1. At Forty, I Still Couldn’t Figure It Out
I was born in 1986. I quit my job in the autumn of 2022, when I was thirty-six. As I write these words I’m already forty. The number forty used to belong, in my mind, to somebody else — to an elder, to someone who sits you down and explains how things work. Now I’ve arrived at it myself, and looking back, not one of those explaining-how-things-work moments ever came my way. I’m still the kind of person who has to think everything over.
Confucius said that at forty he had no more doubts. When I read that as a child I thought it was impressive — that a man who lived to forty should understand everything, see through everything, and never be stumped by anything again. Only when I actually reached that age did I understand that the line seems meant for someone else. Even now, there’s a great deal I can’t figure out.
The world changes too fast. Most of the lessons I learned at twenty don’t work anymore if you try to apply them today. What’s right, what’s good, what kind of life is worth living and what kind isn’t — all of it keeps shifting, and even a person himself keeps shifting. If a man could map out his whole life at sixteen and then just follow the map, that would certainly be easier. But I’m not that kind of person. I got to forty still with a head full of question marks.
What I can least stand is a life lived with total certainty. That kind of person understands everything and has an answer for everything: whether you should buy a house, he knows; whether a child should take cram school, he knows; whether a person should marry, he knows; how you ought to live, he knows that too. He tells you all of it without blinking, as if his way were the only true one under heaven. I’ve always felt that to be alive you need a little of the skeptic’s spirit — toward events, toward what people say, toward the ideas that look self-evidently true, you keep a slightly uncertain attitude. Not that you believe in nothing; it’s that you know you might be wrong.
This doubt didn’t come out of books. I lived my way into it. In my years in Beijing I heard too many people who talked as if every word of theirs were final: at the start of the year they’d lay out the whole situation, point by point, and by the end of the year everything had changed; a set of principles someone was holding up yesterday, today nobody mentions again. People will use the most certain tone to say the least certain things. Once you’ve seen enough of that, it’s hard to nod at anything anyone says. Other people call this having no convictions. I figure that being able to stay uncertain, and stay that way, is itself no small thing.
The year I turned thirty, I didn’t manage to stand on my own either. The old saying goes, at thirty a man should stand firm. When I passed thirty, I hadn’t stood firm on a single side: no house bought, no marriage, nothing saved, and no clearer idea what to do next. Around then I’d just moved from Chongqing to Beijing, renting a place alone, the days flowing along like water with no telling which way they ran. Later I thought about it often, and I stopped feeling ashamed of it — that’s how a lot of thirty-year-olds of my generation came through it.
My parents’ generation was different. Back then a person had only a few roads open to him: into a factory, into a government office, into a school, then marry and have children, one step after another, and you could see the end from the start. My generation has more roads, but every one of them is hard. The more schooling you get, the more you see, the less you know where you’re supposed to stand. Not standing at thirty, still doubting at forty — I don’t think it’s anything to be ashamed of. It looks more like a mark this era has left on a great many people.
I grew up a country kid, and I’m clear about that. As a child I ran along the ridges between the fields, slept on the rooftop, looked up at the stars, felt earth under my feet. That kind of openness is my earliest memory, and it’s the thing I’ve been looking for ever since. People say life is a track. I’d say life ought to be open country — you can walk any direction, and when you’re tired you stop, and no one has drawn a line in front of you.
So I want to say one thing to people like me: don’t be embarrassed. If you reach thirty and there are still things you don’t understand, if you reach forty and there are still things you don’t understand, that’s perfectly normal. In the world of Confucius’s time, the roads a person could walk in a lifetime were just those few, and that was all there was to see; in the world we have now, more pours in front of your eyes in a single day than in a whole year back then. Not being able to figure it out isn’t your fault.
I no longer expect to one day figure everything out. All I want is to be able to keep asking, and to keep being a little unsure.
2. When I Decided to Leave, I Just Happened to Have a Million
In these years of lying flat, the question I’ve been asked more than any other is: you don’t work, so where does the money come from. Usually I say I saved a little. They ask the next one: then what will you do later. I say, later’s business can wait until later.
That sounds like brushing them off, but I mean it. When I quit, I had no idea what would come next — whether the money would run out, whether I’d go looking for work again, whether I’d regret it. I just took the step in front of me first. If a person had to work out the next ten or twenty years before daring to move, he’d probably never move at all, because nobody can work it out.
