Escaped Beijing. Came to a ghost town. Four years by the sea.
“Being free and not being afraid are the same thing.”
A man hands in his resignation in Beijing, takes a coach to the coast, and rents a flat by an empty sea for four thousand yuan a year. This is the whole of it — the ledger, the weather, and four years alone.
— Introduction —
A drifter in Beijing, seven years in the city. In those seven years he paid rent, couldn’t buy a place, had two relationships that went nowhere, and had nothing else to show for it. The job was nine to five, pressure stacked on pressure. Then came the pandemic years — Covid tests, alerts, quarantine — and the days were squeezed tight. He couldn’t say which part was worst. He knew only one thing: he wasn’t free. Not in the least.
So he quit his job outright. Gave up the apartment, handed back the keys, and got on a train heading south, alone.
The place he went was a ghost town — Rushan Silver Beach, by the sea. The buildings were new, the people few. Once winter passed, nothing was left on the whole street but wind. The supermarket shut early, the streetlights were dark, nobody walked. He lived there four years.
In those four years he figured some things out, and plenty more he hasn’t figured out to this day. In between he went off on several long trips — Yunnan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Guizhou, Guangdong, Hainan — traveled to a great many places, wanting to see whether there was somewhere in China that suited him better. When the traveling was done, he still came back to the sea.
He still doesn’t work, doesn’t socialize, doesn’t date. He just wanders this world on his own.
This book is about those four years.
— Table of contents —
10 chapters. Read in order, or open anywhere.
— What’s inside —
— Advance praise —
English first, Chinese beneath.
“Most books about quitting turn out to be books about the job. This one is about rent, wind, low tide and the price of soy sauce — and it is the calmest account I know of a life taken apart and put back together, one ordinary Thursday at a time.”
“写“不干了”的书，最后往往变成写那份工作。这一本写的是房租、风、退潮和酱油的价钱。一个人把生活拆开，又在无数个平常的星期四里重新装好——这是我读过最平静的一份记录。”
— Eleanor Voss, The Tide Almanac
埃莉诺·沃斯，《潮汐历》
“A man gives up the city and moves into a flat by an empty sea, and then — this is the unusual part — he keeps the receipts. Year by year, yuan by yuan, winter by winter. The result is less a memoir than a set of accounts that happens to be very moving.”
“一个人放弃城市，搬到空海边的一间屋子里住下。难得的是——他把每一笔账都留着。一年一年、一块一块、一个冬天一个冬天。读下来它不太像回忆录，倒像一本刚好很动人的账单。”
— Tomás Iriarte, A Geography of Idleness
托马斯·伊里亚特，《懒惰地理学》
“Other countries have their hermits and their dropouts. It seems China now has a man in a rented flat with a notebook and a calculator. He never argues. He writes down what the day cost and what the sea did, and by the last page the argument has made itself.”
“别的国家有隐士，也有主动退场的人。中国似乎终于有了一个——坐在出租屋里，手里一个本子、一个计算器。他从不争辩。他只写下今天花了多少、海是什么样子；翻到最后一页，结论自己站了出来。”
— Sarah Okonkwo, Small Rebellions
莎拉·奥孔克沃，《小小的反叛》
“Nobody should read this book looking for permission. It gives none, and says so on nearly every page — no work here, mostly old people, winter a decision rather than a season. What it gives instead is rarer: an actual year, costed and dated, with no conclusion bolted on.”
“别指望从这本书里拿到许可。它一点也没有，而且几乎每一页都在说：这里没有工作，镇上大多是老人，冬天是一个决定而不是一个季节。它给你的是更稀罕的东西——一个真实的、标了价的、带日期的年份，后面没有硬接一个结论。”
— Rei Arai, The Practice of Doing Nothing
荒井零，《什么都不做的练习》
“I have read a great many books about doing nothing. This is the first one in which nothing actually happens, and it is almost unbearable, and it is the truest thing I have read about a coast in winter.”
“关于“什么都不做”的书，我读过不少。这是第一本真的什么都没发生的。它几乎让人受不了——也正是我读过的、关于冬天的海岸最诚实的一本书。”
— Lin Zhiyuan, The Slow Boat South
林知远，《慢船去南方》
— The author —