1. March 9: I Came Back to Silver Beach
On the night of March 8, 2025, I got on an ordinary green train at Beijing Station. It left at 11:49 and only reached Rushan the next afternoon at one, thirteen hours on the way. There were very few people in the station, the platform was cold and bare, and the waiting room was still done up the way it had been years ago; beside the South Station it looked like an antique. Looking at it, it suddenly seemed to me that it was like me: old, past its youth. The whole way from North China to the Jiaodong peninsula the sky wore a film of grey, smog laid over everything like gauze, and it put a gloom over you too.
The train ran east. Once you’re out of North China you’re on the Jiaodong peninsula, and in the fields along the track the wheat had just tillered, row on row of pale yellow and pale green, lying flat to the ground. I was happy and sad by turns: happy that I was out of the city again; sad because it suddenly came to me that I hadn’t seen the rice fields of home in many years. I’m a wanderer, a stray with no home of his own; none of the scenery of my own country has anything to do with me, and all I could look at was this northern wheat. But then I turned it around: from now on I could be the one who keeps watch over this wheat field, watch the wheat grow tall, turn yellow, get cut — and I came alive again.
At one in the afternoon on March 9 the train reached Rushan. I put my bags down and went straight to the sea. On purpose I didn’t take the main road; I cut across the field paths: most of the fields lay fallow, a stand of dry yellow reeds standing in them, only small plots planted to wheat; a big grey bird I startled flew off, flapping, and startled two small water birds that dived into the grass beside it. No one on the street, hardly a car; not many people at the shore either, only small distant figures, very small. The sand so wide, the sea so big. The early-March wind off the water was still cold; coming down to the sea you need an extra layer. But I felt good: I was back.
Next was finding a place. I had an agent show me two: a two-bedroom on the fifth floor, and the spring rents that year had gone up absurdly; then I went with an auntie to look at a little place with bedroom and living room in one, too rough for me to live in. By March 12 an auntie in the compound introduced me to a small apartment an uncle had standing empty: one room, kitchen and bathroom separate so they didn’t interfere with each other, clean and bright inside, a south-facing balcony with plenty of sun, and on the third floor, so not too many stairs; fully furnished, the appliances still new. Rent RMB 3,500, no agent involved. I paid as soon as I’d looked: with a RMB 1,000 deposit and RMB 200 prepaid for gas it came to RMB 4,700, plus RMB 270 in property fees; water and electricity I’d pay monthly myself. The thing that had worried me for days was settled at last.
On March 13 I moved out of my friend’s place and into a room of my own, and began living alone again. The place was much smaller than the one I’d had the two years before. The bed could only go against the north wall — the balcony was on the south side. That orientation would cost me a little something later; I’ll come to it. Moving in, the first thing was buying things: oil and salt and soy sauce and vinegar, washing things, one item at a time. I also set myself two small resolutions: eat a bit more meat this year, learn to cook meat dishes — the two years before I’d lived more or less vegetarian; and talk to people more, not be so lofty, go out among them.
The day I moved I went to the supermarket for salt, and a woman in a mask suddenly walked up to me and asked, “You’re the chubby little fellow from the seaside, aren’t you?” I was astonished that she’d recognised me and for a moment didn’t know what to say. I told her that what I put online is all nonsense and she should take it lightly. She said, we’ve all been through things, we understand; just live the way you think you should. I was moved, but to the end I never got a clear look at her face. She said those few things and went to pay; I went on buying my salt. It counts as one of the strange encounters — so there really are people in this place who know me.
The landlord uncle came to fix the water heater, changed the shower head, fixed the exhaust fan. I stood there watching and couldn’t help with a thing. I told him he was clever with his hands; he said he’d opened an appliance repair shop back in 1971, and his family had a television by 1976, and he could fix televisions too — no wonder he was so good at it. Those same days the broadband man came; the internet was RMB 398 a year, with a RMB 100 deposit on the modem. Two hours after it was installed the connection dropped; the man came back, said the modem was broken, and gave me an old one in exchange. The bag of rice I bought, ten kilos, lasts me two months; over a year I get through about sixty kilos of rice. I weighed myself: fifty kilos.
