1. You Can Live Without a Job
When I left Beijing I told people I’d take a year off. What I had in mind was that Western thing, a gap year — go out and breathe for a while, come back to Beijing after a year, find another job, go back to work. It sounded easy enough. In truth I had nothing to stand on: a man in his thirties setting down a job he’d held for seven years and a city along with it, calling it a rest — it was more like a bet.
But the first year passed and I didn’t go back; the second year passed and I still didn’t go back. By the autumn of the second year, when I gave up the apartment and left Silver Beach, it no longer needed explaining to anybody: I really wasn’t working. Why I don’t go back — the reason is simple. I found that I can live without a job. At Silver Beach I spent only ten or twenty thousand a year: rent a few thousand, property fees a few hundred, water and electricity and gas not much, and the rest food and the occasional trip out. The money in hand plus that housing fund in the account came to one million, and the interest on it was another ten or twenty thousand a year — just enough to cover the daily costs. I use ten or twenty thousand a year; a million would take a hundred years, and I won’t live anywhere near that long.
My own media still brings in a little. Very little — six thousand the first year, eight thousand the second; enough to cover the fares when I go out. I don’t marry and I don’t have children; I only have to look after myself, and that doesn’t cost much. Living alone, the accounts are drawn up for one person: eating, clothing, going out, each one the plainest kind there is.
I don’t have to worry about my parents either. I’m not an only child — I have an older brother and two older sisters, and they look after things; my parents have their pensions. It isn’t that I don’t care about them; it’s that having chosen to live this way, I can only look after myself first — the money I have is only enough to keep one person alive, and I understood that a long time ago. Put these few things together and the answer appears: you can live without a job. But there are two conditions, and both are necessary — you must have savings, and you must have some way of earning. Even if you earn little, as long as it’s enough to keep yourself, it holds.
Once those two conditions hold, a lot of things come loose. You can do a little something that interests you; you don’t have to do things you dislike every day the way a job makes you; you don’t have to clock in on time; you don’t have to sell the best few hours of your day to a place that has nothing much to do with you. Earn little, spend little, and still get out and travel a few times a year. Living your whole life the way you like — that works too.
Of course, some people will say this is hiding. But a person doesn’t live in order to make money. Work and nothing else and you create nothing; in the end all you have left is a record of clock-ins. People need to rest, and they need days of their own. I’m not arguing this at anybody; I lived it out day by day, over two years.
2. October 25: I Left Silver Beach
On October 25, 2024, the apartment I’d rented at Silver Beach for two years came due, and I gave it up. I’d decided at the start of the year not to renew; when the date came, out. My stretch by the sea — arriving in autumn, leaving in autumn — made exactly one circle. I remember that day clearly, because once the circle closed, those two years were finished.
I remember just as clearly how the possessions went: what I could carry went into a bag, and what I couldn’t carry went to a friend I’d made here. Things two years had accumulated were given away in a single day. Pots and bowls, bedding, small appliances, a few pots of flowers, and the bicycle I’d ridden — bought one thing at a time by my own hand, and now given away one thing at a time. When it was done the room was as empty as the day I arrived. The building had seven floors and I was on the fourth, no elevator: two bedrooms and a living room, over eighty square meters, the balcony facing south, sun straight into the room. I shut the door, went downstairs, stood there a while, thought nothing in particular, and left with the bag on my back.
Why I wanted to leave — the reason is actually a thin one: I’d lived by the sea two whole years and wanted a change of surroundings, a taste of life somewhere else. Life is experience; wherever you can experience a little more, experience a little more — in this place, and in that one. When the day comes that I feel I’ve had enough, I’ll stop. If there really is somewhere better out there, I’ll accept it; if not, I’ll come back.
First I went to Qingdao and stayed two days. I like Qingdao a great deal. The Silver Beach coast is one long stretch of sand; Qingdao’s sea has rocks and islands; the houses in the old town are red-tiled and yellow-walled, the roads rise and fall, and walking along you suddenly see the sea again. Qingdao has plenty of people too, but it does have the sea; when you’re troubled you go and look at the ocean, and that tightness in your chest eases. But Qingdao is only good for a visit, not for living in long term — unless you’re especially rich, because eating and sleeping there cost far more than at Silver Beach.
After two days of regrouping in Qingdao I headed north. The coach had to cross a very long bridge, the Nügukou Bridge. I sat by the window and watched that water the whole way, watched it widen, narrow, recede. Once we were over the bridge the sea was behind me and I couldn’t see it anymore; from then on the window held only fields and buildings.
At Zibo the land opened out all at once. The Jiaodong peninsula is hill country with mountains and sea; heading west you come into the North China Plain, flat and endless. I’d lived by the sea two years and hadn’t seen a plain like that in all that time, so it felt strange to me instead. At Dezhou it was flatter still, all wheat fields — the wheat long since harvested, the winter land lying empty, no end to it as far as you could see. The sky began to go gray too, a gray haze, and I suspected it was smog. There was no damp of the seaside left in the air, and not that faint salt either.