When I quit at thirty-six, I happened to have exactly one million on hand — RMB 800,000 of my own, plus RMB 200,000 in my housing fund account. That money didn’t fall out of the sky; I’d saved it bit by bit starting in my twenties: what I skimmed off my salary, what I set aside from year-end bonuses, what the housing fund took in year after year. I’m not particular about food or clothes and I don’t go in for any kind of hobby, so apart from meals, rent, and the occasional book, the money just stayed in the account.
How much money do you actually need to quit? There’s no standard answer to that. My own calculation was simple: the more the better. With a million in hand, quitting felt secure; with two million, three million, of course it would feel more secure still. But honestly, I’ve also met other kinds of people — people who’d quit with RMB 10,000 to their name, or RMB 100,000, leaving at the drop of a hat without a bit of panic. You can’t say they’re wrong; that’s how they live. I can’t very well claim my way is right either. It’s just how I did my math.
In the end, what this account figures out isn’t how much you’ve saved, it’s what kind of life you want to live. I’m on my own, I don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t buy much, don’t fuss over food or clothes, and the money I actually have to spend in a month comes to only so much. A million would last me a long time; give it to someone who spends freely and a million might not hold out two years. So whether it’s enough isn’t about that number. It’s about which road you mean to take.
In Silver Beach the money is visible. At the market a head of cabbage costs a few coins, a bowl of doufunao is RMB 2, a sweet fried dough ball is RMB 2, a jin of youtiao is RMB 8; eat out and a bowl of noodles is RMB 10, an order of dumplings RMB 18. In my first month here, apart from the odd bite outside, I barely spent anything. Some people here call it a good year if they spend RMB 20,000; and if you can earn a little on the side while you spend, you’re steadier still. In my head I keep an account: RMB 100,000 is enough for a man to live here for five years doing nothing at all.
People ask me too: do you have social insurance, do you have health insurance, what will you do when you get old. After I quit, all of that from my old workplace was gone. It isn’t that I haven’t thought about those questions; it’s that I can’t think up an answer. What I think about is something else: a person isn’t alive in order to be anxious. If you count out your worries one by one, they’ll crush you flat; don’t count them first, and the days go on.
As for sickness, aging, death, it isn’t that I’ve never thought about them either. Thinking about them too much is useless. For a young man to sit and calculate every day which year he’ll fall ill, which year he’ll grow old — calculate it as precisely as you like, you can’t hold off that day. Better to eat today’s meal and sit in today’s sun. I don’t think that’s avoidance. It feels more like a muddled account that’s been carefully reckoned.
Four years have gone by now, and the money hasn’t shrunk much, because I really do spend very little. I wouldn’t claim I worked it out so precisely. All I can say is that this number was enough for me. What it gave me wasn’t comfort, it was a kind of fearlessness — no need to read anyone’s face, no need to grind out one more year at a job I couldn’t stand, no need to swallow my complaints for the sake of next month’s rent.
Money, in the end, doesn’t buy pleasure. It buys this fearlessness.
3. I Call Myself Diogenes by the Sea
The name I use online is “Diogenes by the Sea.”
Diogenes was a philosopher of ancient Greece, of the Cynic school. They say his whole estate came down to a stick, a cloak, and a pouch, and at night he slept in a big wooden tub. Other men lived their lives busily acquiring houses, land, and standing; he refused, and threw those things away one by one until nothing was left but himself. His most famous moment: he was lying in the sun, and Alexander the Great came and stood over him and said he could grant him anything he wished, and asked what he wanted. Diogenes said: then please move aside a little, and don’t block my sunlight.
I love this story. Who was Alexander? By then he had conquered nearly the whole world as he saw it, he had whatever he wanted, and a single word from him could move thousands of soldiers. Yet standing in front of Diogenes, the things he could give were things the man didn’t want, and the things he could take away, the man didn’t have. He stood there talking for a long while, and all the man asked of him was one thing — move aside.
I learned later that “Cynic” sounds unpleasant — it means they lived the way dogs do: without dignity, without niceties, without caring how others saw them. I don’t take it as an insult. For a person to live without caring how others see him is no easy thing.
I’m a man who loves the sun. In those first days at Silver Beach I sat in it almost every day: in the room, on the balcony, at the seaside. In the morning I’d carry the quilt out and let the sun pass through it; at noon I’d spread a rug on the balcony and lie in the light, face up, eyes closed, thinking nothing; in the afternoon the sun would travel from the head of the bed to the foot, and the whole quilt would be dried through, inside and out. The sun moved an inch and the light in the room moved an inch, and I moved along with it.
