1. The First Day of Spring: I Came Back to the Sea
February 4, 2026, the first day of spring. That day I left Mangshi, took the early flight, changed planes in Hefei, and got to Qingdao in the afternoon.
I’d been in Mangshi more than a month, and the day I left it was still cloudless. The moment the plane touched down, Qingdao was under heavy fog and there was no sun to be seen. I had dropped straight out of Yunnan’s blue sky into the gray of the north.
I stayed two days in Qingdao. At Zhanqiao Pier the gulls came in flocks and the tourists were thick. The second day the smog got worse; even the photos came out ugly. I walked from Zhanqiao to the Naval Museum, then on to Luxun Park, Xiaoyushan, and the Ocean University, past the wall everybody photographs and Longjiang Road — the comic-strip street. The street was full of young women, and the air smelled of youth. You don’t see that at Silver Beach; Silver Beach has only old people.
The day I arrived I stayed in a youth hostel. I’d been flying all day and hadn’t eaten; I put my bag down and ordered takeout — rice with sea intestine. It struck me as funny: three years and more living by the sea, and I’d never once eaten the dish, and here I was ordering it in Qingdao. At night I went out wandering, up along Zhongshan Road to St. Michael’s Cathedral, and in a lane beside it ate a bowl of tomato soup noodles with snakehead fish; paying with my phone took more than RMB 3 off the bill, and the owner threw in a dish of shredded tofu with wood ear. I’d been to this place in 2023 as well. Then I walked on to Sifang Road in Shangjieli, which has been rebuilt and is lit up like a fairground; only winter is the off-season, and there were hardly any tourists to be seen. Wandering the quiet old streets of Qingdao, for a man with nothing to do, is a happiness in itself.
I’d meant to stay in Qingdao a few more days — it has heating, and I could sit out the big cold snap coming to the north. But the hostel room couldn’t be extended; someone had booked it out from under me. Fine, back I went.
Early on February 6 I took the high-speed train back to Silver Beach. Qingdao to Rushan South Railway Station is an hour and a half, and from the station I took a bus. The whole way the scenery was familiar: bare trees, fields with no green in them, Daru Mountain standing on flat ground in the distance, and the two towers of the sea-crossing bridge almost ready to meet in the middle.
Once I was in Silver Beach the roads were empty and clean. I couldn’t see the sea, but I could guess: with a wind like this, nobody would be going out to look at it. Downstairs every shop was shut. This is Silver Beach in winter — a ghost town, no question. Anyone who likes a crowd would go out of his mind here. I’m not afraid of it.
I turned the water and power back on and threw all my dirty clothes in the washing machine. On the road I’d been washing everything by hand; now at last I could use a machine. Outside, the north wind was blowing force five or six; inside, it was perfectly still. It’s only a rented room, but it’s the only thing that takes me in.
That day the low was minus ten. With sun in the daytime it was bearable; by evening there was nothing to do but lie in bed with the electric blanket on and the air conditioner running, and even then the room only got to twelve degrees. For dinner I had a bowl of instant noodles — I’d been away too long, there were no vegetables in the house and no eggs. Washing up, the tap water was freezing and my hands went numb.
Snow the next day. It started small, like dandruff, big and small by turns, and later came down in clumps blown slantwise by the wind. Only a thin layer settled on the ground, and sometimes the sun was out while it snowed. That was the last snow of this winter. I stood at the window and watched it a long time.
A few days later came New Year’s Eve. I was alone. The firecrackers outside came in waves, and I watched the fireworks over the sea through someone else’s livestream. Somebody was handing out red envelopes in the family group chat; I didn’t dare say anything — I have no money. I didn’t want to send anyone good wishes either, didn’t want to make small talk with a soul. I just wanted to be by myself and have nobody come and bother me.
In the first month of the lunar year my birthday came round — February 18 on the Western calendar, the second day of the new year, which happened to be Rain Water. Forty. Nobody celebrated it with me; only a few banks remembered, and sent a text. I shaved my own head. My hair had gone white and thin anyway; shaved, it felt cleaner.
And so the year went by. One man, one small room, one snowfall, minus ten.
2. What Was Left of Winter
The New Year was over; winter wasn’t. Winter at Silver Beach doesn’t leave until the end of March. For that month I barely went out, and at home I did three things: made sticker packs with AI, made songs with AI, wrote articles.
The AI sticker packs were an album called Mangshi Isn’t Busy — street scenes of Mangshi, banyan trees, palms, drawn out into little pictures one by one. After I put them out, the people in Mangshi who handle publicity actually saw them and said they wanted to share and use them. That gave me a small warm feeling. There were also a few AI-written songs that passed review and got some plays, and there was a little ad money in that — a few coins at a time. Ten or twenty RMB a day, enough to cover what I eat.