A few years earlier I’d traveled east out of Beijing, all the way to the sea, heading for a new place; this time I was traveling west from the sea toward the cities, the direction reversed, and that bit of lightness in me reversed with it. Two years by the sea — it felt as though I’d left them on the far side of that bridge.
3. Beijing Smog: Blow Your Nose and It Comes Out Black
I reached Beijing on October 28. First I went to my brother’s. He had a dorm room in the countryside in Changping; he lived at his own home and the room sat empty, and he said I could stay there a while. The village isn’t far from Juyongguan, and further into the mountains are Badaling and Yanqing. I went with one bag on my back, not intending to stay long — I just wanted a cheap place to land while I worked out where to go next.
The place was outside the Sixth Ring Road, in a small village at the foot of the hills in Nankou township. I’d lived in Beijing more than seven years, always in the city inside the Fourth Ring, and had never stayed in the rural part of Beijing. No tall buildings in the village, only two- and three-story courtyard houses the villagers had built themselves; outside the courtyard walls was farmland, planted with cabbage and fruit trees. At the village entrance stood a few persimmon trees with every leaf gone, only orange-red persimmons hanging on the bare branches, glaring and beautiful at once. At night the village was so quiet you couldn’t hear a car, and you could see the stars — that part, I thought, beat the city.
But the sky stayed gray the whole time. From late October into early November Beijing had one stretch of heavy pollution after another. Getting up in the morning, the hills to the north and the west were gone entirely; after a walk outside, the inside of your nose was black, there was grit in your eyes, and your teeth felt coated with something abrasive. I’d lived by the sea for two years and the air there was sweet; I’d almost forgotten that this was what the air inland tastes like.
Beijing was extremely dry as well. My lips cracked, my shins came up in layers of dead skin that rubbed off as white flakes; and when I took my clothes off I got a shock of static — static, which I hadn’t met once in two winters by the sea. The air at the seaside is damp without being sticky; it lies against the skin exactly right. By the time I’d been there twenty-odd days I was constipated the whole while, and generally uncomfortable.
In November the heating here came on early. The pipes ran warm first and by the afternoon were hot; the room warmed up all at once, and after dinner I could sit without my jacket, in nothing but a thermal shirt, and not be cold. Heating is comfortable, of course, but I knew too that once a person gets used to it he can’t do without it, and he grows lazy. My two winters by the sea had no heating, just an electric blanket and thick quilts, and I got through them fine.
There were good days too. One day it cleared and I hiked alone to Juyongguan — ten kilometers from the village, all mountain road, up and down. In an hour I reached Watchtower No. 12, the highest on the western line; that day I walked more than twenty-three thousand steps. Another day I rode the S2 suburban railway from Nankou to Badaling; at Qinglongqiao the train has to change engines and run a stretch of the famous “herringbone” switchback that Zhan Tianyou built. There were hardly any people aboard; I moved from the left side of the car to the right and back again. In winter there was nothing to look at but bare mountains, and I still watched with great interest.
One day I went into the city to see a friend. From the village in Changping to the East Fifth Ring took a bus and then a subway, three hours exactly. Beijing is too big, and seeing one friend is too hard. He bought me a coffee — two years by the sea I hadn’t drunk any kind of beverage, only boiled water. We talked for two hours about how each of us was doing, about what we thought of the future, and by the end we both felt that neither of us had much of a grip on the future and just wanted to live the days in front of us well. When I came out it was already dark, and I rode another three hours back.
Another day, with my errands done, I went on to the Fragrant Hills and the Summer Palace. The Fragrant Hills Hotel was designed by I. M. Pei; in its back garden stand two ginkgos, one still holding a good deal of yellow leaf, the other already bare, for no reason I could see. At the Summer Palace I went in by the west gate, where there are fewer people; I watched the sun set over the lake, then walked around the Back Lake and a small garden, and coming out stood a while at the subway entrance outside the west gate — the tracks curve here, the trains come from far off and go off far away, and the setting sun was falling right on the signal lights.
I went out in the smog too. Once I went to the Old Summer Palace; the ginkgo avenue in there was a sheet of gold, so packed with people you couldn’t walk, and every photo came out full of people. I turned aside and went around behind the wall, and there wasn’t a soul there, fallen leaves laid over the ground like a yellow carpet. I stood there a long time. Another evening the sun was red, sinking step by step under a gray sky, and the trees and houses nearby were black. Someone said it looked like Monet’s Impression, Sunrise. He painted the sunrise; I was watching the sunset. Making the best of a bad job, you could call it.
I went to the Shahe market too. Some people call it the paradise of Beijing’s broke drifters. At Silver Beach I loved going to market — the market there was clean, the stalls laid out in a neat line, vegetables and fruit absurdly cheap. The Shahe market is just a big vegetable market; there was plenty to buy, but there was dust everywhere, and I bought nothing.
