1. The Year Opened with More Heavy Snow
After that heavy snow on December 20, 2023, I thought I’d seen about as much snow as a person could see in one lifetime. Then the second winter came and the snow fell harder: January 20, February 8, February 20, 2024 — three more. Add the one in December and that made four heavy snows I remember clearly that winter, with scattered light snowfalls beyond counting. Later I heard that this winter’s snow had broken the local record. The winter before had already counted as a lot; this one had more. The weather was getting stranger and stranger.
Every time it snowed hard, I went to the sea. The wind drove the snow sideways into your face, sky and ground joined in one white sheet, the whole beach buried, no end to it anywhere you looked. I stood there listening to the water slap against the ice and snow at the shore — slap, slap — duller than usual. It was genuinely cold; the wind on my ears was like a small knife. But I didn’t want to leave for a single minute, and I even rolled around in the snow a few times. Anybody watching would have thought the man had lost his mind. What I was thinking was this: to see a sight like this once in a lifetime — worth it.
I went out to the fields to look at snow too. Nobody in the fields, everything bleak and bare, silent and wide open; the snow had filled in the furrows, and only a few dry stalks of grass poked up out of it. Standing in a place like that, a person suddenly becomes very small — the sky and the earth are so large that you can’t help standing there spacing out for a while. In winter the fields are empty to begin with, nothing at all to see; then a snowfall comes down and the ridges, the ditches, the little paths all get an outline drawn around them in snow. Those days I saw more snow than in the previous thirty-odd years put together.
This winter came early and left late. Most years it turns cold in December, stays cold three months, and by early March it’s spring; this year it turned cold in mid-November and stayed cold until mid-March. Coming early, it drove the people who winter here off early, to hide from the cold somewhere else; leaving late, it held the flowers and trees back — last year the trees were in full bloom by March, this year I had to wait until April to see it. I can’t explain why. I just watched it all happen.
The strange thing was that there was more snow than last year but the temperature was warmer. The winter before had gone down to minus thirteen; this one never dropped below minus ten, and there weren’t many really bitter days; when it wasn’t snowing the sun was often strong, and it didn’t feel cold even standing in it. That difference shows up clearest on the electricity bill — I paid noticeably less this winter. The electric blanket was off by the small hours; the first year I’d run it all night. I used the little electric heater less too. After the restrictions were lifted people could come and go freely, and more of them stayed in Silver Beach for the winter than the winter before; one by one I came to know the old faces in the compound.
Silver Beach apartments have almost no heating — that’s an old complaint. The buildings were put up for summer people; who’s here in winter. Rushan town gets heat until the end of March, and it’s nuclear — there’s a nuclear plant on each side of Rushan, at Haiyang and Rongcheng. But that heat stops in town; it doesn’t reach Silver Beach. When Silver Beach will get heating is anybody’s guess, maybe never: with so few people, supplying heat is a losing business. The people living here each work it out their own way — those with money install a wall boiler or run an air conditioner, those without spread out an electric blanket, and those with neither just tough it out. I’m probably in the last group, except I don’t feel like I’m toughing anything out.
I like all four seasons at Silver Beach. The one I like best is the coldest one.
Why winter most of all? Because winter is emptiest and quietest. The compound clears out; in a whole building there are hardly a few windows lit; nobody in the streets, nobody at the sea, not even a sound. That quiet isn’t emptiness, it’s fullness — you sit inside it and you can hear yourself. This is what I came all this way for. No heating, cold enough to kill you — I accept all the bad parts. The good parts are bigger: heavy snow, sunsets over the water, a sky full of stars.
At one point I actually found I was getting a little tired of the view, and then immediately felt I had no right to be. Su Shi got caught in the rain; everyone else in his party was in a sorry state, but he didn’t mind: “I could spend my whole life in the mist and rain,” he said. And when the rain stopped and he turned to look back at that bleak stretch of road, he said, “Impervious to wind, rain or sunny weather.” Fine weather or foul, he could take it. What right has a man who only stands and watches the snow to be particular.
In other people’s eyes, winter in Silver Beach is a place you can’t live: cold, empty, nothing here at all. I’ve spent two winters in a place like this, and the longer I stay the better I think it is. When people hear I spend the winter alone by the sea, most of them can’t get their heads around it, as if I were forcing myself through it. That isn’t it at all — the things they find unbearable are exactly what I want; the things they think are necessary, I don’t want a single one.