I went to a used bike shop and bought a secondhand bicycle: first I had my eye on one for RMB 350 and couldn’t make up my mind, and when I went back in the afternoon the owner had just taken in an old mountain bike, RMB 180, so I rode it home. With it I could ride to Chaoxi Lake, ride into town, ride out to Xiaoshikou at the far west. Some days later I shaved my head again — I have clippers, I do it myself, no barber, not a cent spent. Nobody at Silver Beach cares how I look, so I don’t have to either, and that ease is not something the city could give me.
Settled in, my days soon had a shape: read the lunar calendar, read the tides, go to market, go out. One day was the sixteenth of the lunar month, the big tide went out at ten in the morning, and I went down onto the beach to walk it. The shore at Rushan Silver Beach is too flat and too smooth, all fine sand, nothing much to pick up — only cat’s-eye snails, oyster shells, crab claws snapped off, and smooth pretty little stones. I found one whole moon shell, round, white, with a spiral ring on it, heavy in the hand, and I gave it to a man I know. Then I saw two little swimming crabs; I thought they were dead, reached over and touched them, and they were both alive; I picked them up by the hind end and played with them, and one pinched the flesh of my finger and I howled. Luckily it was tiny and didn’t bite deep; I prised it off and threw it back in the sea.
2. That Year, Not a Single Day Missed in the Diary
The first year I wrote in the diary every day; the second year it broke off and I changed to a summary every few months. The third year I picked it up again: from coming back to the sea on March 9 to leaving on December 15 is two hundred and eighty-two days, and I didn’t miss one. What I wrote was nothing but small things: what I ate, how long I slept, what shape the clouds were, what colour the sea was, where I walked to, what a jin of eggs cost, what I was thinking. Written out day after day, that is my daily life, and also my history.
Once I got to the sea I put my days back on the lunar calendar. The big tides are the first and the fifteenth; the markets go by the lunar calendar too, every five days, the ones ending in five or ten; before going out I looked at the tide table, two rises and two falls a day, and it was best if I reached the water at high tide. City people work nine to five; I ran on the tide. That’s a bit of basic cultivation for anyone who lives by the sea. Days by the sea have no workdays and no weekends, only the first and the fifteenth.
Silver Beach has a lot of markets. The Xiaotan market is right outside my compound, on the fifth and the tenth; Gongjiazhuang is the biggest, stalls crammed along both sides of the road with just room down the middle for one person pushing a cart; and there’s Changjiazhuang and Baishatan as well. I went often, and mostly not to buy — to look at people, at vegetables, at seafood. Seven steamed rolls for RMB 6, enough for three meals; twenty eggs for a bit over RMB 12; a plate of sunflower seeds for RMB 10, kept for cracking while I watched a film. I’d look at the seafood stalls from one end to the other — hairtail, sea bass, mullet, Spanish mackerel, monkfish, oysters, scallops, razor clams; after a year of looking, I knew them all.
That year I learned the names of a good many plants. On the beach there are beach silvertop, metaplexis, beach morning glory, salt iris and sand lettuce; the salt flats grow tamarisk, with small pink flowers; the wetland at Chaoxi Lake has seepweed; the ones with small yellow flowers along the road I’d always taken for winter jasmine, and only learned later were forsythia — forsythia has four petals, winter jasmine five or six; and then there’s the silk tree, its leaves like feathers. I looked up every one I met, like a schoolboy doing his homework. That apricot tree in the compound, from pink blossom in spring to a full load of green fruit to me knocking a few sour ones down — and the year had gone.
The wheat I watched the same way. It tillered in March, and on June 15 the harvest started. That day I rode over to watch the combine, and stood in the sun while it cut one field after another, the grain pouring out of the chute into a three-wheeler and hauled to the yard to dry, a man raking it out flat. Watching, I thought of Bai Juyi’s Watching the Wheat Harvest: farm families have few idle months; in the fifth month they are twice as busy. A thousand years on, the wheat is still that same wheat, and the busy are busy in the same way.
Evening is this place’s true hour. The moment the sun goes down the sky changes colour — sometimes gold, sometimes blood red, and sometimes it drops into the clouds and a seam of red light comes through and dyes the whole sky. The sun sinking into the sea is the best moment of the day. I’ve watched the sunset for three years and I’m not tired of it. Su Shi said: the rivers and hills, the wind and the moon, never had a fixed owner; whoever has the leisure is the owner. These things between heaven and earth have no owner — whoever is at leisure is their owner. He was speaking of himself, and he was speaking of people like me.