In Beijing I also gave an interview, to a fourth-year university student writing a thesis on work and on lying flat, who wanted to hear about my years by the sea. We talked for an hour. I’ve done this a few times; for one thing it’s talking to somebody, and for another it lets me sort out my own thoughts.
My brother keeps a calico cat, seven years old, an old cat now. On the balcony it has caught bats and sparrows. I’ve always thought that keeping a cat or a dog in the city smothers its nature — penning it in a room of a few dozen square meters, never out the door its whole life. A stray cat is free, but its life is short; a house cat lives long, and isn’t free. Rousseau said that man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. I’d rather be a stray cat.
For twenty-odd days I had only one thought: I had to get somewhere with clean air. Once that thought arrived, Beijing lost its hold on me — it’s a good city, and it had nothing to do with me. So I bought a plane ticket, to Yunnan. Go and look first; if it suits me, stay a while longer; if not, leave.
4. November 21: I Left Beijing
On the afternoon of November 21 I left Beijing. A nine o’clock flight, out of Daxing Airport. The subway from Caoqiao to Daxing Airport costs RMB 35; I still remember the price. The airport is very big and very clean, and I happened to catch the sunset; I stood at the big glass wall and watched that red sun for a while. When the plane took off I threw Beijing behind me, and I didn’t feel much of a wrench.
The ticket went first to Fuzhou, with a night there, then a morning flight to Kunming. The two tickets together came to RMB 460 — the cheapest kind there is. To save that bit of money I’d rather take the long way round and spend a night — a man who doesn’t work has no shortage of time and a great shortage of money; trading time for money, the sum works out however you do it. I’m not bothered by a connection anyway. All the time is mine.
Two things took me to Yunnan: Beijing had grown genuinely boring, and a friend was in Dali, urging me to come and see it. I’d known him at Silver Beach; he doesn’t work either, he runs an online shop, his parents mind the physical end of it for him, and that lets him roam. He finds Silver Beach too cold in winter and wanted somewhere that’s spring all year, so he’d gone to Dali first to look it over, and had been living there two and a half months by then.
In fact I’d been to Yunnan once, twelve years before. I’d just landed another job and hadn’t started yet, so with the free time I set out from Guilin and went through Changsha, Guiyang, Kunming and Dali, stayed two or three days in Dali, and saw in the New Year in a youth hostel in the old town. Winter nights in Dali were a little cold, and a crowd of backpackers sat around the fireplace and talked; by day the sun was fierce enough to unsettle you. I’d been to Caicun Pier, climbed Cangshan, been to Shuanglang Old Town. But that’s a long time ago now, and people didn’t take photos much back then; the memory has blurred — like another lifetime.
All these years people online have said how good Yunnan is, until it itched at me, and I’d long wanted to see with my own eyes whether it really suited me. What others say is good isn’t necessarily good for you; a person needs his own firsthand experience, and it only counts once he’s walked it himself. I’d believed that for ten years, and now at last I was going to test it myself.
The moment I stepped off the plane in Kunming the little packet of bread in my bag puffed up — a sign of altitude; Kunming sits at 1,891 meters. Winter in Kunming is warm, and what matters most is that the humidity is right. Twenty-odd days in Beijing had left me parched, and the moment I reached Kunming I felt better. The buses and subways in Kunming opened my eyes too: a single row of seats holds a dozen people, and everyone in the car has a seat, unlike Beijing, where six or seven to a row and you still can’t breathe for the crush.
The next day I took the bullet train to Dali, a little over two hours. Twelve years earlier there was no bullet train; you took an ordinary train, six or seven hours, through tunnels the whole way. The world has changed fast. In Dali it gets dark late, an hour or two later than Beijing or Weihai; my friend met me at the station on an electric scooter, and I sat on the back with a helmet on while he took me to where he lived — Manjiang village, an urban village.
5. Ten Days in Dali
Manjiang village is in Xiaguan, close to Erhai and not far from the Dali city center, and the rent is frighteningly cheap: RMB 260 a month, and with water and electricity only RMB 285. A price like that wouldn’t cover one meal in a big city. But one look at the room and I understood: this wasn’t the place for me.
An urban village is like this: the buildings are four or five stories, put up by the local residents themselves, standing shoulder to shoulder, and you can climb from one roof to the roof of the one across; a single building holds twenty-odd small rooms, rented out separately to migrant workers, traders, bricklayers, stallholders, and young people lying flat like my friend. Some rooms have windows and some don’t; the toilet and the shower are shared; there’s no kitchen. The street is lined with stalls right up against the walls — little restaurants, milk-tea shops, big trucks hauling construction waste in and out, horns and hawkers’ calls and hammering all mixed together — and you have to cover your nose to walk through.
What bothered me more was that I couldn’t get used to living there. I like quiet, I like cooking my own food, I like being alone, and an urban village gives me none of the three. I like to cook, and there was no kitchen; I like stillness, and it was noisy the whole day long. I slept there ten nights, under a thick quilt my friend had gone out and bought for me; the bed was very low and wobbled.