At the end of January I sat on the shore looking at the sea. Not a soul on the beach; off a little way the amusement park was ringed with hoarding. The place was called Dream Kingdom; it had been shut for five or six years, and that winter they were renovating it, saying it would reopen on May Day. The wind came from the southeast; after sitting a while I got cold and went back. The first day of spring fell on February 4, and Chinese New Year on February 10 — the first day of spring still ahead of the New Year. But the seasons pay no attention to that: the moment spring begins, the sun seems to travel north faster, and the patch of light that comes onto my balcony narrows a little more each day, and doesn’t warm you the way it did. The spring equinox was March 20; by name spring was already halfway through, and Silver Beach was still cold. So I simply counted those days as winter too — I was in no hurry to let it go.
2. I Spent That New Year Alone at Silver Beach
I spent Chinese New Year 2024 at Silver Beach. That was my second New Year by the sea. The first one still carried the aftertaste of those three years — everything shut down. This one was different; out in the world things were already lively again. But the way I spent it hadn’t changed: on New Year’s Eve I got into bed early, turned off the light early, and went to sleep.
New Year’s Day was no different from any other day. I woke the next morning when I woke, cooked for myself, ate by myself, went for a walk down to the sea. I didn’t feel it was bleak — I’m not attached to home; I never had that in me, even as a child. What I’m attached to is the outside, and being free on my own. People did urge me: spending New Year alone is too dreary, wouldn’t it be better at home. I don’t see it that way. At home there’s no freedom — you have to socialize, you have to sit in a room full of relatives while they ask you one thing after another; and people who’ve married don’t have freedom either. I don’t go in for that; I only want to keep my own little plot, work my own ground, feed myself, depend on nobody and be depended on by nobody. Unless a family could give me freedom someday, I’m not going into one.
Those two quiet months helped me think one big thing through: living like this was workable. When I quit, all I wanted was a year’s rest, and then I’d go back to Beijing and find work. A full year of lying flat taught me that I didn’t have to go back either. My savings, the interest, plus that little bit from my own media, covered a year of my expenses. I’d done that sum many times, and the more I did it the steadier I felt. I worked out something else too: I was sick of life in a big city, sick of chasing worldly success and happiness, sick of a life defined by other people. That weariness had been in me a long time; it was only by the sea that it first became perfectly clear.
What I ate was still the simplest things: cabbage, potatoes, eggs, rice, once or twice a day. People said, you ought to learn a few more dishes, eat a bit richer, don’t cut out meat, life needs a sense of ceremony. But to me simple is ceremony, plain is ceremony. I’m not willing to spend too much time or money on food; and in winter the tap water is cold enough to sting, so I don’t even want to wash the vegetables or the dishes. Someone shot back at me: it’s only because you’re poor. If it has to be explained that way, I won’t argue — to them, poverty explains everything.
People also said I’d end up lonely this way. I’ve done the math: I hardly deal with anyone, and I’m not the least bit lonely. Nature is my friend — the sea, the blue sky, the trees, the earth, the birds, the fish, wind and flowers, snow and moonlight. Friends everywhere, plenty of them. I even picked up a phrase for it: Non Solus — not alone. Standing by the sea alone in winter, I knew perfectly well that I was not alone.
That winter I remembered something I’d forgotten: why I quit. I always say it was because the job gave me no freedom — too many rules, too many approvals, too much scrutiny, the relations up and down the ladder getting harder to handle, the longer you worked the less point there was. All true, but those were only the small surroundings. What really pushed me out was the big surroundings of those three years: you couldn’t go anywhere, you couldn’t go home, and every day there was a code. Without those three years I probably never would have got to the point of quitting. Quitting was a good thing, but if anyone says that means I should be grateful for those three years, I won’t have it. These past few years I’d almost forgotten them, but the moment something wakes them up, a person suddenly turns sad.
In February the days were still short, and the sun came in on a slant, reaching deep into the room. I sat in that patch of light and did nothing, and sat there half a day. To other people a day like that is probably called a waste; I call it living. I don’t watch what day of the week it is and I don’t wear a watch — light and I get up, dark and I go to sleep, and I can tell the time by where the sun has got to.
A man alone with a stretch of sea, seeing the same things over and over — would there be a day when I tired of it. I thought about it seriously and the answer was no: every year is different. This winter there was all that snow, and last year there wasn’t; this year which day the flowers open, and what they look like when they do, last year there wasn’t. You have to wait for it to come, and look at it with attention, and only then do you know how beautiful nature is. So I’m in no hurry to leave.
