People should stay where there is no ceiling. — Reader Xiaomei
I woke up on my own at a quarter past six. At Rushan Silver Beach I have fallen into the habit of going to bed early and rising early, like an old man. Nothing like the old days in the big city, when the eight o’clock alarm couldn’t even wake me. Back then I slept late too, never before midnight as a rule. The alarm was set for eight, and there was no chance of waking naturally before eight; the alarm simply had to drag me out of sleep. But after I quit and came to the seaside, I wake up on my own every time. I go to bed early, at ten, and I wake early, at six. The alarm has become a useless tool sitting in my phone; I don’t need it anymore. Human beings should not be ruled by an alarm clock.
Once awake I felt a little uncomfortable in the stomach and needed the toilet, so I rolled out of bed and pulled on a jacket — winter mornings are a bit cold. First I went to the window to look at the sky. It wasn’t light yet. Sunrise was at 6:45, and there were dark clouds up there, so there would be no sunrise to see. I was a little disappointed and a little relieved — disappointed because I wouldn’t see the sunrise, relieved because if there was no sunrise then I hadn’t missed one. I sat on the toilet, doing my business and fiddling with my phone, and another ten minutes or so went by. When I went back to the window to check the sky, it had brightened a good deal, and I could see clearly that the ground was covered with a thin, delightful layer of snow.
This was the first time snow had actually settled at Rushan Silver Beach. It had snowed two or three times before, but only the tiniest flakes — you’d see powder like dandruff drifting down, gone the moment it touched the ground. But this morning the snow on the ground had truly piled up. There was none on the roads, but the grass was white, and there is a lot of grass in our compound. I looked at the grass below the south window, then went to the north window and looked at the grass below that; the white really was snow, a thin layer of it, and it thrilled me. Snow in the north is simply too beautiful. I had to go out and look at the snow — I had to go to the seaside and look at the snow, right now, this instant!
I hurried into my clothes, putting on the thickest trousers and coat I had, and my warm shoes, and a hat and gloves, and I picked up my phone and my tripod and went out. Outside the compound is open farmland — in summer it is planted with all sorts of crops: wheat, corn, potatoes, peanuts, soybeans, and scallions, chives, green peppers, tomatoes. But now it is winter, and all that is left is stubble, dead vines, and dry grass. The dirt paths through the fields are lined with tall reeds. Snow had fallen on the fields, covering the dry grass and the wheat seedlings, spreading out wide and desolate. I like walking in fields where there is not a single other person. Life should be open country; people should live where there is no ceiling.
The snow had fallen in the night and had stopped by now, and the temperature was rising, so it would melt soon enough — if I didn’t go out, I would miss this fleeting beauty. The sky was vast and pale, the countryside was lonely and still, and there was not a soul on the road but me. “A hundred mountains and no bird, a thousand paths without a footprint; a little boat, a bamboo cloak, an old man fishing in the cold river-snow.” You can’t help reciting a poem. But there are birds here, after all. I crossed the open field and came to the tottering stone slab bridge over the Xiaotan River, and a flock of wild ducks in the water below, startled by my footsteps, rose from the surface all at once with a great flapping of wings that gave me a fright as well.
After that I reached the main road. There is nothing much to look at on the main road, but you do see a few people: country children on their way to school, their parents waiting with them by the roadside for the school bus, and a few solitary old people walking toward the sea, like me. I walked excitedly down to the seafront and saw that the beach was white. At the mouth of the Xiaotan River the banks on either side were white, flecked with brown sand-grass; the calm water was like a mirror, and in the distance the Ferris wheel and the giant yellow duck of the abandoned amusement park were reflected in its surface. I walked out onto the beach, stepping on the soft snow and sand, leaving a footprint with every step, and ahead of me was the wide, boundless blue of sea and sky.
The spring tide was going out, and the water had already retreated a long way, exposing wet sand. There was no snow on that sand; only the sand close to the shore had any. This snowfall really had been too light, and it had fallen at night while the tide was coming in, and of course snow cannot settle on the sea. If snow falls while the tide is going out, then the flakes can reach the ground. And if it is cold enough, the water at the front edge may freeze, leaving shards of ice on the beach that crunch delightfully underfoot. Those ice shards look very much like old snow, but they are certainly not snow. In the coldest stretch of last winter I saw that kind of ice shard many times.
Settled snow on the beach itself is much rarer. It doesn’t snow all that often in winter at Rushan Silver Beach; compared with Weihai proper it is warmer here, with less wind and less snow, so heavy snow is hard to come by. The sea rises and falls twice a day, so snow can settle on the beach only if it falls at low tide, and falls heavily. I think I have seen that sight about twice. The wind off the sea blows often, and when it blows the clouds away the sky clears, and once the sun is on the snow it melts fast. So being able to see settled snow on the beach today was no small thing, and though there was only a small patch of it, it satisfied me completely.