Erhai is genuinely wide open. But my honest feeling about it, put plainly, was this — Erhai is a pond. Live by the sea long enough, see the real ocean, and a lake like that raises nothing in you. The snow on Cangshan, though, is striking from a distance. One evening we walked to the shore of Erhai and the wind was frightening; my friend said this is the wind in Dali’s famous “wind, flowers, snow, moon” — the wind of Xiaguan. The sky was heavy and dark, the old town had lit up in a sheet of light, and standing there in the wind I suddenly felt free and glad: I had finally come to Dali.
The old town of Dali didn’t feel new to me. Shops all the same, tourists all wearing the same expression, as if they’d come off an assembly line. What makes Dali particular is only that it has Cangshan and Erhai. One thing was astonishingly cheap: a vegetarian place in the old town where the buffet was RMB 5; and there’s an old street selling tie-dye and coffee that’s said to be left over from the Tea Horse Road. The rest I forgot as soon as I turned my head.
Those ten days I walked almost every day. One day I walked forty-eight thousand steps, the most I’ve walked in my life; the other days averaged thirty thousand. One day we walked from Manjiang village along the shore all the way to Caicun Pier, over twenty kilometers. Another day we walked from Xizhou Old Town out to the shore and back along the water, and when I couldn’t go on I rode a stretch. On foot you see the finer scenery, slowly, instead of watching it go by. We live our whole lives too fast; I want to slow down.
I went to the market in Fengyi township as well. That market is like the village markets in Shandong and worth a look. Outside the town are two villages, Benchang and Jingtian. In Jingtian we met a woman living alone, in her thirties, keeping seven or eight cats by herself in a small courtyard, and she’d been there more than a year. She said she simply wanted to think through what it means to be alive. We admired her a great deal, but the kind of courtyard my friend was looking for was still too expensive for me — better to rent an apartment at Silver Beach, and I prefer the sea anyway.
Another day we took a bus to Haidong township. The Bai houses there crowd up the slope in rows, and the gateways and the spirit screens are full of meaning — the words inscribed on a spirit screen tell you the family name: “purple air comes from the east” means the family is Li, “an honest name handed down” means Yang, “a hundred forbearances, a family’s name” means Zhang. Every village has its own Benzhu temple, with incense that never goes out. Looking across Erhai from Haidong to Cangshan, the heart goes very still.
I went to Longweiguan too, beside Erhai’s only outlet: a stone-paved lane climbing uphill, old gateways and little shops on both sides, and walking it the heart goes quiet. In the lane are three old wells, the Big Well, the Second Well and the Small Well, all still in use, their water seeping down from the mountain. Each well is divided into three sections: the water in the first is carried home to drink, the second to wash vegetables, the third to wash clothes, each with its own job and no confusion anywhere. That day some locals happened to be there with buckets, dipping water.
Once we climbed Cangshan, following the Qingbi Stream up; the water was clear to the bottom and you could cup it in your hands and drink. The strangest thing was the flowers blooming in the mountains, a spread of pink — the middle of winter, and Dali had peach blossoms. Later I learned that they were winter cherries. “All flowers in late spring have fallen far and wide, but peach blossoms are full-blown on this mountainside” — I’d never seen anything like it in the north. The first time in my life I’ve seen flowers in winter.
Ten days in Dali, and I’d been nearly everywhere worth going; I’d had enough of the bottom-end life of an urban village too. The conclusion was clear: Dali is a tourist place, not a place for me to lie flat. The little courtyards and guesthouses in the old town all look lovely, and I can’t afford a single one of them, and I don’t want to spend money every day just to live. Too noisy, too crowded, no sea.
6. From Lijiang to Feilai Temple
Leaving Dali I took a stop-to-stop coach to Lijiang. You can book these coaches on the ride-hailing apps, and they’re much cheaper than the bullet train — RMB 29 a head. The road runs through the mountains, and the snow mountain keeps pace with you on the right the whole way. Most of the passengers were young people with backpacks, and a few not working, like me; nobody was in a hurry.
Lijiang’s old town is far better looking than Dali’s. More old houses, better preserved — wooden buildings, stone-paved lanes, a stream running through the town; it has more flavor. I stayed in a youth hostel, a capsule bunk, RMB 50 a night, five nights. It was the off season and there was hardly anyone; a six-bed room had only two people in it the whole time. The hostel’s balcony faced Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, and every morning I got up to watch the sunrise gild the peak — the sun lighting the summit a little at a time, a tip of gold first, then spreading slowly downward.
Every evening in Sifang Square in the old town there was the circle dance around a bonfire. I went to watch every day. At first it was a few aunties in Naxi dress circling in the middle of the square; later more and more gathered, ring inside ring. The steps are so simple there are only a few of them, and the happiness seemed to have no end to it. For the first time I understood: music is a sound that makes people happy, happy enough that your hands and feet move on their own.