I watched the moon for a year too. One night in May, walking back from the sea, I looked up and the moon was just coming up off the water — “Over the sea grows the moon bright; we gaze on it far, far apart” — wasn’t this the life I’d wanted? In June there was a “lowest full moon”, and I rode over to Sanguan Pavilion in the east to wait, and waited until nearly eight before the moon came out of the clouds, showed its face and went back in, leaving only a patch of orange cloud. For a week straight in September I went out every day to watch the moon rise: first a dot of red, then pale yellow, and at last white as a jade plate, the light on the water going from a single gold thread to a whole sheet of silver. One night a total eclipse was forecast; I got up at half past one and the sky was solid cloud, and I saw nothing. Twelve full moons a year, and with good weather you can actually see a few of them.
Once September comes Silver Beach changes character. The children go back to school, the tourists leave, and two-thirds of the people are gone at a stroke; the sea clears, the beach is clean, the air turns dry, and the cicadas and the frogs fall away day by day until there’s nothing left but wind and waves. On the day the fishing season opened, flags went up at the harbour by Daru Mountain, the boats put out one group after another, and the firecrackers went on a long time. Of the whole year my favourite season is really autumn: September, October, November — sky high, air clear, few people, and the oysters at their fattest. The best three months of the year, and they happen to be the three months when there’s nobody here.
The shaved head I did twice that year. The moment summer came I ran the clippers over it, not a hair left, the wind moving over my scalp so I could feel wind and rain, and my body felt lighter too. Shaving it has another use, and that’s less trouble: no barber, no small talk with the barber, no puzzling over what cut to get, and no money spent. I am in fact going bald, and I have plenty of dandruff — scratch my head and there’s a nailful of white paste. I look in the mirror and see white hair; shaved, I can still see the white roots all round my temples. A pity, this white hair coming on.
Every word of it I traded for with my own two feet, one step at a time. That year I went out every day, walking, riding; from my own front door all the way to Chaoxi Lake, from the start of the year to the end of it. In May I was in short sleeves, in July I was bare-chested in the sun, back and arms and calves gone chocolate, and I was annoyed that my chest and belly were still too white and wanted them dark too. In the off season there’s hardly anyone at Silver Beach — often the whole coastline is just me, the wind going past my ear, the waves sounding under my feet, and at times like that I feel everything is mine.
3. The Third Year: I Stopped Making Videos and Started Writing
The third year I changed the way I made a living. In these years of working at my own media, making videos got harder and harder to earn from: I put long videos out online and the traffic fell year by year, and I never did work out what the trick was that turned video into big money. A little money, yes; big money, no. For a stretch I was throttled on a platform and my income went to nearly nothing, and I had to start over somewhere else.
I’m better with words, in the end. So that year I wrote more than I filmed: some pieces about my days at Silver Beach, some about what life is like over here, some about how my mood changed, and some just for fun. Most of my day went into it — drafting, revising, putting it out. That year my income online, adding up several places, was a little over RMB 1,000 a month at best and a bit over RMB 800 at worst; over the year, about RMB 9,000. In other people’s eyes that’s laughably small. In mine, it’s enough.
That year AI arrived. At first I was only curious; then I really went into it. I learned to build workflows, set myself up an agent and had it write copy, make images and make videos for me; I used it to make a whole set of sticker packs; I had it help me write songs, and in the end it produced a whole album, fourteen tracks, all of them in English, called Living by the Sea. One night, listening, I thought: these things used to take a whole band, a roomful of musicians. And the two days in May when I was learning to build an agent, I felt like I was back at university, gnawing through web pages and databases on my own, a whole day indoors and never bored.
That was also when I started keeping late nights. One night, working on generating images and videos, I was at it until half past four in the morning, and the east was already white; the next day I went straight on to workflows and nearly forgot to write that day’s diary — it only came back to me in the shower at night. Nearly forty, and suddenly I felt there wasn’t enough time; too much I wanted to learn, too much I wanted to do. Learning makes you happy — especially learning that isn’t for someone else’s deadline, only out of interest; it’s nothing like the learning you do on a job. When I worked, whatever I learned was for the work; now whatever I learn is to please myself.