It isn’t much money. I did the sum: a year of this comes to ten thousand. Next to a salary, that’s nothing. But I don’t work, I’m on my own, and I spend at most ten thousand a year. Enough to live on. I don’t need more.
Most of the time I did nothing at all; I just lay there. Lying in bed scrolling my phone, watching videos, studying English. March winds blew themselves out: north wind one minute, south wind the next. Some days it was a dust storm blown in from Beijing, the sky a blurred silvery white. Some days heavy fog, the damp pressed against the window. One morning I was woken before dawn by a crunching in the kitchen and took it for a rat; I got up and banged around with the clothes pole for ages and there was nothing. The Chongqing family next door had still been there before I went to Yunnan, and when I came back there was nobody, perfectly quiet — they’ve probably gone back to Chongqing.
I kept listening to Yunnan songs. “There Is a Beautiful Place” from Dehong, the Jingpo Munao Zongge, the Hani “A Jie Guo Guo.” Their music is always so cheerful. I listened to them one after another.
The people of Yunnan are much happier than we are. Only after going there did I understand: you’re happy eating something good, happy drinking something good, happy singing and dancing. I resent that I’m not the sort who can sing and dance; it took me until forty to get this. At home you can find a patch of clear floor and dance; it costs nothing. I ought to learn to sing, learn to dance.
The thirteenth of the first month is the day for the offering to the sea. At Big Thumb Square by the water there were yangge dancers and a dragon dance; unfortunately it rained that day and I didn’t go. By the Lantern Festival they said there would be a total eclipse of the moon and a blood moon, and I didn’t see that either. That’s what it’s like by the sea — plenty of days when the weather won’t cooperate.
One night in bed a question came to me: am I lonely? A singer named Zhang Chu once sang a song called “Lonely People Are Shameful.” I loved that song when I was nineteen, but I have never been a lonely person. These four years I’ve lived alone, and I still don’t know what loneliness is. As a child I ran wild in the hills and fields and every living thing was something for me to watch; when I grew up there were books, music, films; now I have the sea, the sunsets, and a sky full of stars.
I used to say that other people are hell. But the line has a precondition, and the precondition is entanglement. If it’s only the friendship of gentlemen — neither familiar with each other nor in each other’s way — then other people are easy enough to get along with. What I’m afraid of isn’t people; it’s the kind who insist on getting right up next to you, judging you, telling you what to do.
The day of Awakening of Insects, I remembered something: if AI tells you everything, you no longer have to commit those poems to memory. But with no poems in your memory, when you really see a fine prospect and want to recite a line, you can’t bring one out, however hard you try. And that joy you could have felt for yourself is gone. I think I should read more this year — read the Book of Songs, read Su Shi.
I worked out something else too: I’m not tired of the sea; I’ve got used to it. When I first came I had to go out and look at it twice a day; now I can go days without visiting the shore and feel no sense of loss — I’ve got the look of the sea stored in my head. But I don’t want to be trapped by this sea. I can’t turn into a stagnant pond; I have to be moving water, water that can throw up a splash. Four years of watching at the seaside, and it’s time I went from being a spectator to being a maker.
One day I came across an old story about Yue Fei and glanced at his dates — only thirty-eight. Then Wang Bo, twenty-seven; Nie Er, twenty-three. These were names people know, and none of them lived as long as I have. I’m forty, plain and ordinary, and I’ve accomplished nothing, but I’m still healthy and more or less happy. Every day I live beyond them is a day I got for free.
3. That Spring, the Flowers Came Late
In March, the moment the wind turned south, a person came back to life. My range grew too — from home to the shore, from the shore to the market. Silver Beach has a market every five days; I went every time, but bought very little. One person: buy once and it lasts ten days.
The market is all old people. I bought sunflower seeds, bananas, steamed rolls. Free-range eggs taste better than the supermarket’s, even if they cost a bit more. Cabbage is RMB 1, potatoes RMB 2, cauliflower RMB 2.50. The sunflower seeds at the market are RMB 15 a jin, more expensive than meat, and I buy them anyway; cracking seeds is my only snack.
My bike’s back tire went flat and I pushed it to the repair shop; RMB 7. The owner is from Heilongjiang and had just come back from his hometown for the New Year. I asked him what it’s like there, and he said minus thirty-odd, sleeping on a kang, a heated brick bed, that digs into you; nothing much to do in the countryside; but his parents won’t leave, so he has to go back.