The sun by the sea is harder than elsewhere; sit in it too long and your eyes swim. Later I went out and bought a hat and a pair of sunglasses. Once I was sitting on the sand, sun-soaked and limp all over, wanting nothing more than to lie right down and sleep — on that stretch of beach with no one else on it, listening to the waves, in the sun, asleep. And it struck me that maybe this is all a person needs in a lifetime.
After seven years in the north, this little craving of mine for the sun was raised in that north-facing room in Beijing. That room never saw the sun at any time of year; even in daytime it was gray. Live long enough in a place without sun and a person wilts, runs out of energy, starts to feel he’s gray too. The place I have now faces south; by late October the sun had already gone slanted, but it still came in, from morning all the way to afternoon. Sitting in that light, I’d often sit for half a day at a stretch.
I’ve also heard it said that people who get too little sun tend to feel shut in, tend to be unhappy. I believe it. In my years in Beijing I was often unhappy, and looking back, half of it was other things, and half of it was probably just that room, where you’d see the sun only a handful of times in a whole year.
I chose this name for myself half because of this sea and half because of that man who wouldn’t let anyone block his sun. Sitting in the sun costs nothing; sunlight is something everyone has — but you have to have a place where the sun can reach you, and a stretch of time with nothing you have to do. In Beijing I had neither. When I got here, I suddenly had both.
I wouldn’t claim I’ve really done what he did. I still live in a place I pay rent on, I still haggle with people at the market, I still fear cold and hunger. All I want is that one small thing of his — not to live for other people’s eyes. To sit in the sun alone and not get up for anyone who comes, not move for anything anyone says.
What Diogenes asked for was for people to move aside. What I’ve been trying to do all these years is really just this one thing: to move aside, one by one, the things that stand in front of me.
4. So Empty You Could Hear Your Own Footsteps
In those first days at Silver Beach I went out twice a day: once in the morning, once toward evening. Out every day, walking to the sea, looking at the water, sitting in the sun, breathing a few mouthfuls of fresh air. It was still the pandemic then, but this place had so few people. The streets were empty, the seafront was empty, and you could walk half a day without seeing a soul.
You could walk sideways down the middle of the road if you wanted. Traffic lights meant nothing to you, cars were a rare sight, and a traffic cop was nowhere at all. Joking aside, you could lie down in the middle of the road and nobody would bother you. The seafront even less so — you’d get there and it was just you, the whole beach your own. I lived in Beijing for seven years, and in those seven years there were people everywhere you went: packed in the subway, packed on the streets, packed even in the parks. Then suddenly I was somewhere with no one pressing against me. At first I wasn’t used to it, and right after that I was addicted.
I really do love this emptiness.
Empty by day, emptier at night. In the compound, once it got dark it was as if nobody lived there. In the building where I stayed only a few windows were lit — three or four households at most, and on some nights just one. The streetlamps stood far apart, and they were motion-triggered: walk past and one would come on, walk past and it would go dark again, so dim you could hardly make out the road. Once I saw someone using a flashlight, and the flashlight was brighter than the streetlamps. In the compound nobody danced in the square, nobody dragged out a stool to sit and chat, and you couldn’t hear anyone’s television. It was so quiet that when the fridge in my room hummed, I heard it perfectly.
By day I got around on my two legs. From my door to the sea, twenty minutes. On the way I’d almost never run into anyone — once in a while a few old people out for a walk, young people very rarely. The billboards along the road had mostly faded, and what was posted on them was housing information: how many square meters, which floor, what price, the agent’s name and phone number. Plane-tree leaves lay all over the ground, a whole stretch of reeds had gone white and swayed on the waste ground. Just past the compound was open field, weeds grown knee-high.
There were lively hours too, only that liveliness was far away from me. On Big Thumb Square, every morning a group of old people danced ballroom, dressed up neatly and dancing in earnest. I stood off to the side and watched a few times. They looked happy, and that kind of life probably suits them well. It had nothing to do with me; I was only a watcher.
The market was something new I ran into too. The markets here run on the lunar calendar — the fifth, the tenth, the fifteenth, the twentieth, the twenty-fifth — staggered so there’s one going almost every day. My first time at the market was just a few days after I arrived. It had everything: seafood, vegetables, fruit, small appliances, breakfast things, meat, pastries, bedsheets and quilt covers, and people handing out flyers. You couldn’t call it crowded, but it was bustling — the ones pulling little carts to buy vegetables were mostly old people. Of the seafood I didn’t recognize a single kind — scallops, oysters, razor clams, hairtail, mantis shrimp, blue crab, squid, pomfret, and even little sharks. I couldn’t cook and had no gear, so I just wandered the market and took photos, like Granny Liu in the Grand View Garden — a country woman among city luxuries, everything fresh to the eye and a little daunting besides.