People also asked me, aren’t you afraid of the future. This is a question I’ve been answering all along: you have to learn not to care about other people’s eyes and opinions, and that’s a hard discipline, and all I can do is try. As for the future — I don’t even know what the world will look like in three or five years, so why should I fret about what happens in thirty or fifty.
Once New Year was over, the winter still wouldn’t leave. March counts as winter in my book too: the flowers don’t open, the cold drags on, and the town keeps the heating on until the end of March; on my side there’s no heating, so at night I still have the electric blanket on, and going out I have to pull my neck in, and going to the sea is the last thing I want. I know it will go eventually, so I’m not anxious. The first thing a person learns when he comes to the sea is to wait — wait for the tide, wait for the solar terms, wait for the snow to stop, wait for the flowers to open. Being anxious does no good; the tide won’t rise half an hour early because somebody is in a hurry.
3. Early March: A Detour Through Luoyang and Kaifeng
I didn’t go back to my hometown until March. Not going home for New Year was deliberate: at New Year the house is full of people and relatives, and sitting in the middle of it I’m miserable; better to wait until New Year is over and everyone has dispersed, and then make the trip. Where I come from, New Year is all about paying calls, visiting relatives, sitting down to eat table after table; I couldn’t handle occasions like that as a child, and the older I get the less I can handle them. When I was working, going home for New Year was a fixed move of the seven-day holiday, the same every year, and every year I dragged my feet about going. This year I simply moved the New Year along: go back in March, and on the way swing through Henan.
First Luoyang, then Kaifeng, and finally from Kaifeng back to Wuhan, and from Wuhan back to my hometown. Time was tight, and to save money I didn’t go to many places; most of it was hard walking. In Luoyang I went to the Longmen Grottoes — a river with a bank on either side, the cliff walls packed with Buddhas so dense they made your neck ache from looking; I went to the White Horse Temple too, and the Mingtang and Tiantang halls. By the end of the day my legs weren’t mine anymore.
In Kaifeng I went to the Drum Tower night market. Crowded at night, smoke and steam everywhere, everything under the sun for sale; I bought one or two things to taste, ate them standing at the roadside, and left. The old city of Kaifeng isn’t tall — low houses, and walking the streets it’s no different from any other old town. Those few days in Henan the sky was gray almost the whole time and the air was damp, and in a daze I felt Henan counted as the south too.
My hometown in Hubei is even more the south — if it isn’t overcast it’s raining, and the air is plainly damp and cold, the kind of climate I like least. I only like dry sunny weather, and the bright sunshine of the north. After these few years, the south has become a strange place to me; I’m a southerner through and through, and yet I’m more of a northerner now.
I stayed at home a few days. To be honest, it wasn’t comfortable. A man like me, unmarried — what is there to do when he goes home. Sit, listen, get asked, and endure it a day at a time. I’d long known that going back would taste like this, and this time just confirmed it once more. So in the years to come I want to go back even less.
The south, my hometown — I probably can’t go back there. It’s become a blurred memory. Saying that isn’t a complaint against anyone. I’m the one who changed: I’ve been in the north too long, used to strong sun and dry air, used to nobody minding me. A place has to let me be free before I can stay there, and my hometown can’t give me that. It doesn’t sound good to say it, but it’s the truth.
Back from home to Silver Beach, back into the quiet. Once the New Year was past, people began to arrive: more rooms lit up at night, more cars parked downstairs, more people walking through the compound, more people setting up stalls and buying at the market, more people fishing on both banks of the Baishatan River. Students at the foreign affairs and translation university out east came back for classes, and all at once there were young faces along the road.
The weather warmed day by day. I took one of the two quilts off and slept under one; the electric blanket stayed folded away. The thick coat, the thick trousers, the thick shoes, the thick socks — all put away. Spring came later than usual, but it moved steadily forward. That’s the four seasons: day after day, year after year, the way of heaven unchanged, and only a man growing older a day at a time; standing on the balcony, I watched the angle of the sunlight come in a little steeper every day.
In April the willows along the roadside turned green first, a soft yellow-green layer; the little wildflowers opened at the edges of the road — yellow dandelions, blue speedwell, purple violets; and a small yellow flower that’s either winter jasmine or forsythia, I still can’t tell them apart. The magnolias bloomed before their leaves came — one tree white, one purple — and the petals came down all over the ground; the early cherries opened in a whole tree of pink. In the fields the wheat stood green and thick, ready to joint. The north wind grew rarer, the east wind blew often. Spring had really come.
