Su Shi wrote: “How I resent that this body is not mine to keep; when will I be done with all this scurrying? The night is late, the wind is still, the fine ripples lie flat. From here the little boat drifts away; I leave my remaining years to rivers and seas.”
In the middle of July last year I made up my mind to quit. I stayed another month and a half at the place where I worked, then formally handed in my resignation, and after a month of going through the paperwork I had no job and I was a free man. I said goodbye to my friends in Beijing and left for Weihai on October 23. The pandemic wasn’t over yet, and traveling was still a real nuisance. I spent three days in Weihai, then took a bus to the legendary ghost town, the Hegang by the sea — the Rushan Silver Beach coastal resort — and began my new life. By the end of October this year I had lived a full year in Rushan Silver Beach: the quiet shore, the so-called ghost town.
Why did I quit? Because I had spent a full seven years in Beijing, long enough for the seven-year itch (if you’ll allow the comparison). Beijing felt like a cage to me, and I could see no future in it. Even if I worked for the rest of my life, I could never afford an apartment there. And if I forced myself to buy one, I would only be more trapped in that cage, pinned under the Five Finger Mountain the way the Monkey King was, never to rise again. I did not want to be a mortgage slave, carrying a loan on my back. The other reason was the misery of the work itself. If the job hadn’t been so stressful, I would gladly have stayed. But the scheming between the boss and my colleagues, and rules and regulations drawn tighter and tighter around my head, left me on the edge of a breakdown. I couldn’t stand it.
I chose to live in a small town by the sea because I love the sea. I think most people from inland dream of living by the sea. And since I was used to the climate of the north, I considered only northern coastal cities, and I figured the Jiaodong peninsula was the best place in the world for a human being to live. At first I thought of the big cities — Qingdao, Yantai, Weihai — but the cost of living there was too high, and I had no job, so I had to save. Weihai was relatively cheap, but downtown Weihai was dearer than Rongcheng, and Rongcheng dearer than Rushan. Only Rushan Silver Beach was cheapest of all. By then the internet was already buzzing with talk that Rushan Silver Beach was a ghost town, but before I came here I had no idea what the place was really like.
How cheap are the apartments at Rushan Silver Beach? Take renting first. For three or four thousand a year you can rent a big two-bedroom apartment; a shabbier one goes for two thousand a year; anything over five thousand a year is a very good place. The apartment I rented was a two-bedroom, eighty-five square meters, with a big bright balcony, and it cost me only RMB 4,000 a year. In Beijing I shared an apartment with other people and paid RMB 3,500 a month for a tiny partitioned room that never saw the sun all year. As places to live, one is heaven and the other is hell. As for buying: ordinary secondhand apartments in Silver Beach run two or three thousand per square meter, and a top floor or an attic, being higher up, costs only a few tens of thousands of RMB.
Most of the apartments here are empty; nobody lives in them. Some people joke that a lot of them are used to keep urns of ashes, which is why at night the place is full of ghosts. This is a seaside resort. The people who buy here are all retired, and they only come in numbers during the three summer months. In the other months there are very few people, and in winter especially almost nobody stays, because most of these compounds have no central heating. That is what makes it a ghost town. In recent years, though, a scattering of young people have taken a liking to the place and come here to lie flat. They post videos online introducing Silver Beach, and its name gets better and better known — but the number of people hasn’t grown much.
Without central heating it’s hard for old people to stay, and northerners are used to radiators; no northerner can do without heat. For southerners, no heating isn’t such a bad thing, and the north is dry and mostly sunny — even by the sea it isn’t damp — so southerners love it here. And Rushan Silver Beach is out in the countryside, fifteen kilometers from Rushan proper. There’s no shopping mall, no movie theater, no KFC or McDonald’s or Starbucks. Public transport is hopeless. After dark it’s pitch black, and there is nothing to do but go to bed early. Young people can’t handle the silence and the loneliness out here. All there is here is the sea, the blue sky, and good air.