With the bike things got much easier. I rode west, all the way to where Chaoxi Lake meets the sea, where the water lies in a sheet of turquoise; then east to the gate of the Happiness Like the Eastern Sea park, which was locked, so I couldn’t get in. There was nobody on the road; you could cross without looking at the lights and it made no difference. The sky was unbelievably blue. If I hadn’t looked my fill I’d have been doing the weather an injustice.
Spring came late. It was mid-March before the magnolias opened, before the apricots showed their first red. I sat on the balcony in the sun and watched the light creep north inch by inch. Same balcony, same chair, and the season changes inside a few feet of space.
On April 1 I rode for three hours without stopping, all the way east. A new commercial street had opened out there — coffee shops, hotels, a university. The reef flat in front of the school had been laid bare by the tide and people were out foraging the shallows. The lighthouse on the point was nearly finished too, all steel frame; no idea what it’s for.
On April 7 I went out to Xiaoshikou again. The village sits at the end of the land, facing the sea. In it lives an old man of ninety-three, sitting in the sun at his own doorway with a stick. I asked him: living this close to the sea, doesn’t it get damp? He said no. Ninety-three, born in 1933. He’s probably never left that village in his whole life.
I climbed down onto the rocks. On the stones the tide had left, there were general clams, shaped like the hat of a Qing official; you have to take one by surprise and dig it off quickly, or it holds on tight. Today wasn’t a weekend and there wasn’t a single person there. The sea was green, like jade, like glass. I stood there a long time.
Going out is how you measure the world. The cities you know from the internet — Kunming, Dali, Lijiang — everyone knows them; but Yunnan also has Nujiang, Dehong, Honghe, Wenshan, Qujing, Zhaotong, and the people who never go there will never know them. Below those cities there are counties less known still — Dehong, besides Mangshi and Ruili, has Yingjiang, Longchuan, and Lianghe. Knowledge from books is secondhand; the road under your own feet is yours.
On the way back I thought: why haven’t these people moved away? Their little houses and the apartment blocks in the big cities — which do they really like better? I can’t work it out. What a life is for, I can’t work that out either. I only know that the sea in April is very beautiful.
4. April 14: The Glowing Sea
On April 11, lying in bed, I remembered a line of Camus: there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
I like talking about life and death with people, and most people won’t. Old people especially won’t; they take it as a curse on them. But what’s so frightening about death. The frightening thing is pain. If death came with no pain at all, everyone would sing its praises.
These last few years the two things I’ve thought about most are dying and living. Think about them enough and they go flat. Anyway, I’m afraid of dying, very afraid, so I have no choice but to live seriously.
The evening of April 14, something happened to me that hadn’t happened in four years of living at Silver Beach.
That night at half past seven I strolled down to the shore, meaning only to film a stretch of pitch-black sea. Back home, at the end of the footage, I saw a point of blue light on the water. I didn’t believe it at first, looked again, and there it was again — a line of blue light at the head of a wave, running from here to there like lightning.
The glowing sea. I’d heard of it, it happens elsewhere, but I had never seen it with my own eyes. I ran down to the water’s edge, but the phone couldn’t catch it: keep filming and it doesn’t show; stop filming and there it is. It came on with the waves, surge after surge. I tried many times and got only a dozen seconds. When I got home I cut all the fragments together, and just barely kept one line of light.
Four years living in this place before I saw it. If you only lived here a year you’d never run into it. Some sights are like that: you have to wait slowly, and you never know when they’ll come. Luck plus persistence — that’s roughly what it means.
April 23 is World Book Day. I haven’t read a book in a long time and I don’t feel ashamed of it — reading is only one way of knowing the world. But words get at the mind and images get at the eye, and I do worry that I’m getting shallower and shallower.
That day I went to Sanguan Pavilion. It’s a good place to look at the sea, but the scenic area has charged admission since November last year — RMB 38. I begrudged it, so I climbed the cliff from the reef flat beside it. The rocks were covered in oyster shells and slippery. At the top the wind was strong and the view was wide. I stood up there a while, then climbed back down.
The sea in April is different every day. I went to watch the fishermen cast their nets, went to Chaoxi Lake to look at the willow branches, went down to the river to watch people fishing. I do nothing at all, just watch, and a day is gone. The emptiness I’d felt before going out had scattered a little too.
5. April 28: The Sky Fell In
In April I was asked to take down a video again. I’d filmed a warning banner the local police station had put up and asked whether Silver Beach really had pyramid schemes; it got a huge number of views. That morning I got a text telling me to hide the video. I did as I was told.