4. In May, the Landlord Sold the Apartment
In May I was forced to move house. The landlord sold the place I’d been living in, and I had to move out. Luckily the agent was a responsible one: he found me a similar apartment in the same compound, and helped me move. I didn’t have much — a bedroll, a few clothes, pots and bowls, a bicycle — but moving it all alone would have been rough; he made several trips back and forth, and I was grateful.
The new place was almost identical to the old one: same size, same orientation, same balcony, same white walls and cement floor — even the shape of the water stain on the wall was about the same. That day, sitting on the balcony afterward, I suddenly found it a little funny: I’d moved house and moved into an identical one, and nothing in my life had changed. The way out the door was the same, the way to buy vegetables was the same, the way to the sea was the same — only the key was different. The next morning I set off as usual and walked toward the sea, and after a few steps it came back to me: oh — I moved yesterday.
Silver Beach in May hadn’t reached the high season. A few strollers by the sea now and then, the night market just putting itself up, the stallholders rigging their awnings. In the new place I put everything in its place one thing at a time: the rice and flour into the cupboard, the bike against the wall, the pots washed and hung on their hooks — done in an afternoon. And when I was done I went out as usual to watch the sun go down.
Renting is like that: there’s always some problem or other — the landlord sells, the rent goes up, something breaks, the people downstairs renovate. You can’t reason with any of it; all you can do is steady yourself, accept the situation, and get on with living your own days. These two years I’ve come to understand it: a rented place is never really yours. You can’t add furniture, can’t change the layout, can’t arrange it the way you want; however nicely you live in it, you’re keeping an eye on it for somebody else. If it were my own place I’d fix it up properly, put my own things in it, and sitting down inside I’d feel settled.
Silver Beach rents — after two years I’ve got them clear. The first year was RMB 4,000; the second year the landlord put it up by five hundred, to 4,500. I couldn’t be bothered to move, and I thought the price was acceptable, so I let it stand. And then in the summer of the second year the agent told me: once this half-year term of mine ran out, if I still wanted to stay, three thousand five hundred a year would do. Both the landlord and the agent were willing to come down, because these places were getting harder to rent and harder to sell.
But that isn’t how the houses at Silver Beach change hands. Most of the landlords here aren’t local — the apartment was bought on a whim years ago and then forgotten, and the keys sit in the agent’s hand; whoever can reach the landlord is the one who makes the deal. The good thing about renting is that you live light: say the word and you’re gone, and there isn’t one thing you can’t carry. The bad thing is also that you live light — there isn’t one corner in the place that you nailed up yourself. These two years I’ve tasted both.
At that time I’d ask the agent whenever I had nothing to do: what’s the price per square meter now, is there anything cheaper. The agent was patient, quoting them to me one apartment at a time. After enough of that I learned that in the same compound, with the same floor plan, the price can differ by tens of thousands; the higher the floor the cheaper, and seventh floors and attics are almost unsellable. By then Silver Beach apartments had already fallen below RMB 2,000 a square meter, and if you were willing to spend the time looking you could find cheaper still.
The afternoon I finished moving, sitting on the balcony, I thought: I’ll probably move again. With fewer things, moving is no great matter — that’s one of the bargains of a low-desire life. Some people pile their homes full of belongings, every one of them carrying a memory, and one move costs them a piece of their strength. My two boxes, and I can go whenever I like. Saving money is one layer; saving worry is another.
5. That Year I Stopped Writing in the Diary Every Day
From the day I quit in July 2022 I started keeping a diary, without missing a day, right up to the end of October 2023 — more than a year. Back then there was something to write every day: what I bought, how much I spent, what the weather was like, what was on my mind. In the dense stretches I could fill several pages in a day. Right after I quit I wrote especially much — I’d held things in too long, and the moment I got to the sea I wanted to write down everything.
By the end of October 2023 I was writing less. No more daily entries; instead I wrote a summary every so often — one when it snowed hard, a few when I went to Weihai to see snow, and one long one every half year. By 2024 that was almost the only way I wrote. Why less? Because I’d moved my effort over to my own media.
That year I worked at my own media harder than the year before. Not going to an office, I still had to make some money; this made a little money and was work I was willing to do. I wrote the pieces, cut the videos, put them out, then answered the comments one by one. In Silver Beach I don’t deal with people, so the comment section became my only social life — somebody watches you, somebody talks to you, and that’s enough.
