1. Back at Silver Beach in Early February, Winter Hadn’t Left
In early February I came back to Silver Beach from my hometown. Weihai to Rushan is a drive of a little over an hour. The moment I got off the bus I could tell that spring had already arrived here: when I left it had been freezing, and now, the moment I set foot down, even the wind was soft. Along the curb, in the places the sun never reached, snow still lay unmelted; but the knife-edge had gone out of the air. What you breathed in was clean and cold and sweet — the taste of the north.
I got home at noon. The things I had worried about most — a leak, something left plugged in, a burglar — none of them had happened. The room was exactly as I had left it, and the vegetables in the fridge were still fresh. I washed some rice, cracked two eggs over it and steamed them, and that was lunch. Out there I had spent those days eating the way my family eats, meat and fish at every meal, and my stomach had long since had enough; back at my own stove, with one plain meal, I went quiet inside.
After a day on the train and another hour on the bus I was worn out. For those first days I didn’t want to go anywhere; I only wanted to stay in Silver Beach. February is still cold, really. The thermometer indoors read ten degrees — not the five or six of the coldest stretch, with ice on the windows, but a long way from warm. Buildings in the north have central heating; almost none of the complexes in Silver Beach do. Rushan town gets its heat until March 20; on my side you just endure it. I understood one thing quickly: March here is still cold, and short sleeves are a matter for late April or early May.
Then I discovered something else, and it made me miserable for several days: the sunset over the water was gone. In winter the sun sits south and drops straight into the sea, spreading gold across the water in sheets that hop and flash; by February it had moved a long way north, and now it went down over land. Standing on the beach looking west, I had coastline in the distance and coastline up close — no different from watching the sun set inland. For a while I felt deflated; I even thought about moving somewhere else. Then a few days later I noticed that only the western stretch was ruined — the middle and the east still worked. So I started walking east instead. A man has to keep one road open for watching the sun go down.
There still weren’t many people at the market. On the first market day of February the vegetable stalls weren’t even fully set up, but it was livelier than the twelfth month had been. Tomatoes, eggs, sea-duck eggs, cabbage, green peppers, mandarins, apples, cauliflower, sunflower seeds — I bought them trip after trip, and when I added it up at home I’d spent just under RMB 100, enough to feed one person for ten days or so. I don’t buy meat. I look at the meat on those stalls every day; I just never have the urge to buy any.
The weather here has a temper: as long as the sun is out it’s lovely, and the moment it isn’t, it’s freezing. On gray days I don’t even want to leave the house — I sit in the living room with cold hands and cold feet, and in the end I just crawl into bed and wrap myself up. On a sunny noon I carry the pillow, the quilt, my shoes and socks out to the balcony and drape them over the chairs; at night I bring them back in and sleep soundly with that dry, warm smell in my nose. In the north sunlight is a good thing that costs nothing, and I don’t want to waste a day of it.
I hadn’t had a haircut in five or six months, and my hair was long and greasy and unpleasant. On impulse I ran the clippers over my own head and shaved it bald. I’ve cut my own hair for seven or eight years and have never been inside a barbershop once — a barbershop is an uncomfortable place for me, and it costs money besides. Bald, washing was easy, and once the weather warmed up I didn’t plan to grow it back. Years ago I had also tried going without shampoo and kept it up for three months: my hairline didn’t move forward, my white hairs didn’t turn black, but I did develop the ability to go five days without washing my hair and not mind.
With time on my hands I did a few sums. The rice I buy online: RMB 50 for a ten-kilo bag, two bags every four months, six bags a year — sixty kilos of rice, RMB 300. The water card: put RMB 100 on it and you get 120; in the first three months I spent only RMB 20, so one card lasts me more than a year. Writing down the names and the prices of things one by one, I found it felt a little like writing poetry — a very clean kind of poetry.
People say I live like an ascetic. I don’t see it that way. I eat once or twice a day — cabbage, potatoes, eggs, rice — and drink nothing but boiled water. In Beijing I brushed my teeth three times a day; here it’s once at most, and sometimes not at all — not laziness, only that I eat so little there’s nothing to clean. Thoreau wrote something along these lines: the harder a man works for money, the harder he has to eat and drink to keep it up, while a man who needs very little spends very little and goes through the world light. I only really understood that sentence after I came to the sea.
March was still mostly gray. The wind came day after day, and the low was still below zero. I kept my long johns on but put the down jacket away. One day in mid-March the sun came out, and from the balcony I saw that the magnolias outside had bloomed before their leaves had even come — one tree white, one tree purple — and only then did I understand how spring arrives here: flowers first, leaves after, as if the cold didn’t bother them. I went out for a walk every day, down to the beach, to see whether there were fewer people, to see whether the sky was blue.
February and March passed that way, a day at a time. By day I watched the sky, at dusk the sea, at night the stars. It was still cold and still empty, and I wasn’t in the least bit anxious. Spring would grow out of it. I could wait.