It wasn’t the first time. Last year I filmed burning crop straw and half-finished buildings, and both times I got a call asking me to take them down. I live here, it’s not a day or two, and I’m always afraid they’ll make trouble for me. There’s no malice in them; they’re just too serious, no fun.
But April 28 was different. Before I was even out of bed, several people messaged me to look at the news online — no more talking about lying flat. I read for a long while and my heart dropped.
I’d been a lying-flat blogger for four years, and that was the whole subject. Now I wasn’t allowed to talk about it, and my traffic and my ad money would be gone with it. But there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t set myself against anyone; I can’t even make money, and I still have to live.
I thought about it for a long time that day: what was I going to call myself from now on? Not lying flat, not a hermit. Then: retired. I retired in my thirties anyway, so it isn’t wrong.
Under that news story a commenter had written: please enforce the labor law properly. I looked at that line and laughed a little, and then felt a pang. Young people don’t not want to work; work gives them no end they can see.
Those days my head was a mess. Then I came across a lot of videos mocking the news, and young people are sharp-tongued, but they all know perfectly well why they lie flat. I watched for a while and it stopped hurting so much. Rebellion gets you nowhere; being funny does.
On April 30 the landlord downstairs came up to say the floor slab in his place was seeping and to ask whether my toilet was leaking. I went down to look: a patch of plaster had indeed come off the wall. I didn’t want to deal with it in the least, and I had no choice. Living in the same building as other people, the trouble always finds you.
The same day I changed my phone plan from RMB 58 to RMB 8. I don’t need data; I need quiet. And yet I still sit staring at the numbers on my dashboard every day — how many people watched, how much money that makes. I know it’s a sickness, and I can’t kick it.
On May 1 tourists suddenly poured into Silver Beach in one great wave. Tents went up on the beach, children went barefoot into the water, parents stood by smiling. A few days earlier there hadn’t been a soul here. Standing in that crowd, I felt a little dazed.
6. May: Rain, Damp, and the Idea of a Million
May at Silver Beach never once cleared. If it wasn’t overcast it was heavy fog, and if it wasn’t that it was raining. The rainy season came early this year; other years it doesn’t start till mid- to late June, this year it arrived in mid-May. With no sun to be seen, a person goes moldy inside.
Early in May my toilet broke and water seeped into the flat below. Workers came and broke up the floor and redid the waterproofing; the whole thing dragged on for ten days. The tiler who came was a sixty-two-year-old farmer from a village nearby. I asked him about his pension and he said he had none, only a basic payment of one or two hundred RMB. He crouched on the floor laying tile, crouched there all day. A man like me, who’s only ever sat in an office, couldn’t do that work.
For those ten days I couldn’t use the toilet; I had to use the kitchen sink, or go out into the little stand of trees. The water heater was taken out, so I boiled water to wash my hair. Once the workers were gone I took a hot shower and washed the sheets and the quilt cover. That’s what renting is like: the troubles come at you one at a time.
May 10 was Mother’s Day. I thought of the opening of The Stranger: Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I suppose I’m a stranger myself. I’m barely in touch with my family at all. It isn’t that I don’t want to be; it’s that any contact turns into a fight. Their generation can’t understand why I don’t work, don’t marry, don’t have children, and I don’t want to explain.
Not being in touch — I think that’s a kind of respect too. Respect means not disturbing each other, each person living his own life. They have their pensions, and their old age is no worry of mine; and I can only look after myself.
That month it suddenly hit me that I’m forty. In my twenties, closing on thirty, I had age anxiety; but through my thirties I still felt like a young man. Past forty, I can’t say that with a straight face anymore. My hair is more than half white, and my body has begun to carry the smell of an old man. People who marry and have children come home to noise and life; someone like me, unmarried and childless, is like a lone planet drifting in a dark universe, nothing to hold on to, only emptiness. Happiness is really very simple — it’s a smile. And I haven’t truly smiled in a long time; even the corners of my mouth have gone stiff.
I’ve always felt that everything in this world can be solved with money. I wasn’t willing to accept it, and I wanted to find one thing money can’t solve, and I couldn’t. In my thirties in Beijing I didn’t think this way; now that I don’t work, I’ve come to care more and more about money. Once a person has no money, everything else falls away and money is all that’s left.
All through May I was sunk in anxiety. I wanted to make money; I wanted it so much I couldn’t sleep. I set myself a goal for the rest of my life: earn another million. With a million more I’d be completely free. How to earn it, I had no idea at all. I have only that thin little income, ten thousand a year, and ten thousand years wouldn’t pile up a second million.