That year I kept setting myself small goals. In April I said, maybe I’ll make a hundred thousand this year; in June an agent took me to look at apartments and I said, unless I can make two hundred thousand a year I’ll buy one; later I read in the news that apartments at Silver Beach get cheaper every year, and the two-hundred-thousand idea faded away. Goals set and changed, changed and set — underneath it was really panic: no money made, the years going up one at a time, and I didn’t know whether I could still wait for that “some day”.
I fed all the diaries I’d written over the years into a tool and had it analyse me. It said my problem was nihilism; it said I had to go from being a spectator to being a participant and a maker — not just watching the sea, but turning the sound of the waves, the colour of the sunset, the shells on the sand into words, into pictures, into a piece of music, turning the scenery outside into an order and a body of work inside. I stared at that paragraph for a long time and thought it read like a real person. And it was from then on that I first felt my writing these diaries might after all not be only for getting things off my chest.
That year the money from writing online came mostly from tips and traffic. Write well and someone gives you a few RMB; more readers and the platform shares out a little. One day in July the day before brought in RMB 9.77 and that day RMB 31.88, and I stared at the number and was pleased for a long while — far better than making videos. But there are more gates further along that road: with more readers, what you write has to be what people like to read; and what people most like to read is usually abuse and taking sides, things I can’t bring myself to do.
In the end, that year I was fighting myself with both hands. Left hand one thing, right hand another; one moment wanting to make money, the next finding the whole thing pointless; one moment writing, the next doubting what writing it was for. I call that year the year of fighting myself with both hands — not self-mockery, just an accurate name for it.
4. I Became Somebody in Silver Beach, and Then a Target
Three years at Silver Beach and the things I put online had piled up. The more I put out, the more people read; and once enough people read, some things are no longer mine alone to decide.
One day at the end of March a friend was out and saw the reeds by the shore on fire, thick smoke rolling up, the fire truck and the firefighters both out. He filmed a couple of clips and sent them to me, and I posted them online. That afternoon I was asleep when the local police station called and told me to take the videos down — they would damage Silver Beach’s image. I thought it was funny, and I didn’t refuse; I deleted them. A while later the community office called again, saying there was another one somewhere I hadn’t deleted. I set every video so that only I could see it. I was just curious: how did they know my phone number and my name? Out here there probably isn’t much privacy.
Calls like that came more than once that year. I posted video of the sea wall collapsing, and video of the sea lettuce coming ashore — that July the sea lettuce drifting up from the south laid a patch of green over the beach, and front-end loaders hauled it off cartload by cartload. What I put out was passed on by a great many people, and that night people came to me: one was the head of the police station, one worked for the management committee. Both told me to delete. They were very polite about it, but there was an order underneath the politeness. I deleted, because I still have to live here. That year they came to me three times.
Besides the ones telling me to delete, there were the ones who came to invite me. An official from the management committee’s publicity office phoned and I didn’t pick up; then a text message, saying he’d like to come and see me, Mid-Autumn was near, he’d bring a box of mooncakes. I texted back that I’d been out on my bike; and that I’m not good with people, that meeting anyone honestly frightens me, so he should give the mooncakes to someone else. Later the writers’ association got in touch as well, saying they’d read the pieces I’d posted, thought they were well written, wanted to commission some, wanted to meet. I declined that too.
Counting it up, that year the police station, the publicity office, the management committee and the writers’ association all came looking for me. They probably never knew that most of those pieces were written by AI, and I didn’t explain. I simply don’t want to deal with any organisation: once there’s a first contact there’ll be a second and a third, and the “trouble” will come without end. I came here for quiet, not to be known. People fear fame the way pigs fear getting fat — I used to wish someone would read me; now I only hope they read and then go, and don’t remember my name.
5. That Summer, Too Hot for a Summer Retreat
Summer at Silver Beach is supposed to be cool, and the first two years really were: the summer of 2023 I never even turned on an electric fan, and at night I still needed a blanket. But 2025 was different — that was the hottest of my three summers here.
In August I went to pay the electricity: RMB 108; July was RMB 88. The two summers before, fifty or sixty a month at most. The air conditioner had barely been on those first two years; this year it ran a good deal. I live in a small place with no through-breeze from north to south, and indoors it was often thirty or thirty-one degrees — without the air conditioner I couldn’t stay in. And I don’t have an electric fan either — a fan actually suits me better; the air conditioner goes cold if you run it long, and switching it on and off all the time burns even more power. The bill went up and it hurt, but I had to run it.