I added one more subject for myself: English. That second year I studied a little every day — not for an exam, not to find a job, just to keep my mind in use and stop it rusting. Apart from that my days were very regular: cooking, trying to vary the dishes; walking; riding; looking at the sea; watching the sun go down. Coming to the sea is what teaches you that time can be used this way.
People often ask whether I’m socially anxious. I say no — I’m just tired of socializing. I understood very early that people can never really understand one another; and I’m too independent, I get along perfectly well alone, so socializing is unnecessary to me. I’m tired of working out what other people are thinking, and I have even less stomach for the scheming. If I could live on without socializing, I’d gladly never socialize again.
I’ve thought about what the best relationship between two people looks like, and the answer is: like buying something at the supermarket. The thing has a price on it, I take it, I hand it to the cashier, he scans it, I pay, not a word said, the transaction is done, and nobody owes anybody. No working out what the other person is thinking, no being in anyone’s debt, no giving a return gift afterward. Once favors get complicated they become an account you can’t balance; I can’t balance accounts, so I don’t keep them. That’s how much social life I need.
Of course I don’t never talk to anyone. The vegetable seller, the supermarket cashier, the cleaner in the compound, the agent at the gate — I’ll chat with all of them for a sentence or two. Later there were a few young people too, who’d seen what I put out and come to Silver Beach to lie flat; we meet up now and then and talk. I do it half to keep my mouth in working order, and half because we really do run into each other and a couple of sentences cost nothing.
At Silver Beach there’s another way to buy things: the country market. Going to market is a kind of socializing in itself: nothing is priced, you have to ask, and the stallholder usually starts high, especially once he hears an outsider’s accent; then you have to haggle, saying the stall down the way sells it for this much, what makes yours worth that — back and forth, and only when you’ve agreed does the sale happen. Plenty of young people dislike the market for exactly this. It doesn’t bother me; asking is asking.
Not writing a diary had its downside too. In the second year I wanted to look something small up — where I’d gone that day, how much I’d spent — and I leafed through for ages without finding it, because I simply hadn’t recorded it. At the time I thought those days were too ordinary to be worth writing down; now I know that the more ordinary a day is, the more you want to know a little more about it later.
6. The Second Summer Was Too Hot for a Summer Retreat
The second summer was unbearably hot. The people who study climate said that year was the hottest on record. I believe it, because the first summer I didn’t even own a fan and didn’t feel hot; this year I had the fan on all day and all night or I couldn’t sleep, and the electricity bill climbed the whole way. I’ve had two summers here: after the first I thought Silver Beach was a summer retreat; after the second I wouldn’t dare say it.
The heat wasn’t in the temperature. That year the high was only thirty-three or thirty-four, mostly thirty-two — about the same as the year before. The strange thing was the humidity: often sixty or seventy percent, sometimes eighty or ninety. Raise the humidity and a person suffers ten times over. All summer I did nothing but hide from the heat: stayed in by day, went out only around six or seven in the evening when the sun had softened; the ultraviolet by the sea is too strong, and standing outside in daylight for a while was more than I could take.
June was like this: the heat just starting, the sea not warm enough, and going in for a swim took a bit of courage; not many people yet either, often only on weekends, and on weekdays the beach was empty. The people came a little at a time, like water rising. The night market opened in June, more stalls than customers, people sitting under the awnings waiting for business. Then July and August came, the two-month high season, and the whole of Silver Beach put on another face: the beach packed with people, the streets packed with cars, even the vegetable market and the supermarket bustling.
The life in the sea came alive with it. Sea lettuce is an invasive seaweed that in recent years keeps drifting from Jiangsu up to the coast of Shandong; the moment it turns hot it multiplies, the water goes green, you come out of a swim hung with green weed, the beach stinks, and clearing it is a great nuisance. The locals fight it every year, throwing up a sand dam at the river mouth to keep it from pouring into the channel. So in June and July you can see a tall sand dam at the river mouth, and the pool of water the dam has penned in.
The people by the sea live off it. The local fishermen raise oysters — Rushan oysters are famous; what an ordinary person can do is forage the shallows, going out on the big low tides to dig clams, pick up razor clams, turn over little crabs and mantis shrimp. I’ve foraged a few times, purely for fun, never counting on it as food — the Silver Beach shore is flat, mostly sand, few rocks, and there was never much to find. Once summer brings the crowds, the beach is a crush and foraging stops being fun; if you really want to do it, winter, when there are few people, is the time — you can squat down and concentrate.