Last winter’s biggest snowfall came on January 24 — January is the coldest month at Rushan Silver Beach — and it too fell at night, but the tide was out that night, so the snow settled. I ran down to the seafront and saw the beach spread white as if a sheet had been laid over it, a sheet that was very bright and very soft. I jumped down onto the beach; the beach was vast, and the snow crunched under my feet. The snowfield ran all the way to within a short distance of the water, growing thinner as it went, and then came wet ground, and beyond the wet ground, the sea. I walked a long way through the snow, leaving many footprints, and I picked up handfuls of it and packed it into balls and played with them. The sun was bright and my body and mind were wide open.
But today’s snow was only light, a thin layer on the far side of the beach, well away from the water, and by now the temperature was above zero with no wind, so the snow on the sand was melting away at a speed you could see, retreating into the grass farther off. I stood on the bank looking down at that stretch of white, with the river running through the middle of it and the amusement park for a backdrop, and took a few photographs of myself. This year’s cold and snow have come much earlier than last year’s, and yet the experts say we’re in for an El Niño and a warm winter. Who is right? The interesting thing about life is that, like the weather, it can’t be predicted. A life you can predict is a life without interest.
And because today was a spring tide, a lot of people were out foraging the shallows. They stood in a line across the flats in tall rubber boots, iron shovels and spikes in their hands and buckets or other tools hanging off them, working away. More people kept coming down from the bank onto the beach, and the beach took on a busy look. The winter beach is cleaner than the summer beach, because there are no tourists treading everywhere and dropping litter, and there is more seafood in the sand too — razor clams, clams — and more to be seen on the surface as well: little painted crabs, hermit crabs, sea corn, and a bold flock of gulls living peaceably alongside the people, flying in to feed as soon as someone turns over the sand.
I had no rubber boots and no digging tools, so I couldn’t forage alongside them, but I love watching them dig things up; I love the sight of that kind of labor, under the boundless sky, on the endless beach — utterly unlike the wage-earners shut in their cubicles in the city. The wage-earner is in prison; the forager is under no restriction at all; they are free. I looked for little things on the beach myself too — hermit crabs, of which I gathered a whole handful, and then threw away. I also found a strange, slimy sand anemone, and I asked a forager to dig it out with his shovel, and held it in my hand and studied the flower-like tentacles around its open mouth.
People ask whether foraging the shallows can feed you. It can cover part of it, but you can’t eat seafood every day; foraging is a treat now and then, or simply a kind of entertainment. The place where Rushan Silver Beach sits is called Baishatan Township; the beach here is flat, the sand fine, with no rocks and no mud, so all you can do is dig things out of the sand, and what you dig up isn’t much — not enough for three meals a day. And you can’t go foraging every day either; it’s only on the two spring tides each month that you get the most. Unless you do it professionally, as aquaculture, foraging the shallows is like fishing: just a pastime. Plenty of people here also go fishing for fun at Chaoxi Lake and in the Baishatan River.
It was past nine by the time I turned back. The sun was out and much of the snow on the ground had melted, and I was glad I hadn’t stayed in bed and missed this snowscape that was vanishing so quickly. I had seen the snow and I had seen the sea; the day was complete before the morning was over. There were more people and cars in the street by then, but they had all got up late. The early bird gets the snow; the late bird gets none. There was hardly any snow left to be seen in the planting strips, and the snow that had covered the haystacks in the fields had almost all melted away; the temperature was rising too fast and the white had turned gray. By the time I got home and looked at the lawn outside the window again, there was not a trace of snow, as if it had never fallen at all.
On the way I remembered that another market would be opening today. The markets here run on the lunar calendar — like the tides. I felt like going to market, buying a few things, joining the crowd, but I found that that market was a bit far from my place, so I gave it up. Going to market is as much fun as foraging the shallows: the fresh vegetables still with soil on them, the fish and shrimp and crabs and shellfish whose names I don’t know, all different shapes, the countrified farmers and vendors with their lined foreheads and chapped hands, and the brightly dressed customers haggling with them, hauling trolleys to carry the vegetables home, some of them with dogs on leads — and of course a few stray dogs weaving among people’s feet looking for snacks.
But lately a lot of people have noticed that vegetables have come down in price, pork has fallen sharply too, eggs aren’t dear, and seafood is going cheap. And they see that supermarket prices are much lower than the market’s — cabbage at the market goes for RMB 0.4 a jin, but in the supermarket it’s only RMB 0.29, and there are often sales on top of that, bringing cabbage down to RMB 0.19. So a lot of people go to the supermarket and stock up on vegetables, and I, to save money, followed the crowd and started buying my vegetables at the supermarket instead of the market. Many young people dislike crowds and dislike haggling, and would rather buy at the supermarket, or online. Prices are low in winter, and there are few people in the ghost town, so the market really has gone quiet.
I exported the video I’d shot that morning, did a bit of editing, added a voice-over and captions, and posted it to a few video platforms — partly to record my life, partly to earn a little money. It isn’t much, but it is income, and better than eating into my savings. And shooting video costs me no effort at all; I don’t have to please anyone; it is purely what I’m interested in. Unlike going to work, it isn’t painful, and I can earn a little from it — two birds with one stone. And talking with viewers is my only kind of socializing: I give out information and take it in, and I can argue and quarrel with people online, so there’s entertainment in it too. Isn’t that far more interesting than the timid, put-on socializing of the real world?