2. Late February: A Trip to Qingdao
At the end of February I went out — to Qingdao. It isn’t close, but there’s a car service here that runs people back and forth: call the day before, and the next morning the driver is at the gate of the complex to pick you up, RMB 100 a head. We left at seven-thirty and went through Rushan town — the first time in all these months that I’d passed through it. The roads across the whole of Weihai were startlingly clean.
The whole way it was still winter. The trees were bare, the hills gray, and with no leaves to hide them the magpie nests showed up plain in the branches, magpies carrying twigs to build them. When we crossed the Rushan River bridge I looked out the window for Big Rushan Mountain and couldn’t find it.
Qingdao was foggy that day, the sky white. Once we were in the city the traffic jammed, and the driver, fed up with it, dropped me at Qingdao North Station and told me to take the subway to Zhanqiao Pier myself. I hadn’t been on a subway in a long time. Qingdao has so many people, and the subway had so many people — I hadn’t seen a crowd in so long that I actually got nervous: when you get among crowds, the first thing you worry about is how you look, whether you’re too countrified, whether you’re old and ugly now. People are such hypocrites.
Zhanqiao was packed with people and packed with gulls; people were feeding them and the gulls weren’t afraid. I stood on the rocks by the water and watched the gulls, watched the people, watched the young ones. This place was all young people, boys and girls, completely unlike Silver Beach, where all you see is old people. For a moment I even felt a stir of longing — it’s good to be young and good-looking; it makes you want to stay in a big city.
I looked at St. Michael’s Cathedral, its entrance crowded with couples having wedding photos taken; then I walked to Signal Hill and Little Fish Hill and looked at the red tile roofs of the old town. On the way I passed the Protestant church on Jiangsu Road, and I remembered: I’d been here eleven years ago and had left behind a rather odd experience. That time a friend who was a believer had brought me; she told them at the door that she was a church member, so we didn’t have to buy tickets. This time I came on my own and had to hand over RMB 10 like everybody else.
That night I stayed in a converted guesthouse in the old town — Japanese tatami, lattice sliding doors, even a radiator on the wall. I hadn’t seen heating in a long time, let alone used it. All night the wind kept up outside, but indoors it was warm and steady; not like Silver Beach, where at night you have to turn on an electric blanket. There are real advantages to living in a big city — but a big city never lets you settle. Outside it’s too lively, there are too many temptations, and the heart is easily churned up. In the ghost town nobody comes to disturb you, and it’s easier to steady yourself.
The next day I walked along the shore the whole way. Silver Beach has only white sand; Qingdao has rocky beaches and pebble beaches. Rock is imposing, pebble is gentle. I walked Qinyu Road, Little Qingdao, the First Bathing Beach, Badaguan, all the way to May Fourth Square, and then on to Wheat Island. Wheat Island’s sunset is the one everybody raves about; the slopes were covered with young people, every one of them there for it. Watching so many people love the sunset the way you do, you don’t feel so alone. A singer was doing a folk song about young people’s melancholy. It made me want to laugh — young people do love to put on melancholy, I suppose.
Those two days I walked hard — forty thousand steps a day, my legs aching. But I like walking; nobody loves walking more than I do. The old town of Qingdao is made for it too: the streets rise and fall, up one minute and down the next, more interesting than the square, level flatness of Beijing. I’ve lived in Chongqing, so this much of a slope counts as gentle to me.
On the third day I got up early and went to Old Stone Man to watch the sunrise. A crowd had already gathered on the beach, strung out along the shore in a line, every one of them tiny. The sun coming up takes no more than an instant — everyone was staring, and no one expected it to just pop out like that. To the eye the rising sun was blood red; on the phone it came out yellow and too bright, not true at all. I believed it then: only what you see with your own eyes counts. The sea stack at Old Stone Man collapsed a few years ago, and only the bottom half is left.
After the sunrise I climbed Laoshan. In the Yangkou area I walked all the way to the top and looked down at the sea and the coastline, and my heart opened up. Coming down I’d meant to take a car to one of the fishing villages, but there were too many people and I would have had to fight the villagers for a seat on the seaward side, so I gave it up as too much bother. I went to a different little fishing village instead — red tile houses stacked in layer after layer at the foot of a rocky hill, with a harbor and the sea in front of them. This was the picture I’d seen in photographs and always wanted to look at for myself. Though I couldn’t help wondering: living in a place like this, is the wind bad, is it damp, is it cold in winter.
I spent five days in Qingdao and walked my legs off. I had a meal with a friend there. It was the first time we’d met — four or five years of knowing each other online, three years of never managing to arrange it, and in the end we only met after I quit my job. She works Saturdays, with only Sunday off; that was how I learned how many young people work six days a week. She said, You’ve been to more places than I’ve been to in four years in Qingdao; there’s nothing left for me to recommend. On my last day I went back to Zhanqiao, and a gull shat on my back and my bag, which made me furious. That evening I took the car back to Silver Beach, through the black countryside, like walking through emptiness. Back at the complex, only one or two windows in the whole building were lit, everything quiet. I was home again. Still here.
3. Late March: It Kept Raining in Xiamen
At the end of March I went out again, to Fujian — Xiamen and Quanzhou. The north was still early spring, and I wanted to see the southern sea, to see how it differed from the sea in the north. From Silver Beach to Yantai Penglai Airport is a two-hour drive in a hired car; I waited a long time at the airport, changed planes somewhere along the way, and got to Xiamen in the small hours.