July is Silver Beach’s rainy season, and its dampest month. Lots of people say Silver Beach is terribly damp, but that’s because they’ve only ever been here in July. July’s rain comes on and off and can drag on for more than a month; luckily it isn’t like the south, where it rains for days at a stretch — the rain here is quick, stops after a bit, and mostly falls at night. Even so the air is clammy and the quilt is clammy, and lying in bed isn’t comfortable. I don’t like rain.
August is the hottest month at Silver Beach, and the busiest. In August the rain thins out and everyone pours out: the sea like dumplings going into a pot; on the beach people playing in the sand, flying kites, pitching tents, setting off fireworks; on the big low tides a crowd out foraging, and the moon turns the beach white. At night the night market is shoulder to shoulder, you can only move an inch at a time, and the stallholders shout themselves hoarse — the whole year’s living depends on these one or two months, and once September comes the high season vanishes. What Silver Beach has to sell is the sea and seafood; without this stretch of sea there wouldn’t be a handful of people here.
That year a Rainbow Food Street opened, and a lot of new restaurants with it, and it all looked thriving. But someone told me: with so many places open, the customers get split, and nobody makes much. I walked that street a couple of times — people coming and going, plenty looking, few paying. By that autumn several of them were gone.
Dream Kingdom, shut for five or six years, opened again too, renamed Ocean Park, with a very big new Ferris wheel. I didn’t go to the opening — too many people; later I passed by and saw the fresh paint, a brightness that felt a little unfamiliar. That summer I saw some things I hadn’t seen the year before: jellyfish drifting in the sea, transparent, opening and closing; sea anemones on the beach, rare the year before; the figs ripened and I ate them a few times.
Far more people came than the year before. The restrictions had been lifted two years; everyone was willing to go out again, and this year was probably a peak — whether there’d be as many next year, nobody could say. With more people it was lively, genuinely lively, but Silver Beach has only one high season, two months; the other ten months it’s still the same Silver Beach. It really only suits people who can stand solitude: nowhere to be entertained, no cinema, no café, nothing but the sea, and you have to make your own living besides. Young people like a crowd; they don’t stay.
Around the autumn equinox the people left. Once they were gone the beach was clean, the water clear, the cicadas stopped, the frogs stopped, and the crickets sang pleasantly outside the window; now and then one or two got into the room and sang me to sleep. Autumn always brings a touch of melancholy. Liu Yuxi insisted on saying, “I say an autumn day beats a spring morning” — I can’t get the words out. All I can do is what Xin Qiji did: now that I have fully learned the taste of sorrow, I would speak and yet hold back — would speak and yet hold back — and only say that the weather’s turned cool, what a fine autumn this is.
7. Prices Kept Falling; I Wanted to Buy, and Didn’t
These two years the price of housing at Silver Beach has gone down and down. At first a secondhand apartment was RMB 3,000 a square meter, then it dropped to two thousand, and after that it kept falling. The one I lived in was over eighty square meters; the landlord first asked RMB 180,000, then a hundred and fifty, and now a place like that can probably be had for a hundred and twenty. Silver Beach housing is cheap to the point of being frightening.
With walk-up buildings, the higher you go the cheaper: a two-bedroom on the fifth, sixth, or seventh floor, or an attic, can be had for tens of thousands; on the other hand the newly built elevator towers still ask seven or eight thousand a square meter — those are meant for people with money. In the same building, with the same floor plan, one floor can make tens of thousands of difference. And even at that price, not many people buy. Silver Beach sits in Baishatan Township in Rushan — a tourist resort, which is to say, people here on holidays and nobody here off them. Most of the compounds here have no heating: the locals’ resettlement blocks do, the stretch bought up by outsiders doesn’t, and in winter you can tell at a glance. The buildings went up long ago; the people never caught up, and so the apartments sat empty.
Mostly what I saw was empty apartments. The great majority at Silver Beach have nobody in them: some haven’t had a soul for more than a decade and aren’t even fitted out inside; some were visited once when they were bought and never again. The streets are plastered with ads for houses for sale, put up at the start of the year and still there at the end, rotted by the wind, and nobody calls. The people who live here are of a few kinds: local farmers and fishermen, old people from elsewhere, and a handful of young people lying flat. The old people are the most numerous by far; among the outsiders the earliest were mostly from the northeast, then came people from Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Jiangsu-Zhejiang-Shanghai, and after that from everywhere.