Toward evening, a dozen or so old people in the compound gather at the foot of one building’s wall to play cards and chess, chatting as they play, and they sit there until dark. That’s the most people I’ve seen in this whole area. Apart from them, there’s not another stir on this street.
Gradually I got to know the roads. Which one leads to the sea, which one goes into town, which one has the market on it, which one has waste ground on both sides — I kept them all in my head. Before going out I didn’t look at a map, didn’t ask anyone; those few roads were enough. When a person moves somewhere new, the first thing that matters is to learn the roads — once you know the roads, the place is finally yours.
There are a lot of stray dogs here. You often see them on the road — sometimes one lying asleep in the grass, sometimes four or five chasing each other across open ground. Half of that happiness I feel in the emptiness comes from the sea, and half from this looseness, nobody minding you, nobody asking after you.
Around then I did a little figuring: from my door to the sea, twenty minutes; back when I worked, from my door to the office, also twenty minutes. The same length of road — one stretch walking toward a place I didn’t want to go, the other walking toward the sea.
The man is the same man, the legs are the same two legs.
5. The Dark Was Like a Vacuum, and the Sky Was Full of Stars
In those first days I didn’t quite dare go out at night. No lights on the road, the dark total, and just past the compound lay open field; when the wind blew the reeds rustled, and walking there alone set my nerves on edge. But the stars in the sky were the most I’d ever seen in my life.
One night the sky was especially clear, and I stood on the balcony and looked up — the whole sky full of stars. A patch in the south, a patch in the north, a patch in the east, a patch in the west, bright ones and faint ones, big and small, packed close, as if someone had scattered a bag of crushed silver across a black cloth. They turned slowly overhead, and I kept opening the window to look, then a while later opening it to look again, never getting my fill. I wanted to shoot it with my phone, but what came out was black, nothing there at all. A sky like that is something no one can divide up and carry off; you can only stand there and look at it yourself.
In Beijing I couldn’t see the stars. Not that Beijing has no stars — I couldn’t see them. The city’s light is too bright; the sky gets lit into a gray haze and the stars are all swallowed by that haze. The room I used to live in faced north, with a building right opposite, so when I looked up at night what I saw was the lights in other people’s windows. Here, once it gets dark, the stars come out, one after another, as if they cost nothing.
Night in Beijing never truly goes dark. Streetlamps, billboards, the headlights of passing cars — lit all night until dawn, and standing up high and looking down, the whole city is light. Back then I thought that was what liveliness meant, what prosperity meant. Here, where the dark is complete, I ended up seeing other things instead — that there was so much up in the sky, and in seven years living in the city I’d never seen a single bit of it.
When I was small, out in the country, we slept outdoors on summer nights too, and I saw stars then as well, only I didn’t think anything of it. When you’re young you don’t think anything of anything; you take everything as something you’ll always have. Only after you’ve lost it once and then see it again do you understand what it was.
Half a month after I got here I caught a total lunar eclipse. That afternoon a thick fog came up, a blank white everywhere, and when the moon rose you couldn’t see it at all. I thought, so I won’t get to see it after all. That night, walking back from the sea, I was still regretting it on the way, when suddenly I looked up — the moon was there in the sky to the east and a little north, dark red, like a piece of charred coal, with a small bite taken out of it, and the bite was growing bit by bit. I stood at the roadside and watched for a long time, took out my phone to shoot it, and of course the shot was useless. Back in the room I stuck my head out the north window to look again, and by then the moon had become a thin little hook.
Another time there was fog for several days running, the seafront a blank white, sea and sky joined so you couldn’t tell where one ended. I walked a long way along the shore, and it happened to be low tide, the water drawn far back. That day on the sand I picked up two phones, both ruined by the soaking, and I don’t know who lost them. I left them in the grass by the road on the way back, thinking whoever found them would probably be happy for a few seconds, then disappointed. Someone came out of the fog and walked past, as if born out of the fog and returning into it. A few thin-legged gulls stood at the water’s edge without moving, as if lost in thought, and only flew up when I came near.
Some days later the wind was strong in the daytime and I felt stifled indoors, so after dinner that night I walked toward the sea alone for the first time. The road is perfectly safe, actually — few people, but the streetlamps are on. While I was still far from the sea I heard a rumbling noise and took it for traffic on the road — in Beijing that sound never stops all day long. But there are hardly any cars here, the road was empty, and the sound went on without a break, clearer the closer I got. Only when I reached the seawall did I understand: it was the waves.