People ask me, Silver Beach housing is so cheap, RMB 100,000 buys you a place, why don’t you buy. Three reasons. First, I don’t want to touch that savings — spend RMB 200,000 and I’d never feel settled again. Second, I’m not ready to settle down; I still want to go a few more places and see where suits me best. Third, buying a house doesn’t necessarily buy you peace; there’s a good chance you’d regret it. When will I buy? When I’ve earned another million. With two million I won’t be afraid of anything.
We always talk about drifting as though it were a miserable fate, as if it meant bad luck. But from another angle, isn’t drifting a kind of freedom? A settled life nails you to one place, you can’t go anywhere, and it isn’t necessarily happy. I’d rather treat drifting as a challenge to a boring life.
Wang Wei has a line: “As the years go by, give me but peace, freedom from ten thousand matters.” I often use it to describe myself. I don’t like hearing the sound of human voices; most people’s voices are noise to me. And yet sometimes in the middle of the night I feel bereft, as though I were the only person left in the world.
The night of May 30 I was lying in bed with the lights off when three words suddenly came clear to me: freedom is the easiest, happiness is hard to get, and peace is the same as death.
Freedom is the easiest — two words, no fear. Whatever you aren’t afraid of, that’s what you’re free of. The fewer things I’m afraid of, the freer I am. Happiness is one word, a smile — and I haven’t truly smiled in a long time. As for peace, so long as a person is alive there are troubles, and with troubles there’s no peace. Real peace is something only the dead have.
Working out those three words, I let out a long breath, and felt a little bereft too. As if there were nothing left in life to go after. That’s probably the bad thing about forty: you’ve thought your way through the questions, and there’s no kick in it anymore.
May’s earnings came to a bit over two thousand. March was a thousand, and January and February together a thousand. Which makes six thousand for the first five months. Better than the years before — 2023 came to six thousand for the whole year, 2024 to eight thousand, nine thousand last year. This year I should make over ten thousand. Enough to spend, and that’s all.
7. June: Qingdao, and Switching to Talking My Diary
On June 1 I’d meant to go to Qingdao for a couple of days to clear my head; I packed my things and only then found the train tickets were sold out. I got one the next day. Rushan South Railway Station to Qingdao, an hour and a half.
In Qingdao I stayed in a homestay, RMB 114 a night. Right next to Xiaoyushan. The old town’s red tiles, yellow walls, green trees, blue sky — the Germans built it back then, and it’s beautiful. If I had money I’d buy a flat here and settle; but I have no money, so I can only stay a few days.
In Qingdao there are young people everywhere, and pretty girls. Spend long enough at Silver Beach among old people and you turn into an old person yourself, smelling of old age. I need to look at young people more.
But the next day heavy fog came up and there was nothing to see. That night firefighters showed up downstairs — somebody had reported seeing a snake. Big cities are wonderful: a snake gets into the compound and you can call it in, and the firefighters come at midnight. The third day I went back to Silver Beach.
There was another purpose to the trip, a bit of scouting for the return to Yunnan. I wanted to test whether I still had the stamina and the appetite for travel. The answer: the stamina’s still there, but I get tired. Back home I looked at myself in the mirror and thought youth is gone for good.
In June I changed the way I keep my diary. It used to be typing — one or two thousand characters a day, and my eyes went blurry. Now I talk: I talk at the computer, AI turns it into text, and all I have to do is look it over and change a bit here and there. From June on, most of my diary is written with my mouth. Hands freed, and a good deal more words besides.
June 13 is the day the sun rises earliest in the year — it was light before half past four; the latest sunset doesn’t come until June 28, when the sun doesn’t go down till a quarter past seven. I’d always assumed it was the solstice. It isn’t. It’s a piece of useless trivia, and I wrote it down anyway.
A friend asked me what my ideal is. I thought about it — my ideal is to loaf about and wander here and there. When I’ve had enough, go home and cook.
June 19, the Dragon Boat Festival. An obstacle-course game show called Happy Charge Ahead opened at Silver Beach, three days of it. It’s one of the few big events of the year here, and a few young competitors came. There are more and more young people at Silver Beach — probably because work is hard to find, and they come here to rest a while.
June 22, I was chatting with a friend in Beijing. She said she’d had a very bad relationship and thought that dating was just wasting time. I said something that surprised even me: time is for wasting. The more I think about it, the truer it gets. Chinese people have to find a meaning in everything, but life is for wasting. So long as you’re happy while you waste the time, it isn’t a waste.
June 24, my friend in Dali said he was leaving Yunnan. I thought about it and booked a flight — the day after tomorrow, via Chenzhou in Hunan to Kunming, RMB 620. I’d meant to go in early July; now it was moved up. Five whole months at Silver Beach without going anywhere, and it was time to get out.