It was clear and dry and pleasant when we took off from Yantai. The farther south we went, the damper the air got. Over Xiamen the plane ran into heavy fog, and the moon and Venus vanished in a blink. I got a car at the airport, and the driver rolled all four windows down and let the wind pour in. He asked if he should close them; I said no need. The damp in the south is so heavy you feel like you’re soaking in water, your jeans stuck to your thighs. Having lived in the north so long, I found the south frankly a strange place — the rain is beyond all reason.
I stayed in Zengcuoan, right inside the night market. I’d barely settled in when it started to rain outside, drumming on the awnings. That rain went on for seven days.
When I go somewhere, it’s always to walk in a different place. The second day in Xiamen I walked thirty-eight thousand steps. I genuinely love walking — from south to north, from light to dark. A person is given two legs for the purpose of walking. I followed the seaside promenade a long way, then climbed up to the fitness trail on the hill, looking at the sea, the islands, the far shore. The plant life in the south is astonishing: tall thick trees, huge leaves, flowers in every color — it’s like living inside a garden. The north has no green like this.
I went to Gulangyu. The ticket wasn’t cheap, but I was here, so I went up to have a look. The island is full of old Western buildings and Minnan houses; I preferred the Minnan kind — red brick, red tile, the ridge poles curving high, with dragons and painted decoration along them, lively and festive. I also went to Nanputuo Temple, where the kapok was blooming big and red and the water lilies were open in the pond; a good many of the worshippers were young, holding their incense up with great reverence, and who knows what they were asking for.
The south and the north are utterly different. In Minnan people keep their distance from grand principles and stay close to trade and to the bustle of the street; ancestral halls and shrines are everywhere. There’s plenty of rain, the weather is hot, the plants grow like mad, and people live more directly. Having been in the north so long, I found it fresh, and it moved me a little — they’re probably happier.
Quanzhou was what I most wanted to see. The high-speed train from Xiamen takes only twenty-five minutes, faster than getting across Xiamen itself. I went straight from the station to Kaiyuan Temple. The moment I stepped in I saw the West Pagoda, such an ancient Buddhist tower, a relic of the Song dynasty, with cherry blossoms opening at its foot. In the temple grounds there were banyan, camphor, mulberry, azalea, cherry, camellia — and on top of that the sandalwood of the burning incense, so that the whole compound felt like one big garden. There was a tree by the road with small yellow flowers that smelled extraordinarily sweet; I checked it with a plant identifier and it was mango. No wonder I’d never seen one in the north.
I liked the lanes of Quanzhou a great deal; they’re much like the hutongs of the north, some of them so narrow only one person can pass. Above the doorways of the old houses were inscriptions like “Descendants of Yingchuan” and “The Fragrance of Longxi Passed Down” — you could tell where each family had migrated from. Often a corner of a lane would hold a whole tree of blossoms: pink for cherry, pale yellow for mango, deep red for kapok. I bought beef cakes and glutinous rice cakes on West Street for dinner; at noon I’d had beef noodles — Quanzhou is full of beef restaurants, it’s a local specialty.
I made a special trip to Luoyang Bridge. An hour and more on the bus, with women shucking oysters all along the platform. I’d thought it was just a bridge over a river; in fact it crosses an arm of the sea, and it was built a thousand years ago. The piers are shaped to a point on the side that faces the water, like the bow of a boat, to cut the current; I paced out the stone slabs on the deck with my feet and one of them runs a good ten meters. The river mouth is all tidal flats, with a stretch of mangrove in the middle, dense and green, though the trunks are red, and a few egrets standing at the water’s edge; there was even a big fish cruising the muddy inlet with its dorsal fin showing, which gave me a start.
The rain never stopped. Seven days in Minnan, seven days of rain. Lying in bed in the morning listening to it pound the awnings, I thought: southerners are to be pitied, having to go to work in rain like this. The north is easier — little rain, and heating in winter. People are born to different fates. But those seven days taught me something else as well: the south has its own shortcomings, and they made me love the north more — its dryness, its clear skies, its openness.
The moment the plane touched down on the way back, Jiaodong was all sunshine — blue sky, white clouds, dry and wide open. I’d been away a week, and the willows along the road had already turned green; here and there I could still see pink cherry and small yellow flowers. Yantai back to Silver Beach takes only two hours, and Silver Beach was as quiet as when I left — no traffic, no neon, nothing but a sky full of stars and a calm sea. Maybe this is what I want.
4. April Through August: I Stayed by the Sea
Qingdao in February, Minnan in March, and from April on I didn’t go out again. April, May, June, July, August — five whole months without taking a single step out of Silver Beach. Once the weather warmed up it was comfortable here and the urge to go anywhere faded. Around the May Day holiday I called home and told them I had quit my job — I’d kept it hidden for over half a year, and by then there was no point hiding it. They asked a few questions and didn’t say much else.