That wasn’t noise. It was the sea talking. I stood there listening for a while before it came to me how quiet this place really is — so quiet that even the sound of the sea carries that far.
This darkness has its good side too. If I don’t dare go out at night, I just stay in. A little after nine, when the room goes quiet, I boil a kettle of water and soak my feet, then pull the quilt up over me with only my head out, and read by the desk lamp. There’s not a sound outside — the wind being the wind, the sea being the sea — and through the closed window you can’t quite make them out. I often fall asleep before I’ve read more than a few pages.
6. A Winter Sunset I Could Watch for a Year and Not Tire Of
I watch the sunset almost every day.
Silver Beach faces south, out toward the sea. In winter the sun sits to the west and south, and the place where it sets is blocked by a peninsula out to the west, so you never see the sun drop into the water — you only see a slanted band of light shooting in from beyond the peninsula and laying itself across the whole sea. Someone told me you’d get tired of the seaside sunset after a month. I watched for a month and didn’t tire of it; watched for half a year and didn’t tire of it; watched for more than a year and still haven’t tired of it.
When I first started watching the sunset I was racing the clock. The moment the sun slanted I’d head for the sea, afraid that by the time I got there it would be gone. Later I stopped hurrying and just sat on the seawall, watching it go down bit by bit. As you watch the sun go down, your heart slows along with it. Forty minutes, an hour, doing nothing at all, just watching the sky change color. In Beijing I even ate fast; I never knew a stretch of time could be used like this.
The sunset has layers. While the sun is still high, what it spills on the sea is silver light, flashing in sheets, glittering, dazzling. Lower, and the silver turns to gold, the whole sea like a sheet of gold leaf scattered over it — “floating light, leaping gold,” four words from Fan Zhongyan’s “Record of Yueyang Tower,” written originally about moonlight, though I find they fit the daylight here just as well. Lower still, as it slides down along the peninsula, the light goes red, and red clouds spread out across the water, burning all the way to the horizon. And when the last of the red is gone and sky and sea darken together, that blue isn’t a black blue but a deep, purplish blue, and you just stand there, thinking nothing.
Few people watch the sunset at the seaside, and in winter there are none at all. I often stood alone on the seawall, or climbed down onto the beach, and watched the sun go from white to yellow, from yellow to red, sinking bit by bit. When the wind was strong my hands and face went numb with cold; when the weather was fine I just stood there quietly. When it was over I walked back, the dark coming down fast, nobody on the road.
One time I remember especially clearly. That day happened to be a spring tide, clear sky, temperature just right. The sun went down first, the sky darkened little by little, and I was just about to leave when I turned my head and saw a thin new moon in the west, also sinking. A setting sun and a setting moon in the same evening — the first time in my life I’d seen that. I just stood there, watching one go down, then the other go down too. What’s so special about a sun? But this was a sun by the sea. What’s so special about a moon? But this was a moon by the sea. That day I stood there until dark, until the shore came on with a scatter of lights.
Besides the sunset, I watch the tides. The tides follow the moon — biggest on the first and fifteenth of the lunar month, two spring tides a month. When a spring tide goes out, a whole stretch of beach is revealed, flat and smooth, and walking it opens you up inside; when it comes in, the water pushes forward layer by layer, the sound louder day by day. The first time I walked down to the water on a spring tide, I took off my shoes and stepped in barefoot. The water was cold, clear enough to see the bottom, and the sand under my feet had fine ripples in it. That was the first time I really touched the sea.
After a while I stopped treating it as scenery. Every day’s sunset is different. With clouds in the sky it’s one way, without clouds another; when the wind is strong the surface of the sea is broken into pieces, when it’s light the surface is whole. Philosophy says all things are in motion and change, that nothing stays the same. I believe it, especially by the sea.
There’s one more good thing about the sunset at Silver Beach: it doesn’t pick and choose. A sunset elsewhere often means catching a good day, claiming a good spot, and crowding in with a pile of people to see it; here you don’t. Walk out for twenty minutes, stand on the seawall, and the sky is right there. In winter there are even fewer people, and often I’m the only one on the whole beach, and that day’s sunset seems meant only for me. Saying that sounds a little smug, but that’s really how I felt.
The sea never repeats itself. So watching it will never come to an end.
7. Riding a Bike with the Handlebars On Backwards, East and West
In those first days my two legs really weren’t enough — if I wanted to go any distance, one trip wore me out and I didn’t want to leave the house again. The buses here run once every half hour and stop at five in the afternoon, so you can’t count on them. So I ordered a bike online, a mountain bike for RMB 300. The day it arrived I put it together myself at home, squatting down and standing up, at it for two or three hours until my back ached. When it was done I got on and tried it, and it actually rode, and I was rather pleased with myself.