Eating was easy outside the hostel. I had pork-rib rice noodles, free-range chicken rice noodles and roast-pork rice noodles, and the roast-pork ones were the best. But rice noodles every day don’t fill you up, and the occasional meal of rice was expensive and not even good. I’m used to Northeast rice, and going without rice leaves me a bit unsettled.
I didn’t go up Jade Dragon Snow Mountain. The ticket is RMB 100, the cable car RMB 140, and that’s before transport — too expensive. I just looked at it from the old town, from a distance. The people online who bang on about travel every day aren’t short of money. Travel is good, but there’s no need to make it out to be such a grand thing — any life has meaning; if you don’t have the money, travel less, and saving isn’t anything to be ashamed of.
Tiger Leaping Gorge was a must. It’s close, and neither the fare nor the ticket is expensive. When most people say Tiger Leaping Gorge they mean the Upper Gorge, which is windy and very cold; the driver took us to the Middle Gorge, where there are fewer people and the scenery is finer. Winter is the dry season, and the river had actually run clear, green, throwing up white water as it charged down. I went and sat on a big rock close to the water, looking at the cliffs on either side, and felt utterly exhilarated. Coming back we took a walkway the locals had built, climbing near-vertical iron ladders that you have to hold on to, several flights of them, and my legs were shaking.
Near Lijiang I also went to Baisha Old Town. From Baisha to Shuhe looks short on the map, so I simply walked it — you can see the snow mountain on the way, and the roadside trees with little red berries. Shuhe is famous, but these commercialized old towns are all the same once you’ve seen a few — like a small Lijiang.
Further north is Shangri-La, at 3,500 meters. The altitude climbs the whole way and the scenery changes with it: more Tibetan houses, snow mountains everywhere, and cold. I spent only an hour in Dukezong Old Town — small Tibetan houses, solemn, cold. Then I took another bus to Feilai Temple in Deqin, through high mountains and gorges the whole way, with snow piled right at the roadside.
That afternoon there was a great deal of cloud and the peak was half hidden. The people at the hostel said it had been overcast for days, and plenty of visitors had waited a week without seeing the sunrise gild the snow mountain. In the evening I sat by the fire in the hostel’s lounge while a few Tibetans sat around the stove drinking butter tea and talking, the smoke drawn up the chimney to the roof. I pushed the door open and went out to look: the sky had cleared and was full of bright stars. Next morning I was up at seven. Around eight the summit suddenly went red at one point and the crowd burst out shouting; the red spread slowly downward, a great wash of it, from left to right, as if the snow mountain had been set on fire. In ten minutes or so the red turned white, and the tenderness turned cold. Beauty is always short.
7. Xishuangbanna
From Shangri-La heading south, the road goes downhill the whole way. The altitude drops from 3,500 meters to Jinghong’s five-hundred-odd, from the snowy plateau to a tropical river valley, like a slide. In the same province, the climate and the culture are two different things: Tibetans in the north, Bai and Naxi in the middle, and Dai in the south. I rested a night in Kunming and ate a bowl of rice noodles, then took the bullet train south the next day — on the Kunming-to-Xishuangbanna stretch there’s nothing but the bullet train, a little over RMB 200.
Off the train I felt the heat at once. I was still dressed for the north: thermal shirt and thermal long johns, fleece, jacket. Xishuangbanna was twenty-seven or twenty-eight degrees, and after a few steps with the bag on my back I was sweating, the thermals stuck to my skin, and I turned irritable on the spot. I found a place where nobody was around, took off the fleece and the thermal shirt, and put on a short-sleeved shirt.
The hostel I stayed in was right by the Lancang River, five minutes’ walk to the water. The Lancang runs past the edge of town, clear and fast. My own name has a lan in it, so seeing this river felt especially close to home. Abroad it’s called the Mekong, and it flows on down into other countries. In the evening I liked to walk downstream along the riverside road: people fishing on the sandbars, people stripped to the waist about to go in swimming, someone with a little stall giving haircuts at RMB 5 a head, and the moment he opened his mouth, a Northeast accent. There’s a tall, long cable-stayed bridge over the river too; standing on it you can see the buildings on both banks and the water racing underneath.
The temperature swings a lot: the day feels like summer, and at night you still need a quilt. The hostel had neither many people nor few, RMB 30-odd a day; the owner said New Year is when it’s fullest and the price goes up. That’s winter in Xishuangbanna — two seasons in one day.
Gaozhuang Xishuangjing is the place everybody goes in Xishuangbanna. At first I thought the name meant “the two sights west of Gaozhuang” — pure northern guesswork; later I learned that it’s Dai for “nine pagodas, twelve villages.” The whole district is Dai-style buildings, the eaves tipping sharply upward, glazed tiles on the roofs, peacocks painted on the walls. By day there’s hardly anyone; at night the Starlight Night Market is lit up to the rooftops and packed shoulder to shoulder — pounded chicken feet, Dai barbecue, pineapple rice, Laotian coffee, and music and dancing. I drifted around there several evenings.