The people came after the first of June. Short stays of two or three days, long stays of two or three months, arriving in wave after wave. By July and August Silver Beach was no longer a ghost town: the streets, the beach, the night market, all packed; Big Thumb Square was like dumplings going into a pot. Summer is the only high season here, and it lasts three months. Once everyone leaves, the beach is clean again and the water clears.
The great thing about summer is being able to go barefoot and get in the sea. Our ancestors went without shoes; walking barefoot on the sand is the freest kind of freedom. I bought a pair of swim trunks and a waterproof pouch and went swimming in the sea for the first time. The water was far saltier than I’d expected — it hit my face and ran into my mouth and I spat and spat. The waves were big and knocked me off balance; my glasses nearly got slapped off. After an hour I came out cold, though it had been warmer in the water. I was on my own and had no float with me, so I didn’t dare stay long. Safety first.
In May I got to know a crop: wheat. I’m ashamed to say that I’m a southerner and know only rice, and I’ve lived in cities all my life — “can’t tell one grain from another” describes me exactly. In winter I’d passed those fields and seen plants lying flat on the ground like grass, with no idea what they were; in spring they grew tall, with stems and leaves, a dense green, and I checked with the plant identifier on my phone and learned that they were wheat. From then on I often walked in the wheat fields, watching it joint and head and fill out, right through to the harvest in mid-June.
I want to be a farmer. I want to know the land, feel the four seasons, care about grain and vegetables. I think farmers are the real poets. It probably isn’t an easy wish to grant, but a person ought to have ideals.
Summer began with the frogs. In May the ditches outside the complex filled with water and the frogs sang all together, one voice picking up as another dropped. When I came close they stopped and jumped into the water one after another. I saw frog eggs, black specks wrapped in clear jelly, and when I touched them they were sticky and warm. As a child there was a pond right beside our house and I could see plenty of frog eggs every summer; then I grew up and moved to the city and never saw them again. By July and August the tadpoles had grown four legs with their tails still on, swimming at the water’s edge — and I watched them for a whole summer.
There were new things on the beach too. The intertidal zone had sprouted little holes the width of a pencil, each ringed with round pellets of sand, so many and so close together they carpeted the beach — anyone with a fear of density would have nightmares. They belonged to the sand bubbler crab. They’re no bigger than a soybean, the same color as the sand, and the instant you come near or make a sound they bolt back into their holes. Elsewhere I’d been in the habit of walking without watching my feet; here I learned how much lives under them.
Summer has one drawback: the damp. I’d assumed the north is always dry; it turns out the coast of the north gets damp too. For a month and more the wind was sticky, the sheets were sticky, it was uncomfortable to lie down, and I didn’t even want to wear clothes. In the morning it was fog, and at night the fog got thicker. Coastal fog is different in summer than in winter: winter fog is cold and dry, summer fog is like sweat, plastered against your skin. That was the most uncomfortable stretch I’ve had here. Luckily the sea lettuce didn’t come this year — the dam at the river mouth sat across the water for a month and more for nothing, and in the end they dug it open.
In the heat I took two or three showers a day. In my seven years in Beijing I never dared take a cold shower; now I do, and I’m genuinely tougher than I was then. When the daytime sun was fierce I rode my bike stripped to the waist and let myself burn black. Someone said I was white palms, black body — the contrast was obvious. I no longer think white is beautiful; a tanned person is a healthy person.
Summer had its quiet moments too. In the evening, when the wind picked up, the people thinned out; I’d keep walking west until I reached a beach with nobody on it, take off my shirt, and let the wind move over my skin. Children rolled in the water, someone gathered shells at the water’s edge, someone lay on the sand tanned the color of chocolate, someone was fishing. Put those pictures together and you have one long summer.
The moment End of Heat passed, autumn arrived. The most reliable thing under heaven is still the twenty-four solar terms: Start of Summer brings summer in, End of Heat takes it out, and once End of Heat is past the high drops below thirty, the sky is blue as if it had been washed, and the air smells faintly sweet. I rode out on my bike and looked at a sky blue enough to soak into your heart, and at the horizon in bands of orange, blue, gray — blue, orange, gray. I stood on a sandbar and watched for a whole evening. And just like that, summer was over.
5. August: I Got Covid
On August 5 I tested positive. It was the first time, and I hope it will be the last. The evening before, I’d gone for a wander by the sea, and on the way back my legs felt weak, I couldn’t get them to move properly, my head was heavy, my eyelids wouldn’t stay open, and I went to bed at eight-thirty. I woke a little after five with an aching lower back and hips, aching arms, a feverish feeling, my head burning, drenched in clammy sweat. I dug out the antigen tests I’d stockpiled over the winter. One test: two lines. I didn’t believe it and used another: two lines again. My temperature was 38.3.
What was coming came in the end. By rights it should have been hard to catch — Silver Beach has few people and I don’t mix with anyone — but it was summer, there were too many people about, and I’d let my guard down and was often in crowded places, and so I got it. That’s the downside of crowds.