When people call Silver Beach a ghost town they mostly mean the winter, when there are almost no people at all. Spring and autumn are very quiet too. But in summer there is no shortage of people here. They are only tourists staying a day or two, or residents who come for a month or two, but it is lively and full of energy — young parents, or grandparents, bringing their children for the summer holidays; the sea is full of kids thrashing about and the beach is packed. The hotels, restaurants, and barbecue stalls that had been shut for months spring up like mushrooms; there are concerts and beer festivals on the sand, and it is still noisy at nine or ten at night. But the liveliness lasts only through June, July, and August. After that it goes quiet again.
Even though summer brings more people, against the enormous number of apartments here they still look few. In summer a building might hold seven or eight households; by winter two or three are left, and it is common enough to find a whole building with a single household, or with nothing in it at all. The building I live in has only two households in winter, and at night the compound is as quiet as a vacuum — you could hear a leaf drop. There are no people and no cars on the streets, and the seafront is empty; the whole beach belongs to you alone. Winter nights come early, and with no heating I crawl into bed at five or six, switch on the electric blanket, curl up under it with my phone, and I can be asleep before ten.
And aren’t I exactly the kind of person who likes quiet? The whole point of quitting was to stop working and rest for a year — to take a gap year. In the big city the pressure on me was too great: the crush of the high-rises, the crowding of the crowds, the noise of the traffic, the smog and the dust storms every so often, the way you could hardly ever see the natural world or wild animals and plants, the endless tangling between people. I was tired of it, sick of it. I wanted to find a quiet place in the countryside to stay — good air, good surroundings, a sea to look at, few people, nature all around, and above all a low cost of living (cheap rent). I also wanted to give up meat, to stop eating it, and to stop drinking cola, and to live plainly, frugally, and simply.
There’s no air pollution here, no noise pollution, no harsh light pollution. There is only the blue sky, the clean sea, fresh air, birdsong and flowers, frogs croaking and insects chirring. I’ve heard that a lot of old people come here and the illnesses they used to suffer from elsewhere stop bothering them, and their mood improves too. Rushan itself likes to boast that it is a hometown of long life. But why isn’t the place crowded? Because the whole of Weihai is a tourist city. It has no heavy industry and no good schools, and tourism, farming, and fishing can’t hold on to young people. People in Shandong joke that Weihai has no young people. And Rushan, the county-level city under it, has even fewer.
I came to Rushan Silver Beach at the end of October last year, and by then there were already very few people left. After September the population drops by two thirds. There’s a small bump over the National Day holiday, but after that it falls even further. And last year we were still in the middle of the pandemic, so there were few people here to begin with. When I first arrived I still had to go for a Covid test every day, wear a mask, and scan a health code to get on a bus or into a supermarket — complicated and heartless, a real torment. Fortunately there are so few people here that outside you neither come into contact with anyone nor see more than a handful, and you don’t have to worry about catching anything from anybody. Some of the young hermits don’t leave the house for a month, and nobody bothers them about the Covid test.
When Beijing first opened up, I heard, a lot of people got infected, and then it spread to other big cities, small cities, county towns, the countryside — countless people went through that painful stretch. But in Silver Beach I had nothing to fear, because there was simply nobody here. It wasn’t until June of the following year that people started to increase, and the ghost town stopped being a ghost town except in name. And in the end I caught Covid too, in early August, when there were the most people around. It was my first time getting it, and luckily it wasn’t serious; the symptoms were gone in four or five days. I think if the lockdowns had gone on forever, in the ghost town of Silver Beach I would never have been infected in my life. But life has to look forward and move forward; it can’t stand still.
If you ask me which season at Silver Beach I like best, I’d say every season here is good. I like spring and summer and autumn and winter. I like watching nature: the rise and fall of the tide, the turning of the stars, the moon waxing and waning, the sunlight moving across my balcony — at the summer solstice it comes in straightest, at the winter solstice most aslant. In summer it rains and the air turns clammy; in winter it snows and the wind cuts. The leaves turn green, then yellow, then fall, then bud again. The flowers bloom and wither. The winter wheat comes through the winter, grows tall, flowers, heads out, ripens, and is harvested; the corn is golden too. The swallows fly south and come back north; the magpies and sparrows stay. The frogs croak loudly in midsummer.