After roaming the fields and the seafront for two or three hours I was a bit hungry and started cooking. Winter is getting colder and I want to cook less and less, because it means washing dishes and scouring pots. So I decided to cook only one meal today, with more rice than usual and more of the dish than usual — half at noon, half in the evening. First I rinsed the rice and set it cooking, then I made two dishes: one fried egg, one plain stir-fried cauliflower. When the rice was done I ate straight out of the pot without serving it into a bowl — no need. I ate the two fried eggs and half the cauliflower, then tipped the other half of the cauliflower into the half pot of rice left over, and that was my dinner — it only needs reheating — plus one salted duck egg.
As for food, I am very plain, frugal, and simple. I don’t eat meat; I drink only plain boiled water; I don’t need to eat three times a day. I don’t go to work, so I burn no physical energy and waste no mental energy either, and I don’t need much energy going in. Thoreau said that instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary, eat but one. The more a man works, the more he has to eat. If he doesn’t work, he has no need to eat. And there are people who are simply controlled by their appetites (or, to put it nicely, by the pursuit of pleasure). I often think of the scene in the film Se7en where the glutton is killed. I have no wish to turn into a fat pig. And of course there is one other very important reason: to save money.
After eating I washed the bowl, then sat on the balcony in the sun, face tipped up, eyes closed, legs crossed, thinking about nothing, half asleep. I think sunbathing is the happiest thing in the world, bar none. A person has only to get enough sun and he will be healthy and happy. Isn’t it supposed to be good for calcium? Especially in the cold of winter, the sun makes you comfortable and warm. But a lot of people never get the chance to sit in the sun; they don’t understand what good it does, and some even think a tan is ugly — utterly shallow. Only Diogenes of Sinope was truly wise; he said, stand out of my sunlight. I mean to get good and dark in the sun myself, like a black loach.
When I’d had enough sun I decided to go and lie on the bed for a while. At school I slept with my head on the desk; at work I slept on a folding chair; neither was as comfortable as your own bed at home. I stripped off my clothes, stretched out, and burrowed under the quilt, safe and at ease, with nobody to hurry me up for class or for work. You can get up whenever you like — sleep till dark, sleep till 2024, sleep a hundred years, sleep till the universe blows up. A person ought to have the freedom to sleep, the freedom to sleep undisturbed. Still, I can’t sleep that long; I slept only two hours and got up. I still had to go out to the seafront and watch the sunset.
Because the geography of Silver Beach is such that the shore faces south, the winter sunset here is the finest. The land juts out on the western side, so the sun doesn’t set over the water, but the light the setting sun pours onto the sea is still a magnificent sight. When the sun is still fairly high, what it spills on the sea is silver, rippling silver; lower down it turns to gold, light dancing on the water; and as it comes down to the horizon it turns red, a red glow spread across the surface — the shifting color alone is a feast for the eyes. It’s just that the wind on this northern shore is too strong, and it is hard to get a heavy sky-wide sunset. I watched the sun go from white to yellow to red and sink little by little behind the peninsula, feeling the time slip away, and after more than a year I am still not tired of it.
Before I came here, someone told me, go and watch the sea for a month and you’ll be sick of it. But I watched for three months and wasn’t sick of it, six months and wasn’t sick of it, and now more than a year and still I’m not sick of it. If I could, I would go on watching till I died. The sea is different in every season: spring has its look, summer its look, autumn its look, winter its look — you could say all 365 days are different. Doesn’t philosophy say that everything is in motion and change? Nothing stays the same. If you pay attention, you’ll find that the sea, and the sunrise and the sunset, are different every day.
Just like today: I saw the snow, I saw the sea, and then I saw the sunset, and today was not the same as yesterday. Every day of mine is new. I waited until long after the sun had gone down before walking home. I passed through the Yinlong Bay night market; there were not many people left in it, a few stalls and a few shoppers, a world away from summer. In summer it is traffic and crowds, and the stalls push all the way down to the seafront. In winter Silver Beach becomes a ghost town, utterly deserted, all bleak and bare. But I prefer winter. I like empty streets, I like a soundless compound, I like having a whole stretch of beach to myself — the clear breeze and the bright moon all belong to me.
I stopped by the Jiajiayue Supermarket to look at prices; they really are much lower than the market’s. A sales assistant was shouting that such-and-such was only RMB 9.9, and some bulky old people were settling up at the checkout with great armfuls of vegetables. I wandered around and went out. Back in the open ground outside the compound I saw a big red moon rising over the little grove to the east like a piece of blood jade, and below it the shivering trees, the abandoned farmhouses, the wasted fields, and a lone jackdaw gave a cry that made me shiver. “This morning the cold seeps into my office; suddenly I think of the guest in the hills. He gathers firewood down in the ravine, and comes home to boil white stones for his supper — the food of immortals.” I am that guest in the hills, the guest by the sea, the guest in the world.
November 30, 2023, Rushan Silver Beach Resort, Weihai, Shandong.