I rode it to the sea, and in better light I finally saw it clearly: the handlebars were on backwards, left on the right and right on the left. I’d ridden the whole way like that without noticing a thing. Back home I found the chain was rubbing against the guard, making a noise the whole time. I asked a friend, and he said the gears weren’t adjusted right, only he didn’t know how to adjust them either. So I propped the bike up and tried one gear after another, and only after a long while did I get the hang of it. The next day I rode it out again, and only then was it really a bicycle.
With a bike, the places I could get to stretched further out. East, there’s a university. The area around the school is a little more presentable than elsewhere — a wall, a gatekeeper, a few small shops, and young people to be seen. Further east there’s nothing much: a wide road, few cars, open lots on both sides.
West is even quieter than east. The compounds out west were built earlier — old buildings, old apartments, fewer people living in them. Riding over there I saw nothing but closed shops the whole way: secondhand-home sellers, renovation contractors, appliance dealers, their roller doors pulled down and pasted over with posters from years ago, sun-faded white. I went down a whole street without seeing a single shop open. There’s a place called Chaoxi Lake, and I rode over there on purpose to see it. The lakeside road was new, the lake was big, but there was not one person. I pushed the bike along for a stretch, and the stillness all around was so heavy that a panic came over me and I hurried back.
That fear wasn’t a fear of people. It was a fear of emptiness.
Riding is more tiring than walking; you have to keep pedaling. Once I did a big loop, more than twenty kilometers, from the sea all the way to the university gate and back around by another road. Halfway through, my legs gave out, my stomach was empty, and there wasn’t a single place nearby selling food, so I gritted my teeth and rode home. Back in the room I cooked a pot of plain rice, stirred in some chili sauce, and wolfed down two big bowls of it. After that meal I felt that being alive was still a pretty good thing.
Riding along the coast, sometimes you come on something rare. Once I rode to a spot where a path drops down to the shore, and I saw sunlight coming through thick cloud in clear shafts, slanting down into the surface of the sea. Right at the center where the light fell was that little island, Gongjia Island, and the water around it was all silver-white, so the island seemed to float on that silver. I leaned on the bike and watched for a long time. Warplanes also passed low overhead with a rumbling sound, and by the time you heard them the planes were long gone — they were training, shooting at targets on an island to the east.
The most common thing along the road is real-estate ads — on bus-stop signs, above trash bins, on walls, pasted everywhere: how many square meters, which floor, how much. Secondhand places in this area mostly go for a bit over RMB 100,000, the pricey ones RMB 300,000, the cheap ones RMB 100,000, working out to only RMB 3,000 or 4,000 a square meter. When I was in Beijing, home prices were RMB 100,000 a square meter. But here the apartments are heaped up like cabbages, with more sellers than buyers.
It wasn’t always like this around here. Some years back the place had a run of popularity built on sea-view apartments; retirees from all over the country came to buy, saying it was for their old age, saying they wanted to see the sea. Buildings went up everywhere, one after another, but the people to live in them didn’t keep up — no heating in winter, far from any city, so even when the old folks came they didn’t stay long, and the apartments just sat empty. The home sellers, the renovators, the appliance dealers all made their living off those apartments; when the apartments stopped moving, the shops closed one by one.
Luckily the sea is still here. On the days when a spring tide goes out, the foragers gather on the seafront — long rain boots, shovels over their shoulders, buckets hung on them — lining up across the flat in a row, digging shovel by shovel. The gulls land right beside them, waiting for them to turn over the sand, then fly in to pick up what they can eat. I had no rain boots and no tools, so I could only stand on the shore and watch. Watching the way they bend to dig, I felt a pang of envy — that’s work under the open sky, no cubicle, no clocking in and out, a person is his own.
I rode the bus once too. The buses here come every half hour and stop at five in the afternoon. That day most of the passengers were old people, and two of them didn’t know how to scan the code; they fiddled at the door for ages, the bus wouldn’t go, the whole load of them waited, and someone got impatient and told him to get off. Finally it scanned, and the bus started. At the next stop there was another one who couldn’t scan, and a young man went up to help, poking around every which way, and found the old man’s phone didn’t even have a data connection, so the old man had to get off. I watched the whole ride and couldn’t help with anything, and after I got off, the thing sat on my mind.