If I absolutely had to pick one season, I would pick winter. Winter here is cold — the temperature drops to minus thirteen degrees — and there is no heating, so indoors it is only five or six degrees, and I spend long hours curled up in bed with the electric blanket on. The wind off the sea blows constantly; as the saying goes, “Weihai has wind twice a year, and each time it lasts six months.” Going down to the beach to watch the sunset, my hands and face often go stiff with cold. But I still love the bleakness of winter here — the real ghost town, utterly peaceful, as if the whole universe had only me left in it, with no one and nothing to disturb me. I want inner calm, and to live out my life in freedom. That is only possible here.
Before I came to Silver Beach my time was divided into workdays and days off, and I was a beast of burden. Since I came here I have no workdays at all; every day is a holiday. And I no longer count the days by the day of the week but by the day of the lunar month. The tides follow the moon: the first and the fifteenth are the spring tides, and those are the best days to forage the shallows and watch the tide. The country markets run on the lunar calendar too, not the week — the first of the month is the Changjiazhuang market, the second is the Gongjiazhuang market, the fifth is the Xiaotan market. Since I don’t remember that today is Monday, I don’t have to fret about going to work; since I don’t remember that today is Friday, I don’t think about going out to cut loose at night. Every day I am calm and free and happy, like clear water in a little stream.
Living inland, you don’t need to remember what day of the lunar month it is, because you don’t forage the shallows. Foraging the shallows is such fun — and not only fun: it can put food on your table. Dig up enough clams and pick up enough crabs and you can eat for days. Even just standing to one side watching the fishermen at their busy work, with the gulls wheeling overhead, is interesting. Foraging the shallows depends on the spring tides. When the spring tide goes out it bares a flat, wide beach; walking on it and looking around you, it is vast and easy. When the spring tide comes in the water surges and the waves thunder — Cao Cao himself would have had to write a poem. Sitting in the sun, foraging the shallows, watching the tide, watching the sunset — that is my daily round.
The country market was a new experience for me too. In the big city I had no idea what a market was for; the city has supermarkets and no need of markets. There is one right outside my compound, open on the fifth and the tenth of the lunar month. I eat so little that since I came here I have never gone to a supermarket again (the nearest one is a twenty-minute walk), and I rarely buy things online — I gave up the big online shopping platform long ago and use only a cheaper one. At first I was too embarrassed even to ask the price; later I was chatting with the vendors like an old hand. I seem to have settled into country life by the sea. I like dealing with farmers more and more, and I like the city less and less.
I eat very plain food — for my health, and to save money. At the market I buy only potatoes, cabbage, eggs, and fruit. I never buy meat, and I no longer eat any red meat at all. I ate far too much meat in the past, and now meat disgusts me. I have given up cola too; I drink only plain boiled water. I eat twice a day instead of three times, because I don’t burn much energy, and if you don’t burn much you don’t need to eat much. Eating little and plain, I lost ten kilos — the fat on my belly disappeared, my abs appeared, my cheekbones stuck out. And because I eat no meat and no sugar, my teeth are clean — so clean that I can go four or five days without brushing and my mouth still feels fresh.
There is no takeout in Silver Beach (not enough of it to count), so I have to cook for myself. In the big city I ordered takeout all the time; when I came here I uninstalled every delivery app. I had never cooked before and didn’t know how; I learned quickly enough, or I would have starved. Nobody lives more plainly than I do. Zhuangzi said, “Plainness — nothing in the world can compete with it in beauty.” At noon I boil rice and stir-fry a dish — one vegetable dish — and fry two eggs, and that is my lunch. In the evening I usually eat noodles, dried noodles or instant noodles, with some cabbage leaves and one or two eggs thrown in, and that is my dinner. I don’t ask for much food, and I don’t eat meat; all I want is plain nourishment and a clean body.