The first two days were the worst. All I wanted was to sleep; my head was heavy and my eyes ached and I didn’t want to open them. Sleeping under a blanket I sweated without stopping, my back and stomach soaked through, as if I’d been swimming; once the sweat was out I felt a little better. The medicine was simple: banlangen, a granulated cold remedy, throat lozenges, and a lot of water, hot and cold both. By the third day two complaints were left: a dry throat and a pain in my chest, so that every time I coughed I had to hold my chest. On the fourth day it began to recede, though my voice had changed — the vocal cords had taken damage. On the sixth day only one line was left.
I didn’t go to the hospital and didn’t get any injections; it cleared up on its own in four or five days. The virus goes into the nasal passages first and affects the brain and nerves first, so you get headaches and fever and aching limbs; then it moves to the throat and your throat feels off; and finally it reaches the lungs and your chest feels tight and sore. My symptoms were mild and I recovered quickly — a few packets of banlangen were enough to carry me through.
For those few days I didn’t go to the beach for six days, for fear of crowds. Since I couldn’t go to the beach I went to the edge of the fields — there’s nobody at the edge of the fields. I watched the sunset and the afterglow there for a long time; the sky was very clean, the colors changing band by band, and it quieted me to watch. There were stars at night too, though once the thin mist came up I could only make out the three in the handle of the Big Dipper.
Over the years people who know me have always liked to ask about my social insurance. Let me be clear: after I quit, my social insurance, my medical insurance, my pension — all of it stopped. I don’t intend to start paying again either. One, I don’t want to spend the money; two, the money has to be used sparingly, and a man who doesn’t work can only economize where he can; three, I still have some confidence in my own body — small ailments, sleep them off.
People say: aren’t you afraid of getting sick, aren’t you afraid of the future. I was afraid once; then I stopped. Whatever you fear tends to find you. If you count out your worries one by one they can crush you to death; if you don’t count them, the days somehow go on. I wasn’t sick once that whole year — apart from this bout of Covid in August. And it was nothing much: a few packets of banlangen and four or five days, and it was over.
The day I got better the weather was ridiculous — a cloudless sky and a strong wind that dried the sheets and pillowcases. I washed everything that had been soiled during those days, sheets and blankets, and hung it out on the balcony. When I was done, I was clean and my mind was clear. I thought about my Beijing days again: back then I had medical insurance, a work unit, everything a person is supposed to have; and back then I was anxious every day, wound tight, and that made me more prone to getting sick. Now I have none of it, and I feel light. Put the two side by side and I know which to choose.
August 8 was the Start of Autumn, and in Rushan there was a bigger event that day: the thirtieth anniversary of the county becoming a city, with a show in the square. I was sick and didn’t go. Excitement is rare here, and it was a pity to miss it. But I knew there would only be more of it from now on — it won’t be my turn until the autumn wind gets up and everyone scatters.
By August 11 the test was negative. I put on a mask and went to market and bought some food; then I rode my bike to the beach and found the tide going out and the water flat calm. Then I remembered that the wind had been from the northwest the last couple of days — a wind coming from the north can’t raise waves on the sea to the south. Working out that little bit of reasoning actually amused me. At the end of August every rain brought a chill, the high dropped below thirty, and the beach went completely quiet. I was looking forward to everyone leaving.
6. September: Back to Beijing, Thinking About the Northeast
I’d stayed in Silver Beach five whole months without taking a step out. The truth is I didn’t want to go anywhere — it’s too comfortable and too free here, and everywhere else looks second-rate to me. But I went anyway, pushed along by a few worldly sayings: that life is movement, that you ought to see the world and widen your experience and meet up with friends. I understand the old principle — “without going out his door, a man knows the whole world” — but in the end I’m an ordinary man and can’t hold to anything that absolutely. So I went out, to see whether the outside was worth it.
From Rushan to Beijing I took the long-distance bus, RMB 150, and you can get on right at the gate of the complex; the drawback is eleven hours of sitting. Once I was in the city the first thing was the haze — a gray sky, air that smelled bad, a throat that felt scratchy. At Dawanglu subway station I hunted around for ages before I found the entrance — that’s big cities for you. From the start I didn’t like this city in my heart: too big, too crowded, it doesn’t let you breathe.
I stayed in Beijing a few days, at the northern edge of the Sixth Ring Road. In the morning I took a car into town and hit traffic the whole way; the subway was packed like a tin of sardines, and when someone in front of me sneezed, the person next to him turned away at once. I’ve seen these days before — I lived here seven years, I know what their lives are like.
I went to Yonghe Temple. That day I believed the news reports: most of those burning incense were young people, the majority of them under twenty-five. They stood in long queues, holding incense up, kneeling, knocking their heads to the floor, bowing and bowing again; the line at the shop selling religious items was long too, and mostly young women. I used to laugh at all of this, but that day I took a bundle of incense myself, lit it three sticks at a time, followed the crowd in, stood behind them with the incense held to my chest, and went through the motions of bowing a few times.
I asked my friend in Beijing: is there anything in Beijing that makes you happy. She said no. Anything that makes you anxious. She said a whole pile. I sighed and couldn’t say anything. These years I have been happy; they aren’t, particularly. But I have no standing to judge anyone. All I know is that I lived here seven years, and lost seven years here too.