Sometimes I feel sorry for these apartments. So many of them, no one living in them, no one able to sell them, sitting there through wind and sun, wasted for nothing. They were probably thrown up in one of those crazes — everyone assumed the seaside would draw crowds, and when they came they found the crowds wouldn’t stay. Places like this will probably end up given away for free, and even then nobody will want them.
The reason they don’t stay is perfectly clear: Silver Beach can’t draw young people. A young person can come here and lie flat for a month or two, a year or two, or simply live somewhere else for a while — that’s all fine; but to settle down you first have to solve survival: you have to make money. And here you can’t. The high season is two months; the other ten are thinly peopled, and no trade can live off two months of the year. What young people want is work and opportunity, and there’s none of that here; so most of those who come have come to look at the sea and rest a while, and when they’re rested they go.
These past few years every trade tied to housing has shrunk: the agents were the most numerous, and the agents were the first to give way, some of them simply changing trades; the decorators, the plumbers and electricians, the appliance sellers, all closing one by one. Restaurants are harder still — I’ve watched one spot open as a restaurant the first year, fail the second, get taken over by someone else, and change hands again the third. There’s only so much money at Silver Beach, and it’s all set out in those two summer months; whoever comes to divide it can’t divide it evenly.
The ones who live here long-term, the great majority of them, are old people. They have pensions, they aren’t short of money; they come and stay two or three months in summer and go back to their hometowns for the winter. Some simply stay year-round, because housing here is so cheap to them. When the old people come the place has some life to it, and carries a little business with it. But they’re like migratory birds — when they leave, the place sinks back down. I often think this place is growing old one day at a time.
Living here a while, I’ve come to recognize a few kinds of neighbors. The old people go about in crowds: dancing in the morning, singing in the evening, laughing and talking the whole way round on their walks, as if they never knew what tiredness was. The young people hiding out here, like me, each hide in their own room; some never go out at all and make a living off games or off writing something, and some simply do nothing. I don’t write about them and I don’t disturb them — I’m only a bystander. I saw, I wrote it down, that’s enough.
I’ve also seen plenty of young people come and go. They arrive with great vows, saying they’ll stay a year at Silver Beach, or longer; not long after you see them trying to sublet, some of them after a month or two, some after a few days, fleeing in a hurry. They thought too well of the place; once they got here they learned: first, loneliness; second, no money.
Why don’t I buy? I’m waiting. I’ve done the sums: if this kind of apartment dropped to a hundred thousand for the one, over eighty square meters, I’d buy; at a hundred and fifty thousand or a hundred and eighty thousand I won’t. I think the price won’t bottom out until 2026, and two more years of waiting will let me pick up a bargain. A friend said, spending eighty thousand on a house is worse than renting for twenty years with that money — much better value. I keep that in mind. Besides, I haven’t decided to settle down; I still want to go out and look around — Yunnan, say. Renting is enough for living in; why sink your money into bricks and mortar and nail yourself to one spot.
8. The Second Year, I Earned Eight Thousand
In the second year I made eight thousand from my own media, two thousand more than the year before. The extra wasn’t luck, it was effort: that year I put out more videos and spent more strength on it — writing, filming, editing, answering comments, more than half of every day poured into it. The first year I’d still kept a diary and still gone out; this year I hardly went out at all, just stayed with this one thing.
But this road was narrowing too. The platform wasn’t as rich as it used to be; more and more people were making their own media, too many hands after too little, and the number of viewers wasn’t growing to match. The reason I earned more than the year before was that I put in more effort, not that business had improved. Part of what I earned that year was the royalty on an e-book I’d put out online, two thousand — not much, but when I got it I was pleased: so the things I write can still be turned into a little money.
Besides that I had a little passive income, the interest on my savings. The interest wasn’t generous either, and it slid down year by year with the rate cuts; in one August the things I’d bought didn’t just fail to earn, they lost six hundred. I keep that account in mind, because it reminds me: money sitting still isn’t necessarily safe either.
The spending, though, went down. In the second year I spent about twelve thousand over the year, less than the year before. The rent went up five hundred, and I made it up elsewhere — the pots and pans, the small appliances, the bicycle I’d bought the first year didn’t need buying again in the second. Living had been simplified, and there weren’t many places left to spend.
That summer my brother came and stayed two days. Because he came, I ate oysters and barbecue for once, and bought a watermelon for the first time — all on his money. The place was big enough for a guest; I never went in the sea alone, because there was nobody to watch my clothes, and the moment he arrived we went in and played in the water — when he was in I watched our things from the shore, and when I was in he watched from the shore. The Silver Beach sand is flat and gentle, like one big shallow basin; you can’t drown in it. Just those two days, and they were the liveliest two days of my year.