Late June to early August is the rainy season here. Not much rain, but a great deal of damp — the humidity often above ninety percent. Your body goes clammy, as if smeared with a layer of oil, and the heat has nowhere to go; in bed the sheets stick too, as if they mean to stick to you; washed clothes hang for days and never come out crisp. One day the damp got as high as ninety-eight percent and the upper half of the tall buildings in the distance sank into fog. This is the most uncomfortable stretch of the year at Silver Beach; a month and more of it has to be endured, and it doesn’t clear until around the beginning of autumn.
But the rain that year was strange as well. One night in June the thunder rolled up from the south, the lightning lit the ground and tripped the motion-sensor lights in the stairwell of the building opposite, and the rain came down all night; next morning it was blue sky and white cloud, bright and clean. Then there was the maddening kind: black cloud pressing down for half a day, ten minutes of rain and it stops, the sun straight back out, and a layer of damp steaming up off the ground. At the end of June a rainstorm filled the ditch outside the gate of my compound that is usually dry, and overnight every frog in it came out — black ones, green ones, squatting in the water with a transparent bubble under the chin going in and out. The old people said those weren’t frogs but “puff toads”. I squatted at the edge of the ditch and watched a long time, and watched like a child.
In July the sea lettuce came. Fresh ashore it’s a great sheet of green, soft underfoot; two days in the sun and it goes white and stinks, and the beach with it. Only the locals have a way to deal with it: they block the river mouths early with sand dams so it can’t pour into the channels; on shore they keep front-end loaders pushing it up and hauling it away to be dealt with somewhere special. Those days when I went out I’d often see dozens of older people raking the beach clean, one rake after another, and by the time they’d finished a stretch the tide had brought up a fresh lot. I put that out, and the next day I was told to delete it.
Also in July, something happened. One evening I went west and saw a crowd gathered on the shore, rescue vehicles parked on the sand, police cars up on the bank. Somebody said quietly that it was a man in his sixties who had gone swimming as it got dark, and the waves were big, and he hadn’t come up. Crying kept coming up from the shore. On the way home I kept thinking: waves like that, dark already — why go into the sea. The sea at Silver Beach looks gentle, but it is very deep.
The heat that summer was a warning to me. The first two years I’d always told people that at Silver Beach you don’t need air conditioning in summer, that it’s a good place to get away from the heat; this year I didn’t dare say it. The weather gets harder to predict every year; nobody knows what next year will be like. In the heat I thought of simply going south in winter and skipping the three coldest months — but then I thought of the airfare, and the idea was put down again.
6. First Year New, Second Year Ordinary, Third Year Empty
The thing I thought about most that year was that my spirit had changed, and changed very visibly.
The first year was novelty. Everything was a first: the first New Year alone, the first snow by the sea, the first time at the market, the first time hearing the wind in the pines. The whole year I was in a state of excitement; everything looked good, everything tasted good.
The second year it became ordinary. The scenery was the same scenery and I no longer marvelled at it daily; the days settled down and flattened out. By the end of the second year I was a little bored — and bored, I wanted to leave the place, and come back when I’d had enough. So in October 2024 I gave up the apartment and went off on a long loop.
By the third year it was no longer boredom. It was emptiness.
What is emptiness? Schopenhauer says that life swings like a pendulum back and forth between pain and boredom: a desire unsatisfied is pain, satisfied it is boredom. That sentence I understood best in the second year. The third year isn’t quite that: I’m not especially in pain, because I’m not short of money and I won’t starve; and I’m not especially bored, because I have things to do. And still I find it pointless.
This is the Camus kind. You’re not short of anything either; you won’t starve, and you could do nothing at all and still not starve; but doing nothing at all, you feel that life has no meaning. You want to make something enjoyable — you write, you want to write something good, and the inspiration doesn’t come, it simply won’t come out. You think about making big money too; but to make money you have to watch the traffic, watch the audience, watch the comments, and watching, you get tied to the traffic.
One day I came across a passage of Camus online and copied it out: “I have lost all desire to confide in anyone... I know I have no place in this world. But what right have you to judge my soul?” Copying it, my heart sank. Isn’t that exactly me: with nothing, with no home to go to, standing alone outside the crowd.