I also made a trip to Jiagedaqi, a small city in the Greater Khingan mountains. I’d been thinking about hiding away somewhere else, and Jiagedaqi had always stayed in my mind: few people, out of the way, good forests. There’s only one train from Beijing, billed as an express but actually the slowest kind there is — you board in the afternoon and arrive the next afternoon, twenty-five, twenty-six hours of sitting. Once the train leaves Shanhaiguan you’re outside the passes, heading north, with black earth on both sides, rice and soybeans and corn nearly ripe, a patchwork of green and yellow like an oil painting. I even saw two pheasants at the edge of a field, one gray, one red.
When I got to Jiagedaqi I could feel the cold the moment I stepped out of the station; not one person outside was in short sleeves or shorts. It’s a very small city — five kilometers east to west, two or three north to south, a few streets running each way, and you can walk all of it in two or three hours. There were quite a few good-looking, fashionable young people and children in the streets, which is a great deal better than Silver Beach — this is more like a city, whereas Silver Beach is properly the countryside. The streets were plastered with ads for houses for sale, and yet rent isn’t cheap, and in winter there’s a heating fee on top. I asked around, and my heart sank.
I walked around Jiagedaqi for two days: looked at the government offices crammed into a single building, looked at the one KFC under renovation, looked at the people dancing in the square, looked at the ring-toss stalls. By evening a puff of wind made it cold enough to frighten you. I’d meant to go on to Mohe, Qiqihar, Manzhouli, and to save money I’d bought night trains so I could sleep on board and sightsee by day; after one leg I learned that this is far too exhausting. I refunded the tickets one by one and rebooked a night train to Harbin.
The point of the trip was to see whether the northeast would suit me for living. The conclusion was no: too cold, and finding a place isn’t easy either. And Beijing — after seeing a round of friends and talking for a few days, I found the life there both boring and oppressive, and the friends weren’t obviously any happier. So in my heart it was settled: back to Silver Beach.
Getting from Beijing back to Silver Beach wasn’t easy either, two changes on the way, and it was deep in the night by the time I was home. I took a hot shower, cooked rice, steamed an egg over it, and ate it with a bit of canned food. The water heater is slow and takes half an hour to get going — I’m not short of time. I turned off the lights and stood on the balcony looking up at a sky full of stars. In that moment I knew: all that bustle and glitter I’d seen the last few days had nothing to do with me. What I want — it was never any of that.
Back in Silver Beach I noticed that my speech had gone a little rusty. Five months here and I didn’t say a handful of sentences a day; out on the road, ordering food or asking directions, I didn’t much want to open my mouth, and when I did my voice was small and my Mandarin wasn’t standard anymore, the retroflex and the flat consonants all mixed together. That’s what comes of being alone too long. Later I came up with a fix: read what I had written out loud, and when I made a video, add a long stretch of voice-over. That’s how people are — stop using something and it goes.
7. October: Xinjiang, Alone
Just before National Day I was at home scrolling for plane tickets and came across a very cheap one from Qingdao to Urumqi. I’d never been to Urumqi, and never been to Xinjiang. I bought it on the spot. The next day I set out from Silver Beach, first by car to Rushan town, then a bus to Qingdao, and flew out that night.
I waited a whole day at the Qingdao airport and slept a while sprawled on a bench. The flight was five hours, the longest I’d ever sat on a plane in my life. By the time we reached Urumqi it was the middle of the night and the buses and subway had stopped. I’d planned to make do at the airport for the night, then found there was a capsule hotel in the terminal and stayed there.
It was a kind of space pod, very small, you needed a card to open it, private enough inside, with air conditioning and a charging port, and you could sit up without hitting your head; the only problem was the soundproofing, and the bunk below snored without stopping. I was tired and sleepy and dropped off fast. Staying there made me realize something: I had forgotten that big cities still have such things as taxis. There are no taxis in Silver Beach, and even the buses are inconvenient; live that life long enough and you forget there are other ways of living out there.
The next day I went to the Xinjiang Museum. It isn’t large; the main draw is a room of mummies, and that’s what everyone comes for. I also made a point of going to see a bus stop — Baylou, “the Eighth Floor.” It’s a stop famous from a song, and the route that served it has been cancelled now, but the sign is still there with a line of small print underneath saying the route was cancelled and the sign kept as a memento. Most of what I go out for on a trip is useless things like this.
In the streets of Urumqi people look different from us: white skin, high-bridged noses, deep-set eyes, thick eyebrows, and yet black hair. To an inland newcomer the sight is very fresh. I walked the streets and looked around — the museum, a park, and the snow mountains; from a high point in the city, looking south, you can make out a line of snow peaks through the haze, too far to tell how far.
From Urumqi to Kashgar I took the train, eighteen hours. It runs south the whole way, desert on both sides, bleak as can be, with a white layer on the ground that I took at first for frost and later understood to be salt-alkali. Wherever there were people, the desert gave way to an oasis, with corn and pomegranate and grapes in the fields, and stretch after stretch of cotton, white as can be — the first time in my life I’d seen so much cotton.
