing the furnishing. It was a completely different life from eating takeout and going to restaurants in Beijing.
9. Eighty-Some Square Meters, Four Thousand a Year
The place was a little over eighty square meters, two bedrooms and a living room, with a very large balcony and a bedroom facing south.
By late October the sun had dropped low, and the light came slanting into the rooms. Sitting on the balcony you got sun; lying on the bed in the bedroom you got sun too. The place was a walk-up, fourth floor, not too high and not too low, with the light slanting in just far enough to fall on the balcony. At the time I didn’t think about it much — I only felt that four flights weren’t tiring to climb. Living there longer, I understood: at Silver Beach, getting the floor right changes everything. First and second floors get no sun and the rooms go damp; fifth and sixth and above are a chore to climb, and in winter, with so few people around, there’s not even anyone to hear you breathing as you go up. The fourth floor is the floor that’s exactly right. The day the agent showed me the place, the moment I walked in and saw the sunlight laid all the way from the balcony to the living room, I knew: this is the one.
The day I moved in I set my things down, and the first thing I did was pull all the curtains open and watch the sun lay itself in patches across the floor, across the bed. For that little while I was very quiet inside, and I felt the journey hadn’t been for nothing.
I’m a man who loves the sun. Seven years in the north, and this small fixation of mine on sunlight was raised in that little room in Beijing.
In my first room in Beijing I didn’t even have a place to hang laundry: the room faced north, I was afraid to leave the door open and let people see how I lived, and I rarely opened the window either, so the washed clothes just hung inside, filling the room with damp. Being in the sun and being out of it are two different things — where you can get the sun, a person loosens a little; when you don’t see the sun for years, a person tends to curl up. I didn’t understand that then. I only felt the room was stuffy. It was when I moved into this place of eighty-some square meters and saw the sunlight spilling in off the balcony that the stuffiness of those seven years suddenly had something to match.
The first four years I lived in a shared apartment, a small north-facing bedroom of five or six square meters where the sun never reached. Rent was RMB 2,300 at first, then RMB 2,700, then up to RMB 3,000 — always climbing. In my fourth year the landlord wanted the place back, so I rented a small thirty-eight-square-meter studio of my own: a balcony, a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, and the bathroom was fairly big, with the wet and dry areas separated. RMB 6,500 a month, and with the agent’s fee and service fee, RMB 7,000. Over a year that came to RMB 84,000.
While I was in Beijing a friend told me, the rent you pay in Beijing for one year would rent you twenty years at Silver Beach. At the time I took it as just a remark. Then I signed the lease and put the two numbers side by side: RMB 84,000 against RMB 4,000, roughly twenty times. The same country, near the same stretch of coastline — on one side, a year’s money for a north-facing five-square-meter corner where you never see the sun; on the other, a year’s money for a whole apartment of eighty-some square meters, with a big sunny balcony.
There was one small thing I only got my hands on the day I signed: in Beijing you paid by the month, once a month, and every rent day felt like being cut. The place at Silver Beach rented by the year, one payment, RMB 4,000 in full, and once it was paid the whole year went quiet. RMB 4,000 wouldn’t cover a single month’s rent in Beijing — and here I’d bought a whole year with it. That comparison steadied me more than anything anyone could say.
A little over eighty square meters, two bedrooms and a living room, RMB 4,000 a year. And that was that.