There are a great many Northeasterners in Xishuangbanna. On the streets: Harbin sweet-and-sour pork, Qiqihar barbecue, Jinzhou grilled fish; and most of the people waiting at the bus stops have Northeast accents. They’re like migratory birds — fly down from the Northeast when it turns cold, fly back when it turns hot. I went to a resort district that’s almost entirely apartments bought by outsiders, building after building, packed full in winter, and the locals have a certain amount of complaint about these outsiders.
I went to the edge of a local village too; there’s a big rainforest park there, and opposite it on a hill a large Buddhist temple that charges admission, so I didn’t go in. The city museum is free, and going through it I learned that the name Xishuangbanna means “twelve rice fields,” and for the first time got some of the Dai people and Theravada Buddhism straight.
But I still love the sea. Yunnan has no sea and has too many people, and the bit of winter warmth there is bought with other things. This place has exactly one use for me: in the coldest month or two, come and stay a while, get some sun, and go back to the seaside when it warms up. The rest of the time I should be by the sea. That counts as a pretty good idea.
8. The Night of December 31: Crossing Hoh Xil
Coming back from Yunnan to Beijing I stayed at my brother’s again. Still no internet in the room; I read by day and wrote a little at night, and when I had something to post I walked over to the hotel next door to borrow their wifi. Ten-odd days and I still couldn’t sit still. A person can’t idle for long; idle too long and there’s an emptiness inside. I bought a train ticket to Tibet again.
I bought the ticket for December 30, on purpose to see in the New Year on the train — late on the night of December 31, into the small hours of January 1, I would cross the Tanggula. Nobody in Beijing would have been keeping me company at midnight anyway; I’d rather walk into the new year this way, a broader way.
The train put its lights out at ten, and I had no wish at all to sleep. I joked with the conductor that it was New Year’s Eve tonight, could we skip lights out. He said, New Year’s Eve or not, the days still have to be got through. The altitude shot up and up, now four thousand meters, now four thousand five hundred. At midnight exactly I was in Hoh Xil. I pulled the curtain back and looked out: pitch black below, and the sky packed with stars, a whole handful of them, too many to count, so bright they seemed within reach, like a fleet arriving out of a science-fiction film. I’d never seen so many stars, or ones so bright; in that moment I couldn’t speak — this was my New Year.
This was my second time in Tibet. What I most wanted was Everest, to go to Base Camp and see that 8,848. I joined a small tour, eight of us plus the driver, nine in all; I was the oldest and they all called me big brother. There were university students in the group, some just graduated, some who’d worked a few years, the youngest only twenty. The first day we drove toward Nyingchi, which sits lower and is billed as the Jiangnan of Tibet — a pity that in winter there wasn’t a trace of green. In the evening we reached Namcha Barwa and waited for the sunrise to gild the peak. We were lucky that day; the next day was cloudy. The sun went down step by step, the light shifting from intense to soft, from soft to cold, and at last the night covered it over — the snow mountain takes no account of any of it; it just keeps cycling through sunrise and sunset, day after day.
On January 6 the group went to Yamdrok Lake, the Karola Glacier and Manla Reservoir, and in the evening reached Shigatse to get the border permit. The Karola Glacier isn’t blue ice but snow that has lain there ten thousand years, pressing thick on the summit, and at its foot the wind is strong enough to wreck your hair. The water of Manla Reservoir is green as a jewel, better looking than Yamdrok, and half its surface was frozen.
My roommate in the group came down with altitude sickness that night, a splitting headache, and when we took his temperature it was over thirty-eight. I went with him in a taxi to the hospital; the doctor had him on oxygen for an hour and gave him some painkillers, and the whole thing cost under RMB 100. Back at the hotel the oxygen machine was broken, and the front desk sent a separate one up for us. That night we got through in peace.
At nine the next morning we were waiting in the hotel lobby for the driver, to go to Everest. He never came. I saw a message on my phone: an earthquake in Shigatse, magnitude 6.7, in Tingri County, which is exactly where Everest is. We were on the ground floor and felt nothing at all; the driver was upstairs and said it shook hard. Everest was of course off — the road ahead had already slid, the scenic area had cut its water and power, and the toll gate was turning every vehicle back. Driving back we met, head-on, fire trucks, armed police, army trucks, one after another, charging past us toward the disaster area. That moment my nose stung.
The rest of the itinerary lost a day and they refunded RMB 220; I signed and put my thumbprint on it. When we hung the prayer flags, everyone else wrote blessings for themselves and their families; I didn’t know what to write, so I wrote just a few words, a prayer for the people in the disaster area. On the extra day in Lhasa I went to the Potala Palace again, at midday — too many people, I didn’t like it.