The old city of Kashgar is divided into two halves, east and west, and I gave each half half a day. I like to burrow into the narrow lanes, where the locals live their lives. The little houses are boxy, mud-yellow, two or three stories, one pressing down on the next; stand at the mouth of a lane and shoot into it with a strip of blue sky left at the top, and it’s beautiful. In the lanes there were green plants and red flags, children playing football and hopscotch, old men sitting at their doors chatting, and someone baking naan at the side of the street. I was caught there in a rain shower, the drops picked out clearly against the light; women in their best clothes posed in the rain, a resident walked by carrying naan, a few little girls ran after each other with umbrellas — I noted all of it down.
What I remember most is the Pamir Plateau. I signed up for a day tour, a big coach, not full. Out of the city it ran south without stopping, the altitude climbing, snow mountains multiplying on both sides; I kept shifting to the left window and then to the right, and still couldn’t take them all in. We came first to a white sand lake: the water was green, like turquoise; behind it a gray-white sand hill, with the wind having heaped all the sand on one flank — it looked wild and very still. Farther on was another lake, one that leaves you with nothing to say — three snow peaks over seven thousand meters standing across the water from you, snow and cloud fused so you can’t tell where one ends. That day it turned overcast and the wind was strong; I couldn’t hold up against it, took a few shots, and ducked back into the coach.
On the way back from Kashgar I detoured to Turpan and joined a day tour. The karez channels run underground; walking into them was cool, and you can drink the water straight. The ruins of Jiaohe are a stretch of earth and rubble, with a sun that makes you screw your eyes shut. The Flaming Mountains were reported at forty-three degrees that day, a great long red wall of them; the guide said the hotter the weather the redder they burn, and now that it was autumn they no longer did. We also went to Grape Valley and looked at the Wang Luobin music hall; the valley is covered in grape trellises, but the season was past and the drying rooms stood empty.
I spent eight days in Xinjiang. The first person I saw seemed novel; after I’d seen more they were simply ordinary — some good-looking, some not, some young, some old, some rich, some poor. What you believe doesn’t stop people from having the same pastimes: all of them scrolling their phones, all of them chasing celebrities, all of them learning swear words. Han or any other people, there’s really no difference; people are the same the world over.
On the flight home I deliberately took a window seat and looked at the snow mountains from the air for a long time. It was the second time I’d watched snow mountains from a plane; the first was coming back from Lhasa. The summits here are not like Tibet’s: the mountains in Tibet are higher and white in great sheets; here the bare, sandy-colored rock shows through, tinged with red, in band after band like ribbons. Once I’d looked at enough snow mountains, the trip felt complete.
I got back to Silver Beach at the end of October, and after that whole circuit my lease happened to run out. I didn’t hesitate much; I renewed for another year. Renting here is far too easy — agents on every corner, houses in abundance, two bedrooms and a living room, over eighty square meters, RMB 4,000 a year. Some agents had given up and changed trades and left; but when a tenant wants to renew, they’re only too glad. And so I settled myself here again.
I ran all over that year, barely touching the ground, and every time I came back I still thought this was the best place. You don’t have to live in the best place; you have to live somewhere you can stand and can afford.
8. December: I Went to Weihai for a Snowstorm
In mid-December the forecast said there would be a heavy blizzard on the sixteenth. The moment I saw it I bought a ticket and hurried to Weihai. I’d known since last winter that Weihai is a snow pocket, that the snow on the coast there is enormous, ice forming on the railings, like another world; but last year it was inconvenient to go out and I could only watch from a distance. This year was different. I wanted to make up for the one I’d missed.
Early the next morning the snow started, filling sky and ground, and the ground was soon covered thick. Weihai snow is genuinely beautiful — it doesn’t drift down from the sky, it comes at your face sideways and heavy; wrap it in wind and the whole world turns white. The locals don’t find it romantic, of course; snow like this falling is a disaster. But to someone from a small town by the sea, it’s a marvel.
I went to the shore. The sea and the snow lay side by side: gray-black waves on one side, white snow on the other, and the strip of beach between them buried. Along the railing at the shore hung row after row of icicles. I stood there a long time, the wind on my face and my ears, very cold, and I was excited. To see a sight like this once in a lifetime — worth it.
I went to a few other places. There was a headland by the sea where the snow had bent the pines over, layer on layer; there was a small street that ended at the sea, snow lying on the road, hardly anyone about; and there was a big ship run aground near the shore — the Blueways — a great hull wrapped in snow, from a distance like a huge beast lying down. I also went to Rongcheng to see the swans — whooper swans that come from far away to winter, settling at the water’s edge, white as snow, whiter than snow.
Weihai city, Rongcheng, Wendeng — that whole area had heavy snow for a week, and in places it piled up to over seventy centimeters, breaking a record nearly twenty years old. But on my side there was far less: the same day that Weihai had a blizzard, Rushan had only a light snow. One mountain between them and the two places are entirely different. That’s how winter is here — less wind, less snow, much more comfortable than in Weihai.