That year I thought often about people my own age. About friends from before — there are only three kinds: you got married, he went abroad, I lay flat. Three ways of living: one conventional, one a scramble, one like mine. I don’t think any of them is right or wrong; everyone just has to live his own days well, there’s no need to compare — but sometimes, when it goes quiet at night, I still think: the same forty years, so why is there no one at all on this road of mine?
That year I also put the question of buying a place down for good. An agent took me to look: in the compound next door, a fifth-floor two-bedroom, over eighty square meters, furniture and appliances thrown in, RMB 138,000. I weighed it up for a long while and let it go. Later, in the courtyard, I heard two old men talking; one said he’d lived here five years and the courtyard below had stood empty those whole five years; the other didn’t take it up. So he said, that place is RMB 60,000 at most, and nobody’s buying. It sounded reasonable to me: apartments are worth less every year and the empty ones will only multiply. So I won’t buy; renting is the cheapest — RMB 3,500 a year, enough to keep me housed for many years.
That year I really didn’t spend much, but what I thought about was still mostly money. Without money a great many things can’t be done — you can’t travel, you can’t take someone out to eat, you can’t even keep up with people; and yet I don’t want to go back to a job for money. I’m thirty-nine. The first two years I still felt like a young man; this year I stopped feeling it: I’m old, and a great many things are still undone.
7. I Stopped Seeing Anyone
That year I cut off almost all contact with the outside, and kept none.
I stopped reading the comments. The first two years I chatted with people online and answered comments, because living alone at Silver Beach with no dealings with anyone, I was afraid of losing the use of speech. That year I couldn’t be bothered to look: put the thing out, and good comments or bad, let them be. And then I found that a great many people simply cannot understand my life — you’re on a completely different road, and unless someone has been through the same thing, who is going to understand you? Most of what they said to me online was taking my days as something to talk about over dinner. Better not to say anything at all.
In the first half of the year a former colleague in Beijing sent me a message, saying he’d read what I’d written online and wishing me a happy time by the sea. I didn’t reply. Later a senior from my school days found me too and left me a message; I didn’t reply either. I don’t know how they found me and I didn’t ask. Not replying isn’t because I hate them; I simply don’t want any more involvement with the people and the things of before. A colleague is not my friend and a classmate is not my friend; I have very few friends and they are precious, but to people who have nothing to do with me I don’t want to talk.
And then there were the readers who’d read my things and wanted to meet me. Some wanted to meet, some to eat or drink together, some to make friends; I politely declined them all. The reasons are simple enough. One: the older I get the more I want quiet, and I can’t work up any interest in new friends — I did enough socialising in the first half of my life. Two: I’ve written myself out online, so you know everything about me and I know nothing at all about you, and to me that is dangerous; I’m alone in a strange place, and the first thing is safety. Three: Qian Zhongshu said that if you eat an egg and find it good, why should you want to meet the hen that laid it — I’m the hen. Four: Sartre said, “Hell is other people.” I wouldn’t go so far as to call other people hell, but other people are at least a pressure on me, a constraint: human relations run on favours returned, and once you begin there’s no end to it.
It isn’t that I dislike people; it’s that I dislike dealings that have no sense of boundaries. A sense of boundaries, put plainly, is respecting each other’s privacy: don’t look at what you shouldn’t look at, don’t ask what you shouldn’t ask. But too many people in this world call prying into someone’s privacy caring, and go around telling other people their private business. Dealing with people like that, my whole body is uncomfortable. So the people who could become friends were very few to begin with; two or three is enough; and having none at all needn’t mean loneliness — you have yourself, you have imagination, and the days are not dull.
I’ve thought about why I dread dealing with people so much. I detest the whole business of human obligations, so I stay far from home, far from my parents and relatives, and far from work and from colleagues and bosses; and not marrying means no tangling of two families. To go a whole lifetime without having to watch anyone’s face, without having to work the room, I need to be financially independent enough. It isn’t coldness; I just find that whole round of false politeness and endless ceremony a nuisance. I only want to live a simple, natural life.
Dragon Boat Festival and Mid-Autumn I spent alone. People outside asked me on the phone whether I was going home; I didn’t answer. Not out of spite — I just didn’t want the bother.