8. Western Yunnan: From Weishan to Mangshi
On June 25 I flew out of Qingdao, changed planes in Chenzhou, and reached Kunming in the small hours of the 26th; I slept a few hours in the airport, took the high-speed train to Dali in the morning, and got to Benchang village in Fengyi township at noon, where my friend came to collect me.
Dali was the same little courtyard, RMB 100 a month for rent, only now it was summer, and not like last winter. The first two days I slept on the sofa and the mosquitoes left my arms covered in welts; the third day I moved in and squeezed onto one bed with my friend. I stayed five or six days in Dali and made one trip out to Shaxi, an old town in Jianchuan. The old town has gone thoroughly commercial and isn’t much to look at, but in the village Benzhu temple the names written up there, all of them surnamed Ouyang, were really beautifully brushed.
July 1, we rented a car and set off from Dali, west and south. First stop Weishan. Weishan was the old capital of Nanzhao; the old town is small and lovely, much quieter than Dali’s, the gate tower is low, and standing in the street you can see the mountains far off the whole time. On the wall of the gate tower were pasted death notices, white paper with black characters, saying whose elder had died, at what age, and who the children and grandchildren were. When the three years of mourning are up, white turns to red. The custom is still alive.
Second stop, Baoshan. Baoshan’s old town is long gone, bombed in the war of resistance; only the Renshou Gate is left. But in the museum I learned something new: in ancient times this was called the Ailao kingdom. Yang Shen, who wrote “On and on the Great River rolls, racing east,” was exiled here.
Third stop, Tengchong. To get to Tengchong you cross the Gaoligong Mountains; the road tunnel is three kilometers, and the rail tunnel is still being bored — they say it won’t open until 2028. On the way we passed Lujiangba, only six hundred-odd meters above sea level, and it turned hot all at once; by the roadside I saw jackfruit hanging on the trees for the first time. In Bingmen village there’s the largest banyan in Asia, and under it an old Dai woman selling jackfruit — one weighed seven kilos, and I haggled her down to RMB 10.
Further south is Dehong. Lianghe is the smallest county in Dehong, and its streets are hung with jackfruit too; it’s the home of the hulusi. Yingjiang has the liveliest Munao Zongge — eight at night, on the square, Jingpo people dancing in circles around the Munao pillars. The one leading is called the Naoshuang, in full festival dress, and the girls following behind are prettier one than the next, with a dozen or so people livestreaming. The moment the music starts, everybody wants to dance.
Longchuan is the recognised home of the Munao Zongge, but that day its online celebrities had all gone to Beijing to tape a programme, and only a few uncles and aunties were left dancing on the square. I saw two things here: one was the Husa knife, forged by the Achang, taught to them by Ming soldiers, handed down for centuries; the other was Wang Xiaobo’s old residence. Wang Xiaobo was a sent-down youth here when he was young, and later wrote it into Golden Age. The mountain he wrote about is called Zhangfeng, just behind the town.
Ruili is the best-known city in Dehong, but these last few years it’s been going downhill. I went to see the Jiele Golden Pagoda, the Zongfo Temple, and the Nongdao Dai temple at the far southwest corner. On the road out to Nongdao, sheet-metal border walls stood in lines across the paddy fields, tight as a drum. Somebody online joked that Trump’s border wall with Mexico was a small thing next to this. Whether the wall is worth the money I can’t work out, but I do know it’s not my business to worry about.
Going north from Ruili is Mangshi. On the way we passed Longling and turned off to see the Songshan battlefield ruins. On the hill stand rows of statues: boy soldiers, women soldiers, gunners, veterans, generals, and the Allied Flying Tigers. It was pouring rain, and standing in front of that row of boy soldiers I felt terrible. I think I should go to places like that less from now on; my heart can’t take it.
I got to Mangshi on July 7. I’d been there last winter; this time it was the rainy season. Mangshi really does rain: the first five days were all overcast and wet and I never saw the sun once. Hot in the day, muggy at night, two steps and you’re soaked in sweat. One afternoon it suddenly cleared, and that night a downpour started, hammering on the sheet-metal roofs like someone pounding on them. I got up to look: the water off the eaves came down like beads off a snapped string.
I used to think of living in Mangshi a whole year. Now that summer has come I’ve changed my mind. In summer it rains too much here and there are too few clear days — and I don’t like rain to begin with, don’t like not being able to see the sun. It’s only good for winter. From now on I’ll use Silver Beach as my base: when winter gets cold, go south; when summer gets hot, find somewhere cool. Mangshi — winter is enough.