I hardly socialize at all either. Going to market is my only social life in Silver Beach. Just as I don’t eat meat, I have no appetite for socializing. I am not shy — I am just tired of it. I think most socializing is completely meaningless. Some young people who also live in Silver Beach have asked to meet up, and I have politely declined them all. People ask: with such a plain diet and no social life, what’s the pleasure in a life like that? What I would say is: I like to be close to nature, and that means keeping away from crowds and not getting tangled up with people. I’m a fan of Thoreau. After I came to Silver Beach I read Walden properly, all the way through; I had opened it many times before but never had the patience for more than a few pages.
No social life in the real world, but there is one online. I post videos explaining what life is like here and answering people’s questions. At first I had no idea you could make money posting videos, but gradually I built up some followers and some traffic, and it turned out I could earn a little. That is something I never expected before I quit. So a lot of things you simply cannot predict — just go and do them, go and do them bravely, don’t worry about what comes later. In Silver Beach, if you can earn RMB 20,000 a year, you can lie flat forever. People are simply controlled by their desires, and desire is a bottomless pit. Lower your desires and you’ll actually be a little happier.
When I quit we were still in the middle of the pandemic, and nobody knew how long it would last; luckily the restrictions were lifted at the end of the year. After three months in Silver Beach I was a bit bored, so without doing any research at all I bought a train ticket to Lhasa. I spent a few days in Lhasa, then went back to my hometown to see my family. I came back to Silver Beach, and afterwards went to Qingdao, to Xiamen and Quanzhou, to Beijing and Jiagedaqi, and to Urumqi, Kashgar, and Turpan in Xinjiang. Since I had quit, I had all the time in the world, and as long as I was careful with money I ought to go and look around. It is precisely because I quit that I am able to go and look around. Having a job is like being in prison: you have money, but no freedom.
People ask me: so what will you do later on? And others ask: do you have social insurance? What I would say is: people don’t live in order to be anxious. “The years of a lifetime do not reach a hundred, yet they contain a thousand years’ sorrow. When days are short and the dull nights long, why not take a lamp and wander forth? If you want to be happy you must do it now; there is no waiting till an after-time.” I have said before: in Silver Beach I spend at most RMB 20,000 a year, so if you have RMB 100,000 you can do nothing at all and live happily for five years. And if you can earn a little on top of that, you are a perpetual motion machine. As for illness, old age, and death — why do you keep thinking about those when you are still young? We Chinese have a belief that the more you think about a thing, the more likely it is to happen. Besides, only happiness can make you healthy.
What is happiness? Happiness is not comparing yourself with others. What is freedom? Freedom is not being afraid. If I hadn’t come to Rushan Silver Beach I might never have understood these simple truths. In the big city my eyes were blindfolded and my mind was muddled; I was like a stray lamb sunk in the mud. I am a country child; I will always love open country. Life should be open country. “He is no longer a city dweller who has even once in his life caught a perch, or seen how, on clear and cool autumn days, flocks of migrating thrushes drift over a village. Until his death he will be drawn to freedom.”
I renewed the lease on my place in Silver Beach for another year and began my second year of happy small-town life by the sea: still watching the sun rise and set, the tide come in and go out, the stars turn, spring flowers and autumn fruit, the wheel of the universe. Maybe one day I’ll tire of it, but that is for later; what is later can wait. “Sing when you win, stop when you lose; too much worry and too much hate go on and on. If there is wine today, be drunk today; if there is sorrow tomorrow, be sorrowful tomorrow.” The ancients taught us so many truths — don’t leave them sitting in books. “Death and life have their determined appointment; riches and honor depend upon Heaven.” “Man’s life between heaven and earth is like a white colt passing a crevice — gone in an instant.” Don’t worry, don’t fret; fretting is no use. It only gets you to see that god a little sooner.
November 3, 2023, Rushan Silver Beach Resort, Weihai, Shandong.