The same goes with people I know. When I first came I used to buy eggs at one stall; after a few times the stallholder recognised me and would start chatting whenever she saw me, and from then on I didn’t dare buy her eggs again — I knew she meant no harm, but I still felt I ought to keep a little distance. The landlord uncle came to fix things, the agent showed me apartments, the neighbour downstairs says when he sees me, “Off to work, are you?” — I nod to all of them and say no more. In the countryside people are on familiar terms by nature; there’s small talk and there’s ceremony, and I never learned it and don’t want to. I can’t get into the city and I can’t get into the countryside; wherever I am, I seem to be temporary.
8. Marriage, Children, and Family Matters
People are always asking me: don’t you want to find a girlfriend? Don’t you want to marry? Don’t you want children?
When you boil it down, it’s still money. If I had money, took a wife, raised a few children, of course I’d marry and have children. But I chose this road, and on this road I can’t make big money; my savings, my income, are only enough to keep me alive. So I have no standing to think about a family and children.
And these things trail a whole string of other things behind them, beginning with the family. You don’t marry and you don’t have children, so you are different from other people; and every exchange with home comes round to this, and round and round it turns into a quarrel. So my dealings with home are: business is business. If the family needs something, say so; my affairs, don’t ask. My affairs are nothing to do with you, and I don’t need anyone worrying about them. You look after your own — take care of your health, eat what you want to eat, go singing, go dancing, go and write your memoirs; a person needs a life of his own, and shouldn’t keep his mind fixed on the children.
The reason I don’t get in touch isn’t that there is no more conflict; it’s that with no contact there is no conflict. What counts as “business”? A need, a requirement. Those simple greetings, that idle chatter about family matters — they mean nothing to me. So I say: no business, no contact. No contact and there’s no talking, no talking and there’s no clash.
In July my mother called me. We had nothing to say to each other; a few exchanges in and we nearly started quarrelling, and she hung up herself. I think old people put all their minds on their children mostly because they have nothing of their own to do; if she had a stretch of things of her own — singing, dancing, learning something new — she wouldn’t be thinking about her children every day. If something goes wrong with her health, I’ll see to it; the knot in her heart I can’t untie, and she’ll have to untie it herself. My not marrying and not working is a knot in her heart, not in mine.
People also ask: you don’t work and you don’t marry — how are you going to get past your parents on this? My view is that I’m an independent person, I’ll do what I want to do, and I don’t need to explain myself to anyone, parents included. Parents are the people who gave me life, not the people who manage my life. Of course I can say that because of my circumstances: I’m not an only child, I have an older brother and two older sisters, and when my parents get old and can’t manage, there are others to look after them. Being the youngest in the family is exactly what gives me this little bit of freedom. With an only child it would be a great deal harder, and I haven’t got a solution to offer.
Other people ask, why don’t you go back home and lie flat there? Home is cheap, and your parents are there to look after you. I can’t answer that one. Grown up, I shouldn’t be under the same roof as my parents again; and back home, living in that small town or county seat, everyone around would point at me: that age, not married, not working. I could take it; my parents couldn’t. And besides, I couldn’t make money back there either. Better to go on drifting on the outside, and write the drifting down, and trade that for a little living money.
On being a dutiful son, I’ve simplified that too. At this age there’s no use in fine words. You give money, you’re dutiful; you don’t, you’re not. I can’t give. So all I can do is keep myself standing first, hold myself up — that’s probably the only way there is.
In September I had a dream. In it a friend and I were on a ship, a big cruise liner, but we couldn’t afford a good cabin and had only the low bunks down below, a room full of plain wooden beds, like the cheapest youth hostel. He was going to Jiangsu, I was going back to Hubei; the ship set out from Rushan and went south along the coast, turned into the Yangtze, and headed upstream. Waking, it struck me: going home I’d always flown or taken the train — it had never once occurred to me to go by boat. The dream may not be realistic, but it’s romantic: a man on a boat, slowly going home.
9. I Solve Everything Myself
That year, from cooking to fixing the plumbing, from illness to thinking things through, I solved everything myself, and carried it all alone.
The kitchen tap was old and the rubber ring at the joint was about to give, and only then did I realise that this was the water I drank every day. The hardware shop at the gate wanted RMB 160, and I thought that was too much, so I bought a tap and a length of pipe myself online, shut off the main valve, took it apart by hand, prised at what wouldn’t turn with an old tool the landlord had left behind, and put it back on — RMB 9.20 in all. The evening I finished I was in high spirits: all these years I could do nothing, and now I can fix a thing or two. I’ve thought about it too — if it were my own place, I’d go through the plumbing and the doors and windows one by one and put them right; a rented place I don’t take trouble over, and I don’t know how long I’ll be in it.