9. Yunnan and Guizhou: From Qujing to Duyun
On July 20 I left Mangshi. I’d meant to stay a few more days at the youth hostel, but a guest suddenly moved in and broke up my quiet. I bought my tickets that same day: Mangshi to Baoshan by bus, RMB 70; Baoshan to Kunming by high-speed rail, RMB 180; then from Kunming a connection to Qujing.
Changing trains in Kunming, the high-speed train was late, I missed my connection, and I had to rebook. What I got was a K-number slow train with no seats, and I stood for an hour and a half. The carriage was packed: people sitting on the floor, people by the toilet, people standing in the aisle, most of them Yunnanese going to work in Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Some had children, and the children sat right in the aisle, and whenever anybody came past they had to be moved. The snack cart pushed up and down: beer, soft drinks, mineral water, sunflower seeds, peanuts, eight-treasure porridge. I looked at them and felt awful.
Qujing was nice and cool; the locals nickname it “Qiu Jing,” begging for peace and quiet. At night it was around twenty degrees. I heard from a taxi driver that flue-cured tobacco was the money-maker here, and that a lot of Sichuan people come to escape the heat in summer. I ate a bowl of steamed rice noodles at the night market, the first time I’d seen them made that way; then I went to see the Cuan Baozi stele, a first-class national artifact. I couldn’t read a single character on it, but the shop signs and slogans all over Qujing use that style of calligraphy.
On July 22 I took the train north to Liupanshui, China’s cool capital. The moment I came out of the station I saw the slogan saying how cool it was here. Liupanshui is a new city, built from nothing in the 1960s during the Third Front construction, which is why its roads are laid out more neatly than Qujing’s. The hotel I stayed in was awful, like the shady inns in the movies, and it cost more than Qujing’s — too many people come here to escape the heat, so the prices went up.
July 23, Anshun. Anshun has Huangguoshu Falls, famous all over the country, but the ticket is RMB 160 and you have to buy a RMB 50 shuttle as well, and the transport there and back is another expense. I wandered around the city for half a day and in the end didn’t go. These years I have one rule when I travel: no scenic spot that’s too expensive.
July 25, Xingyi — this is where mutton rice noodles actually come from. The next day I went to the Ten Thousand Peaks Forest and the Maling River. The Ten Thousand Peaks Forest is a great spread of rounded hills, like Guilin; the Maling River is a gorge with waterfalls down both sides, a white curtain coming down, cool air in your face. Given a choice between mountains and water, I still prefer water. I stood there a long time.
July 27, Zunyi. Zunyi was hot, thirty-two in the daytime. I went to the site of the Zunyi Conference; it was very crowded, the little building where the meeting was held was under repair and closed, and I only saw the memorial hall. There I made up a lesson: Guizhou’s one-character abbreviation is Qian, which means black, and the Wu River was called the Qian River in ancient times.
July 28, Guiyang. Guiyang was the biggest city on the whole trip. I stayed in a compound called Huaguoyuan — they say it has three or four hundred buildings, each forty or fifty storeys, and you look up and can’t see the sky. I was on the seventeenth floor — the highest I’ve ever lived in my life. At night I went to see the Jiaxiu Pavilion, and I learned something else: Wang Yangming had his enlightenment at Longchang, which is in Xiuwen County, under Guiyang. The next day I went to Qianling Mountain Park, and there I saw a panda for the first time — both of them asleep.
July 31, the Xijiang Miao village, a thousand households. The Miao houses are built up the hillside, all over the slope. I looked at the local women’s hairdos, coiled high with a flower and a comb stuck in — I asked and was told that’s a Tang and Song style, because the Miao lived up in the mountains and kept the look of a thousand years ago. Everywhere on the street were girls in full costume having their pictures taken, but that isn’t how they dress day to day.
August 1, the Zhaoxing Dong village. The Dong villages are famous for their drum towers; there are five here, named for propriety, wisdom, benevolence, righteousness, and fidelity, and they say they’re all mortise-and-tenon, not one nail used. From the village I went up the hill to the Tang’an Dong village and back, switching vehicles several times. AI told me the last bus was at half past nine, and I rushed back in a panic, and the man checking tickets said there was still a bus at twelve. All for one wrong answer, and I missed the Dong village lit up at night.
August 2, I crossed the provincial line into Sanjiang Dong Autonomous County in Liuzhou, Guangxi, twenty-odd minutes by high-speed rail. At university I was on a forum, and on that forum was someone called Wu Hongfei, a Dong girl who’d gone to Tsinghua, who later started a band and later still went back to study Dong choral singing. She was where I first heard of Sanjiang. This time I finally came. The wind-and-rain bridges of the Chengyang villages are famous; the river runs loud underneath them, green paddy fields on both banks, and when the rain came I ducked into a straw shelter and watched it.