I hadn’t come to watch the spectacle. I had come to a place other people had withdrawn from, and found myself a reason to stay.
8. The First Time I Cooked: Plain Rice with Soy Sauce
In seven years in Beijing I never cooked. When I got to Silver Beach, if I didn’t cook I’d go hungry — there are hardly any restaurants here, the nearest is a twenty- or thirty-minute walk, and a lot of the shops have been closed for ages. In my first few days, with no pots or pans yet, I could only eat out, or buy some bread and snacks at the little shop downstairs to get by.
For half a month I was taking in packages almost every day. Rice cooker, kettle, cotton slippers, washbasin, water bucket, bowls and chopsticks, kitchen knife, cutting board, soy sauce, vinegar, laundry detergent, trash can, cushion, light bulbs, power strip, electric blanket... one thing after another shipped in from dozens of kilometers away, piled up at the entrance to the hallway. For the first time I understood how much there is to buy when a person starts a life from zero. No wonder everyone wants a settled home — just furnishing all these odds and ends is enough to wear you out.
The ten-kilo bag of rice I bought online, and I went to the pickup point and carried it back myself. When I opened it I couldn’t find scissors, so I clipped at it bit by bit with a nail clipper, taking ages. Once the rice was in the pot I remembered I had no bowl and no chopsticks, so I ate it with a spoon. Someone told me I could drip a few drops of soy sauce into the rice, but my soy sauce hadn’t even arrived. Those few days all I ate was plain rice — sometimes stirred with a little chili sauce, sometimes with nothing at all, just swallowed down.
Having a pot, I still needed something to put in it. The first time I bought seafood at the market I told the vendor I’d take a kilo of oysters. He frowned a little and said, a kilo — how are you going to eat that, it’s only seven of them. I took them home and steamed them eight minutes, and when they came out the meat had shrunk to a little knot; dipped in vinegar and soy sauce they were gone in two bites. After that I got smarter at the market: I’d shoot a photo first, then look up the names when I got home, and I learned sole, rockfish, mullet, flounder, turbot, and several more I honestly couldn’t name. Learned them, yes, but I still didn’t know how to cook them, and didn’t dare buy them.
As the things arrived one after another I started with the simplest. Fry two eggs — that I could still do. The pan was new and still a little raw on first use, so a friend taught me how to season it; with no lard on hand I heated peanut oil, wiped it over the pan several times, dried it, and let it sit. Once the oil and salt and vinegar and soy sauce were all in, I started stir-frying. Cauliflower, onion fried with egg, tomato fried with egg. One time I made tomato-and-egg the way my friend taught me, and when it was all done I realized I’d forgotten to cook rice, and stood by the stove laughing at myself for a long while.
Once I wanted something decent and tried braised eggplant. It drinks oil — one ladleful and it’s gone — and when it was done there was a layer of oil in the bottom of the pan. The eggplant was good, and it went down well with rice. But when I’d eaten and looked around, the plate, the pan, the spatula, the bowl and chopsticks were all slick with oil, and I washed for ages. That day I understood one thing: cooking isn’t hard, cleaning up is.
Cooking always used to strike me as a nuisance. Once I actually did it I found the nuisance wasn’t the cooking, it was the dishes. After a meal the pan, the spatula, the bowls, the chopsticks are all greasy, and every single thing has to be washed. Vegetables have to be bought, rice has to be rinsed, and after eating there’s the cleanup; the whole routine takes far longer than the eating. Later I learned to cook a bigger batch at once, eat half at noon and reheat the other half at night, to save washing up twice.
In Beijing I ate three meals a day, never skipping breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Here I gradually shifted to two. Not working, there’s no physical exertion and no mental exertion either, so two meals are enough. I eat less meat too. Not that I’m deliberately abstaining; I still look at the meat sold at the market, I just have no urge to buy it. Eating less leaves you clear-headed, and it’s easier to clean up after.
Eating alone has one advantage: you don’t have to ask anyone what they feel like eating. You cook whatever you want, if you make too much it keeps, if you make too little you add a bite more, there’s nobody to be picky and nobody waiting. It has its downside too: a whole table of food, and you sit down and the other side is empty. I’ve gotten used to it. When I was younger I might have found it bleak; at this age, eating alone actually feels steady, because there’s no talking to do and no one to entertain.
It was around the cooking, too, that I slowly figured something out: a lot of things aren’t that you can’t do them, it’s whether you feel like doing them. I always thought I couldn’t cook, but really I’d long ago passed sentence on myself — there’s the canteen anyway, there’s takeout, no need. When it actually comes to there being no one to cook for you, you heat the pan and you just know how.