Speaking of money, there’s one thing these two years have made clear to me: happiness is really very simple — it’s not comparing. My rent was four thousand a year; someone told me he’d rented an identical place for only three thousand, and I felt put out. Then someone else told me his cost five thousand, and immediately I felt fine again. Same apartment — what right did the amount somebody else paid have to steer my mood. Once I saw through that, I stopped comparing.
People ask me, you’ve been at Silver Beach two years, don’t you get bored. I say, if I weren’t short of money I wouldn’t get bored anywhere — which is a joke, of course; I don’t know what not being short of money feels like, I’ve never been rich. But these two years I genuinely haven’t been bored: the sea is different every day, the sunset is different every day, the prices in the vegetable market are different every day, and the things I write are different every day. Boredom mostly isn’t about the place; it’s about whether you have something to do.
I don’t think being short of money is as frightening as it sounds either. Don’t be afraid to begin with, and don’t be anxious about things that haven’t happened: not having a job doesn’t mean there’s no other way to earn, you won’t starve; and if the day comes when the money runs out, think of something else then. I’ve said that to myself for two years, and I really haven’t starved.
I’m an observer of this world. I came here to experience life, not to be a beast of burden for anyone. I live for myself — not for my parents, not for my friends, and still less for strangers. It sounds a little hard, but I’ve thought about it for two years and I still think so: a person has to get his own life clear first before anything else can be talked about; if you can’t even look after yourself, everything you say is empty.
9. October: I Gave Up the Apartment
In October the lease ran out. I’d lived at Silver Beach two years, two full years — came on October 26, 2022, left at the end of October 2024. As early as that summer I’d already had the thought of leaving. After the second year settled in, I slowly came to feel: it isn’t that this place is bad, and it isn’t that I’m bored — it’s that this person of mine always wants to experience a new kind of life. Two years now; time to change places.
Where to? I thought of Yunnan first. A friend was living in Dali and kept telling me to come. The year before I’d thought about the northeast too — the Greater Khingan, Mohe — and I’d said I wanted to go and see whether that region suited me for living; but the northeast is too cold, and I’m a person who gets miserable if he doesn’t go out for a single day, and being shut indoors by winter is more than I can bear. Yunnan — I could go and have a look first.
The landlord asked whether I wanted to renew, at three thousand five hundred a year — cheaper than what I’d paid the first year. I hesitated, and I was a little tempted; that price was simply too cheap. Leaving a place you’ve got used to, and a cheap one at that, takes a bit of hardness. But in the end I decided to go, without any more lingering. I wanted to start a new stretch of life, go somewhere else, see how people in a different place live. This whole seaside arrangement — I’d tasted it through.
Two years by the sea, and I’d thought one thing through: a person really can not work. Not working doesn’t kill you either. There are many paths in a life; you don’t have to work, you don’t have to be a beast of burden for anyone. Life is open country, not a track; a person ought to stay where there’s no ceiling.
Friends advised me too, saying you’re living so well at Silver Beach, what’s the point of all this churn. There’s a saying: a tree dies when you move it, a man comes alive. When I say I want to look around, I don’t mean traveling; I mean staying at least a full year in a place, living through its spring, summer, autumn, and winter, seeing how the people there get through their days — only that counts as having seen it. While I can still get around, I want to walk through a couple more places.
It was when I was packing that I realized: two years on, my entire worldly goods were still two boxes and a bicycle. That’s how it was when I came, and that’s how it was when I left; the only things added were a few books and a few clothes worn thin. Two years at Silver Beach and I’d accumulated nothing — except the things I’d seen. When other people move, they have to call a van, find help, sort through it and throw half away; I, alone, finished packing in an afternoon, and couldn’t even fill one cardboard box.
There’s a line of Camus I like very much: two years is not too long to spend thinking about a single point. These two years by the sea, what I thought through was more than one.
Before I left I went down to the sea once more. That day the wind was fairly strong, the waves came in one layer at a time, and there was nobody on the beach. I stood there a while, then went back. In the evening I gave the room a last going-over — washed what needed washing, threw out what needed throwing out.
On the day the lease ran out I packed up my things, gave up the rental, and handed the key back to the agent. I’d lived here two years, and two years was enough. I put the bag on my back, went out the door, and got on a car headed south — I don’t know whether I’ll ever come back, but I know I still want to walk a while longer.