August 4, Duyun in Qiannan. It’s a city I’d never heard of, yet it’s the seat of Qiannan prefecture — because it sits at the crossing of the Guiyang-Guangzhou and Guiyang-Nanning high-speed lines. Duyun produces Maojian tea, and the streets are full of tea shops. There wasn’t much else to see, so I went to the old flagstone street and ate a chongchong gao, a little steamed rice cake, for RMB 4.
On the afternoon of August 5 I took the high-speed train from Duyun to Longdongbao Airport in Guiyang, flew to Xiamen at nine that night, and the next morning flew from Xiamen to Qingdao. The whole Yunnan-Guizhou trip felt like a long dream.
10. Back by the Sea: Four Years, Four Moods
On the afternoon of August 6 I was back at Silver Beach. Xiamen had been muggy, Qingdao dry and hot, and Silver Beach was dry and hot too, thirty-five degrees. There were far more tourists in the compound than when I left, and the beach was all parents with children. I went in the water too — nothing on but a pair of underpants; the sea was warm, the beach sloped away gently, and you could walk out a long way and still only be chest-deep.
The next day was the first day of autumn. That evening at the night market I ran into a man who rode past staring at me, and stared a long while before he spoke, asking whether I was Diogenes by the Sea. I said I was. He said his name was Xiake Xu — Xu the knight-errant — and four years ago it was watching his videos that first told me about Silver Beach. I’d lain here four years and only today met the man in person. He said he hadn’t done as well as I had with his own media, and I said: an ordinary person can’t do this well — you have to be sick to do it.
Once it cooled down, I settled inside too. This time I’d been drifting around outside for forty-some days, and that was enough. The day after I got back I felt that Silver Beach was where my heart belonged and I didn’t want to be anywhere else. August, September, October, November, December — five months I won’t go out. Autumn is the best season here.
Having gone all the way around, I also worked out what these four years have been. The first year, October 2022 to 2023: fresh. Just arrived, curious about everything, watching the sea, going to market, learning the plants, happy. The first year of my own media I made six thousand.
The second year, steady. I’d lived here a year, my head had settled, and I wasn’t bored yet. The second year I made eight thousand. By then I believed it: I can keep living without a job.
The third year, emptiness. At the end of 2024 I went out and made another big loop — Yunnan, Hainan, Guangdong, Tibet — and when I’d finished it I found the seaside was still better and came back, and didn’t go out a single day, stayed two hundred and eighty-two days. Stay too long and you start on the big questions, and thinking about them too much turns into emptiness. The same state Camus wrote about.
The fourth year, confusion. This year I don’t deal with anyone, don’t marry, don’t make friends, and barely keep in touch with home. Alone like that, all that’s left is a kind of confusion. The American poet Eliot wrote The Waste Land, and he wrote The Hollow Men too. I feel a bit like what he wrote — going my own way, always turning over one question: whether a person has to have anything to do with society at all.
If you don’t deal with people, the ordinary pleasures are always out of reach — eating and drinking, men and women, all of it needs a crowd. But the moment you deal with people you fall into another kind of unhappiness. Sartre said that hell is other people. I’m stuck in the middle and can’t get out.
Confucius said, “At forty, I had no doubts.” I’m forty this year, and there’s still a great deal I can’t work out. But I think that’s probably what a life is — thinking on and on, solving one problem after another. Not being able to work it out isn’t such a bad thing either.
Years ago I used to say that a person has to go out and see the world. Now I think if I really had enough money, I probably wouldn’t go out at all — I’d stay home every day, eat and sleep. Saying that out loud, even I don’t believe it. People are just contradictory like that.
One thing I’ve worked out about halfway: being free and not being afraid are the same thing. Whatever you don’t fear is what you’re free of. And happiness is not comparing. But understanding it isn’t enough. To really be happy, you have to laugh out loud. And I haven’t laughed in a long time.
So by the end of the year I had another thought: a person still has to move. At home you overthink; out in the world you overspend; neither is good. But a man who moves lives and a tree that moves dies. Moving is always better than being stuck where you are. This winter I might go to Hainan, ride a bike around the island, find a place and stay a while, and see what the islands and the tropics there are actually like.
I don’t know where I’ll spend this winter, or where I’ll be this time next year. I only know that in four years I haven’t really accomplished anything and haven’t saved any money — I’ve just learned from the beginning how one person ought to live by the sea. And as for what comes next — I still want to move. Move, and maybe a new direction shows up.