On the train home I finished a book called A Dream of Dust in the Wilderness. The author was a soldier, and it tells of a column coming out of Tibet more than a hundred years ago and crossing Qinghai in winter; of more than a hundred men, only seven were left at the end. It made my heart pound — that road was practically the road to the underworld back then; and here I was on the same road, only by train, arriving in a few days. The high mountains haven’t changed, the white snow hasn’t changed; the people have been replaced generation after generation.
9. New Year in Guangzhou
Back from Tibet I stayed in Beijing another ten-odd days and really couldn’t stay put. With the New Year coming on, I didn’t want to go home for it; I only wanted to find a strange place and stay there. A woman I’d met online said she had an empty apartment in Guangzhou and I could stay in it if I came. I hesitated a long time — we’d never met and I had no idea who she was. But the New Year kept coming closer, and I finally worked up the nerve to ask her. Her answer was: no problem.
The cheapest ticket was one that connected through Xiamen. I reached Xiamen at night and simply didn’t go to a hotel — I walked the city all night: out along the Ten-Li Causeway, watching young people sit by the sea playing guitar; from Zhongshan Road all the way to Shapowei, then on to Zengcuoan; at that hour the streets were almost empty. Then I found a chair in the airport and slept until daylight.
When I got to Guangzhou she came to meet me on a scooter. She’s about ten years older than me, short hair, speaks neither fast nor slow, and puts you at ease. The apartment is in Nangang, a loft, the upper and lower floors rented out separately, bringing in RMB 2,100 a month; she has several places like it. She cleared the upper floor for me, carried up sheets and a quilt filling from downstairs, and together we put the cover on. She said that if anyone counts as a founding mother of lying flat, it’s her — but she lies flat without letting it rot: once you lie flat you still find something to do, which is why she went and took another degree.
The first surprise Guangzhou gave me was the water. The tap water runs clear and smells of nothing. In Beijing I never drink the tap water; the taste of it and the scale are unbearable. The subway opened my eyes too: the logo is a ram’s head, the station announcements are in Cantonese, and there’s a women-only car. The second surprise was how wildly popular the Yingge dance had become in Chaoshan that year — too many people, expensive rooms, tickets impossible to get — so in the end I stayed in Guangzhou and never got to Chaoshan.
Guangzhou’s cheap food is famous too. Downstairs a bowl of pork-offal rice noodles was only RMB 15, the offal and fried soybeans and peanuts and pickled radish piled right to the top; in the breakfast shops the buns, the shumai, the zongzi were RMB 1 or 2 apiece, enough to make your eyes spin. Set beside this, the north looks like it never learned how to live. When food is cheap, people don’t worry so easily.
Guangzhou is enormous; getting anywhere often takes two hours on the subway, and the fare is RMB 11, more expensive than Beijing. The cars are packed with young people; I stood by the door and looked at their clothes and their faces, and at the streets flashing past outside. There are especially many young people in Guangzhou, quite unlike the north, which is slowly growing old.
The rest of the days I went out almost every day. The wood carvings in the Chen Clan Ancestral Hall are beautiful, the ticket only RMB 10, and the courtyard smells of osmanthus; the lanes and alleys of Yongqingfang are all snacks and arcade houses; the Yuexiu West Lake flower market was packed tight with people, every one of them carrying an armful of flowers — Cantonese say that hua, flower, sounds the same as fa, to prosper, so buying flowers at New Year is buying yourself good luck. In the Nanhai God Temple there’s a stone tablet written by Han Yu, and the Sun-Bathing Pavilion that Su Shi once visited. I sat under the eaves on the shady side, in the breeze, watching the leaves rustle.
I went to Yuexiu Park too, and saw the Five Rams statue and a stretch of the Ming city wall — the wall is covered in banyan roots, tangled together, very strange. Next to it is the Museum of the Nanyue King, built over the tomb of a Nanyue king, and inside is a jade burial suit sewn with silk thread, the jade plates strung on silk, almost the same as the gold-thread jade suit you read about. I always used to think Guangzhou had no history; seeing these, I learned that this place had a kingdom of its own in the Qin and Han, and was a great port on the maritime Silk Road in the Tang and Song.
On New Year’s Eve I climbed Baiyun Mountain alone. It isn’t high and I was up quickly, and I waited at a lookout point for dark. When the night view lit up it was like a film, and someone was playing music from La La Land. I called home, and as usual there was nothing to say. Coming down, the sky was fully black. And that is how the New Year went by.
I also wandered through a demolition village near Nangang. Most of the people had moved out and the houses stood empty, no doors or windows, no water or power, with only a very few still living inside. An old man in his nineties in the village grabbed me for a chat; he could only speak Cantonese and I couldn’t understand a word, so he took a pen and wrote it out for me on a newspaper. He said he’d been to Hubei once, and had seen the Yellow Crane Tower.
10. Around Hainan Island, and Then Back to Silver Beach
The flight from Guangzhou to Sanya was only RMB 298. Going to an island after the New Year costs less than half what it does before — that’s the advantage of not working. An hour and a bit in the air, and it was like stepping from winter straight into summer. I’d never been to Hainan; all I knew was that it’s warm the year round, with palms and coconuts.