Those two eggs I fried the first time I lit the stove were my dividing line. From then on I was no longer a man who goes to the canteen when it’s time; I was a man who lights his own fire and cooks his own food.
9. Watching the Sea Every Day, Keeping a Diary Every Day
In those first days the things I did each day came to just a few: go out, watch the sea, sit in the sun, come home, cook, write my diary.
What I looked at was all over the place. The sea — how the waves push up onto the sand layer by layer and how they draw back; the sky — how the clouds come in from the west, how the sun goes down, how the moon comes up; the street — which shop has opened and which has closed, and the prices on the billboards; the trees — the pines, the plane trees, how the reeds go whiter by the day; people — seldom, since there aren’t many people here to begin with, and most of the ones you see are old. Sometimes I looked at nothing at all and just stood by the sea in the wind, standing there even when the wind stung my ears, not leaving.
I also learned the weeds out on the waste ground. So a reed was a di — the same one from the line “maple leaves and reed flowers rustling in the autumn”; there was a kind of grass with three leaves, each leaf with a white stripe on it, forming a ring; and another with purple flowers called the Altai aster. I hadn’t known a single one of these names before. Slowly, the grasses I could name grew in number. Standing out in that open ground, I felt like I was reading a very slow book.
I also kept a diary every day. From the first day I got here, not a day missed. What I saw, what I heard, what I thought — all of it written down: what time I woke today, where I went, what I saw along the way, what color the sea was, what my heart was feeling. When the sky was blue I wrote a line; when it was overcast I wrote a line too. Saw a sunset and wrote a passage; saw the stars and wrote another. What color the evening glow was — pink, purple, red — how the colors of sea and sky changed little by little, I wrote it all down. When I wrote, I didn’t know who it was for. I was just afraid of forgetting.
Living alone, you don’t say more than a few words in a day, and the things in your heart have to go somewhere; writing them down is like setting them aside. At the time you don’t notice, but after writing for a while and looking back, you realize you actually did a great many things in those two months: learned the roads, learned the weeds, learned the seafood, learned the tides, learned all those things you hadn’t known a single one of before.
The days slowly took on a routine. Every night I’d shut the door, shut the window, draw the curtain, and let the whole room close up; in the morning I’d open the curtain, open the window, open the door, and let the light in. This opening and closing split the day in two. My days used to be cut apart by an alarm clock. Now they’re cut apart by light.
Out here the days don’t go by the week anymore either. I don’t have to remember what day of the week it is; I only remember what day of the lunar month it is — which day there’s a market, and that the first and fifteenth bring the tides. Time has gone very old, like the time in the village when I was a child. Once a person doesn’t have to go to work, the days of the week lose their meaning, and what’s left is only the business of tides and the moon.
It was during this stretch, too, that Walden finally got into me. I’d opened that book several times before, and each time I couldn’t get past the first few pages, finding it long-winded. This time, for some reason, I read straight in, and every line seemed to be talking about my own days. Some books you can’t understand until you’ve reached a certain age and had a certain amount of experience; and by the time you can read your way into them, you’re no longer the person you were.
At the end of November the weather turned cold all at once and the temperature dropped a dozen degrees. That afternoon a little snow drifted down, very fine, like dandruff, gone as soon as it touched the ground. The locals said Rushan had only now truly entered winter. The next day a little more fell, still that small, but the cold was real cold. I stood by the sea for half an hour watching the sunset and came back with my face numb.
That’s how I passed my first month here. The apartment newly rented, the pots and bowls newly bought, the roads newly learned, and even the sea newly made acquaintance with. The days went slow and went muddled, and at the end of one you couldn’t remember what you’d done, and yet it didn’t feel wasted. It was a process of getting used to things: getting used to no heating, getting used to no one to talk to, getting used to the dark coming early, getting used to speaking to no one all day but the vegetable seller.
Back then I often wondered about one thing: how long can I keep living like this. The money is enough, that I don’t worry about; I’ve given up the job and I don’t regret it; but what happens to a man living out his days alone in an empty city, after a long time — about that I had no floor under my feet. Later I stopped thinking about it. I couldn’t think it through. What I could see was this winter in front of me: the wind off the sea, the stars in the sky, a quilt just dried in the sun, and a winter not yet read through.
The northern winter hadn’t truly arrived yet.
I lived in Beijing seven years, and in those seven years I rarely looked up at the sky. When I came to the seaside I looked up every day. There are clouds up there, stars, sunrises and sunsets, and none of it costs a cent — and I’d never seen any of it before.