Coming back from Weihai I kept turning one thing over: why do I love snow so much. As a child at home the winter snow was heavy too, but back then I didn’t know how to look at it. Later I moved to the city, and winter there was only a gray sky and a dry, cold wind, and whatever snow fell turned to slush the moment it touched ground. Here the snow is clean, thick, white; it falls and lies there and doesn’t leave. There aren’t really many things a person wants to see in a lifetime, and to see them one by one is already enough.
After that snow it grew colder day by day. Winter came earlier in Rushan than the year before; it turned cold back in November. There’s no heating in the apartment and at night it’s down to a few degrees; I put the heavy quilt on, laid out the electric blanket, and ran it all night. Outside the wind was strong and rattled the windows, and curled up under the quilt I slept better than ever. People say you can’t live here in winter. To me it’s precisely because you can’t that there are so few people — and few people is my paradise.
Around the winter solstice the days were at their shortest. I stood on the balcony watching the sun: it rose low, moved fast, set early, and came in at such a slant that it reached deep into the room; corners the summer sun never touched were all lit now. A few days more and the sun would begin to come back north, a little at a time, and the angle of the light would shift again. That’s the year turning one full circle, and when it’s done, on to the next.
And that’s how I got through the year. The wheat sown in spring had long since been cut; the birds and the insects, the ones that stay stayed and the ones that leave left; the snow fell, one time after another; I was a year older. And I don’t feel it was wasted at all. What did a man do in a year like that, you ask — he watched the flowers open, watched the snow fall, and lived the days out one at a time.
9. That Year I Earned Six Thousand
How much I earned that year — I don’t mind saying: RMB 6,000, from making videos. On top of that there was the interest on my savings, over ten thousand, close to twenty. That’s the whole of my income.
Making videos was my only work and my only social life. I’d write a little, film a little, put it online, then repost it to a few other accounts. Ten RMB or so a day; say it out loud and you’d laugh at me. But it’s interesting: people watch you, people talk to you, people disagree with you and argue. At first I cared a great deal about the comments and took people on, up and down inside; then someone said to me, you need a sense of fun — and I learned not to care.
And how much did I spend? Rent four thousand, property fees a few hundred, utilities next to nothing over the year; food — one or two meals a day, cabbage, potatoes, eggs — not much a month either. A year of ordinary living, ten thousand at most. But I traveled a lot that year — Qingdao, Minnan, Beijing, the northeast, Xinjiang — and all of it together came to about fifteen thousand. Both accounts have to be clear: living is ten thousand; add the traveling and it’s fifteen. The six thousand from my own media plus the interest of ten to twenty thousand covered both, with something left over. I don’t consider it living poor — when money is short the days go slowly, and when the days go slowly you don’t panic.
Talk about money and you can’t get around housing. The place I rent in Silver Beach is two bedrooms and a living room, over eighty square meters, with a balcony and a south-facing bedroom that lets the sun come in, RMB 4,000 a year. In Beijing the little apartment I rented was thirty-eight square meters, and rent plus property fees plus everything else came to nearly seven thousand a month, eighty-four thousand a year — enough to rent here for twenty years.
People have urged me to buy a place here. I won’t. It’s true the housing is cheap — a secondhand apartment can be had for RMB 100,000, and with renovation, furniture, and a vehicle on top it comes to two hundred thousand. But money isn’t the main thing; the main thing is how you’re going to live afterward. Buy a house here and you’re tied to it for the long haul; if all you want is to rest for a while, renting is enough — why sink your money into bricks and mortar. I don’t want to be tied down by a house, or a job, or a marriage, or anything else. Freedom is a very insubstantial thing, and it’s worth more than everything else.
People also ask me how long I can go on like this. I don’t know. All I know is that nobody can say what will happen a year from now, and what happens three or five years from now is even further beyond me. I’ve saved a little money, and in Rushan I spend twenty thousand a year at most, so I can go ten years without working. If I really run out I can go back to a big city and find work; if I can’t find any, I can go home and farm. Life is just one step at a time, and you take it as far as it goes.
That year I also worked out one more thing. The life I live has many names in other people’s mouths — lying flat, letting it rot, sponging off my parents, running away. Really, when you get down to it, I just retired early. Why must a person work until sixty? Can’t you retire in your thirties? There isn’t much I want — health, happiness, freedom, that’s all. A little poorer, a little plainer, a little less competitive about everything, and I’m happy. I don’t want to compare myself with anyone, and I don’t want to be anyone else. I only want to be myself.
One day I did a larger reckoning. I counted out, one by one, the things I had seen that year: the sunrise in Qingdao, seven days of rain in Minnan, the wheat fields going from green to yellow, the frogs growing from eggs into frogs, the fever that ran up to 38.3 in August, the wind in Jiagedaqi, the snow peaks of the Pamir, the Flaming Mountains at Turpan, and every snowfall of winter here. When I’d finished counting I found that the year had not been wasted.
And so the first year went by. Writing a little, filming a little, living alone, earning six thousand a year. I don’t feel bad about it. That money was enough to buy me this year of days — and in this year I saw so many things that cost nothing: cloud in the sky, stars, sunrise and sunset; on the ground flowers, snow, grass, insects. Not one of those things ever belonged to me before. Now they’re all mine.