Sanya’s sea is nothing like the sea in the north. The northern sea is dark in color, blue-green, heavy — solemn even on a clear day. The sea at Sanya is light; close up it’s transparent, farther out it’s pale blue and pale green, as if it were smiling. And the people on the beach wear much less; in the sunlight it’s all a dazzle of white. In Sanya I stayed in a youth hostel, RMB 30 a day, twelve bunks to a room, and you make the bed up yourself and strip it yourself when you leave.
Yalong Bay is the best looking — a long coast, not many people, and it feels quiet. Dadonghai is close to the city and the beach is short and packed solid; people who like a crowd go there. Sanya Bay is the longest, running from Luhuitou all the way to Tianya Haijiao, and good for walking; the sand is fine and walking on it is hard work, and every so often you have to stop and rest. Luhuitou, Tianya Haijiao and places like them no longer charge admission, and I went several times to watch the sunset.
There are a lot of Russians on the beach in Sanya, lying in bikinis in the sun outside the expensive hotels; and Northeasterners everywhere on the streets — running stalls, cutting hair, keeping restaurants, some of them already settled in Sanya for good. On the bus the driver opens his mouth and out comes Northeast dialect, which shows they’ve long since become locals. To leave home and go so far to make a living — I admire their ability to adapt.
The hostel owner runs more than a hundred beds on his own. I asked him how he makes money at those prices; he said not from casual guests but from groups and long stays — training courses, study trips. The people staying there are all sorts: delivery riders, local tour guides, sleeping indoors by day and going out at night. Everyone has a story, but when you get down to it, they’re all people short of money.
From Sanya I took the island-loop bullet train to Ocean Flower Island off Danzhou. The moment I got onto the island I saw great slabs of high-rise, thirty-odd stories, one against the next, stacked densely together. Buildings like that frighten me — so tall and so packed that standing under them you feel pressed down. Ocean Flower Island is an artificial island built by filling in the sea, and to recover the cost the only way was to build tall and dense. Secondhand apartments there go for seven or eight thousand a square meter; fifty square meters sells for four hundred thousand. Renting isn’t cheap either — over twenty square meters for RMB 600 a month. I stayed only one day; the next morning I was woken by the music downstairs and decided to leave.
I went to Haikou on the fifteenth of the first month, the Lantern Festival. There was a fireworks show at Century Park that night; Haikou people said it was the first in a dozen years, and the crowd was so thick you couldn’t move. After dark a swarm of drones flew up and first drew a figure in the night sky wearing a cylinder-shaped cap — Su Shi’s Dongpo cap; then they pulled out a line of characters: “Hainan, ten thousand li away, is truly my home.” Someone in the crowd shouted, “Su Shi.” Standing there in the middle of them, I was suddenly struck. I’m a wanderer too, everywhere I go; only he took it more in stride than I do.
Later I took the bullet train to Boao. Boao is a small town under Qionghai, where the Wanquan River meets the sea, with a long strip of sand, Yudai Beach, lying between the river water and the salt. I stayed in a youth hostel in the village, a big banyan at the door. As soon as night came, something small and unnamed in the tree would call and call, croak croak, like a frog in a pond, though there was no pond anywhere near. I looked it up — a kind of tree frog from Hainan. I went out to find it and saw nothing at all. Down at the shore there wasn’t a soul; the beach was very clean, and I picked up a piece of coral with a beautiful pattern on it. Later I heard coral isn’t allowed off the island, so I left it on the hostel table.
In Hainan I went to only four places: Sanya, Ocean Flower Island, Haikou and Boao. The warmth is real warmth, but outside of winter the other seasons are hard going. I’m the kind of person who likes a place with four distinct seasons. From that trip I settled several things: Yunnan has no sea; Tibet and Xinjiang are good to visit but not to live in; cities like Guangzhou I don’t like; Hainan is only good for wintering. What I want is somewhere open, quiet, with few people and clean air, and ideally a stretch of sea as well.
At the end of February I flew from Sanya back to Beijing; the ticket connected through Fuzhou and the flight left more than two hours late. On the plane I put my jacket back on, and in Beijing I had to add the thermal long johns again — the two places differ by twenty or thirty degrees. I stayed in Beijing until March, and only then went back to Rushan Silver Beach. When I’d left I’d given my things to a friend I’d made here, and after I got back I collected them one by one. I rented a small place again, bed and living space in one room, smaller than the old one, RMB 3,500 a year, a bit cheaper, third floor, and comfortable to live in.
I’d lived two years on this empty coast, gone out and traveled four whole months, and come back here. Open, empty, quiet, clean air, fresh, and the sea — I’d measured all of it out with my own feet, step by step. The greatest use of that whole long circuit was that it showed me what I don’t want. From coming back in March to December, two hundred and eighty-two days, I never went out.