My body I look after myself too. I brush my teeth in the morning; every time used to draw blood, and that year it suddenly stopped, and I checked it over several times and was pleased for a long while. But from April on my stomach was uncomfortable: bloated, sore, gurgling, loose, twice a day. First I suspected the water, then that the new place faced north and I’d taken a chill, then that I’d had Covid again. After a lot of looking I came across a doctor’s video and the symptoms matched one by one: irregular meals, sitting too long, late nights, anxiety — disordered gut function. Only then did I set my mind at rest.
I have no health insurance. When I worked, the office arranged a check-up every year and you went to hospital when you were ill; now I don’t dare go, because one visit is money. I’ve told people my method: a small illness, tough it out; a serious illness, don’t treat it; a middling illness, play it by ear. I can say that because these years I really haven’t once been laid up. But living alone, the thing I fear most is illness and accidents — if something did happen, with nobody to lend a hand, that would be the real trouble.
Things of the mind, and other needs, I settle myself too. I’m an adult; I can’t lean on other people and there’s no one to lean on; if I’m in real difficulty I’ll be the one to open my mouth and ask, not wait for help to arrive. That year I got a great deal thinner, dark and thin, and the man at the agency saw me and said I looked like a refugee from Africa. In the mirror I see more white hair, and white hairs in my eyebrows as well; the hairline going back year by year; and the two lines between my eyebrows, the character for river — I first noticed them in the mirror the year I was twenty-seven. That was the first time I understood that sorrow carves writing into a person, and once carved it doesn’t smooth away. I’m thirty-nine.
December came, and it got cold. Indoors it was only eleven or twelve degrees; on windy days I didn’t go out at all, curled up in bed with the electric blanket on, scrolling my phone, quiet enough to hear my own heartbeat. Days like that most people can’t stand, and I was very comfortable in them, which is probably evidence that there’s something a little wrong with me. But one thing kept at me: I have to get out. Nine months at Silver Beach is enough; I’ve seen all the good places, and what I write is nearly dried up; a person can’t stay still forever, staying still he stiffens, and I want to go and see somewhere else and prove that I’m still all right — body all right, mind all right.
On December 2 the first snow of this winter fell. I watched it come down at the window, the flakes in small clumps, landing on the pine needles and shaking off like crumbs. I got out of bed to look, then burrowed back under the covers, happier than I can say. In the days after, there was heavy snow over at Weihai while Silver Beach was bright and clear — the two ends of one peninsula, like two different places.
In December I boiled my days down to a single sentence: the days of one person, quiet, with enough to eat, owing nobody an account. But after nine months of days like that, I suddenly felt that everything worth thinking had already been through my head once, nearly all of it cleared; and the rest, the parts I never meant to touch in any case, no longer needed thinking about. Then there was no reason to stay here any longer. I should go out and walk a while, go and look at people, and let people look at me.
That year I took a great many questions and thought them through one by one: what peace is, what emptiness is, what my troubles are, what to do about appetite, what to do about desire, what to do about vanity, whether I’m lonely, whether I’m afraid of dying, whether I’ll go back to the city, how I should make money, what the point is of what I write, whether I’m still happy, whether freedom is still the thing that matters most. Some I worked out and some I didn’t; and the ones I worked out may tip back over in a while. In the end one thing I did work out: that writing it down is itself the meaning. From the first year by the sea, to the second year out roaming, to the third year back at the sea, year after year of writing it down, I’d stacked up three volumes and more than a million characters. These things can now be fed to a machine and it analyses out an approximation of the real me; when I was writing them I’d never have imagined that. I planted nothing and the willow grew.
I call that year the year of fighting myself with both hands: one moment thinking this, the next thinking that; one moment in contradiction, one moment in pain, one moment bored, one moment happy, one moment indifferent, one moment empty. Three hundred and more days, going round and round inside that one tangled state.
On December 15 I packed up that little one-room place, put the pack on my back, and went out the door. That year I went nowhere and finished nothing; I only thought myself through, from head to foot.