Heaven and earth are an inn for all things; time is the passing traveler of a hundred generations. And this floating life is like a dream — how much joy is there in it? — Li Bai, Preface to a Spring Night Banquet with My Cousins in the Peach Garden
Somewhere around July 25, 2015 (I don’t remember the exact day — perhaps there is evidence, an air ticket maybe, but I’m not willing to go and dig it out, because the rented flat is a mess and finding it would take a great deal of effort) I came to Beijing.
I had flown in from Chongqing the night before. The ticket was naturally for the middle of the night, because it was cheap. I got to Beijing at about two or three in the morning. I reckoned there would be no bus and no subway, and I wasn’t willing to spend money on a taxi — and the main reason was that even if I could get to where I was staying, no one would open the door for me and I couldn’t move in anyway; a letting agent had to take me there. So I lay on a bench in the airport waiting hall for a few hours. When the first airport-line train of the morning began running, I got on and headed into the city. The subway ticket was RMB 25, if I remember right — outrageously expensive. Then I changed lines and rode to the stop nearest where I was to live. It took a long while going round and round to find the right exit, and then I loitered at the exit for ages; the bus never came, and a look at the map showed it was easier to walk. After a long walk I finally reached that compound, and phoned the agent to come and fetch me.
I had brought very little luggage — one backpack, stuffed full, and one big suitcase, also stuffed full — and that was my entire estate. The flat had been rented online beforehand; it was the first time I had used an app to rent, and it really was convenient, a great saving of trouble. I had asked a university classmate of mine in Beijing to go and view it, and he raised no objections, so I thought it would do, and in my imagination it was rather lovely. And yet…
The agent took me to the building, opened the outer door and then the inner door, and I was dumbstruck. The room was tiny — a double bed against the wall and the window, a wardrobe against the door, wardrobe on the left, desk on the right, and all that was left was standing room. Two meters by two and a half, so five square meters; probably not even six. And for a room this small, and this old — a partitioned secondary bedroom — the rent was RMB 2,300, more than three times what I had paid in Chongqing, where I rented a smartly furnished little flat, roomy and bright, with a bathroom, a kitchenette and a balcony, for only RMB 700 a month. I was stunned, disappointed, on the verge of tears even, and I didn’t know what I had come to Beijing for.
Two people lived here; the other one had the master bedroom, a bit larger, with a balcony. We shared a kitchen and a bathroom and a living room, where there was a dining table and a drying rack on the floor (which of course only I used — I wasn’t willing to walk through someone else’s room to hang clothes on the balcony) and a fridge. No sunlight came into the living room, so it was dim the year round and the light had to be on. I was on the north side, the other man on the south, so from then on I would never get any sun. The north side had no balcony, only a window, and I wasn’t willing to leave my door open and let people see into my privacy (southerners care more about privacy), so our flat was never aired either.
Before coming to Beijing I had planned to rent together with a not-very-close friend who was already here, but in the end his timing never settled, and where he lived was a bus ride from my workplace; I wasn’t willing to squeeze onto buses and subways, so I looked for a place myself. This one was close to my workplace — a fifteen- to twenty-minute walk, and I couldn’t endure a long commute. Rather than waste time on the road to and from work, better to spend a bit more and rent somewhere nearer.
In Beijing I had only two acquaintances. One was the university classmate who had viewed the flat for me — my old roommate from university, doing a doctorate at a university and not yet graduated. The other was my brother, who had finished his master’s the year before and found a job in Beijing; but his workplace was far out of the city, in a village at Nankou in Changping, so there was no question of my living with him. And the friend who had spoken of renting with me was my brother’s friend. Apart from these two, I knew nobody else.
So the flat was settled. The agent gave me the key, I put down my luggage and began tidying this cramped room, making the bed and folding the quilt. Luckily it was summer, so bedding and clothes and shoes were all few; the wardrobe and desk were soon arranged, and out came the computer. I went out again and bought a few toiletries, and that was about enough; whatever else I needed could come later, slowly. The kitchen was shared, but I didn’t intend to cook. The bathroom was shared too, with old pipes that would often cause trouble later, though the agent came to fix things for free. I took more or less a hot shower, and so began my new life in Beijing — living with strangers. Little did I expect that I would stay here, in a little five-square-meter room, for more than four years: four years and three months.
Someone will surely ask why I came to Beijing, so let me give a simple explanation. After the Chinese New Year of 2015 I went back to Chongqing and carried on with my old job. By then I had been in Chongqing nearly two years, and I was twenty-nine. As everyone knows, young Chinese have a fear of turning thirty (perhaps people everywhere do), and I was no exception. I felt that if I stayed on in Chongqing, then I would simply stay there forever — buy a flat in Chongqing, marry in Chongqing, have children in Chongqing, grow old and die in Chongqing — and that was not the life I wanted. Chongqing life was very comfortable, my work wasn’t hard, my colleagues were good to me, but I simply didn’t want to go on like that. “I wanted to see the world outside”; I wanted to go to a big city. Guangzhou and Shenzhen were out of the question, too far south; Shanghai was out of the question too, because I had done my master’s there and lived there two and a half years. Only Beijing I had never seen — and who doesn’t long for Beijing? The capital! By then my brother had been in Beijing a year already. We are twins and have always had many ideas in common, so I wanted to go there too. In Chongqing I grew less and less able to bear it, and had not the least interest in my work; I only wanted to resign. In the end I found a job in Beijing, sent off my CV, and went to Beijing once for an interview and a written test; that post happened to need someone, so it was quickly settled and I was told to start in August. Looking back now, I think it was a wholly correct choice.
Before this move to work in Beijing, I had been to Beijing only a very few times — four in all. One of them was just passing through: one summer holiday at university (I forget which year, '06 or '07), I set out from home, took the train to Beijing West, and, without stopping, transferred to a coach to my brother’s university in Tianjin; I stayed two or three days in Tianjin, and then went back to my own university in Changchun. Besides that one, there were three others: passing through Beijing in September 2004 on my way to university; an internship in Beijing in July 2007, in my third year; and the interview before I came to work here (in June 2015). Let me briefly set down these three short experiences.
In my last year of high school, several close friends all wanted to get into a Beijing university — they didn’t want to stay in the province, feeling that only people with bad grades went to a provincial university. In the end only I did best of all — though not well enough for Wuhan University or Huazhong University of Science and Technology in the province, let alone the famous schools in Beijing — and I wasn’t willing to study so close to home, so I went far away from my hometown to Changchun, in the northeast. The others all chose to repeat a year, and the following year none of them got to Beijing either. When school started in September 2004, about the beginning of the month, I took a train for the first time and went to Beijing for the first time — a slow train, overnight on board — the four of us: my parents, my brother and me. The train drew slowly into Beijing West, and by then it was midday. I remember that as the train came in, a little girl in the seat opposite said “qing” — “please” — in crisp standard Mandarin, and for the first time I understood what proper Mandarin sounded like. At the schools back home only a few young teachers spoke Mandarin; in daily life nobody did. Take “please”: our dialect has no final -ng, so it comes out qin, and we hardly ever use the word at all — southerners don’t seem to have the northerners’ store of courtesies and rules. A distant aunt of ours in Beijing came to fetch us by car, and she deliberately drove us along Chang’an Avenue to see Tiananmen. I was thrilled, looking around everywhere. My uncle treated us to a meal, and because it was so hot we didn’t go anywhere; my father and I still had an overnight train to Changchun that evening, so we left after only a few hours in Beijing. That was my first impression of Beijing.
I went to Beijing for an internship that summer of my third year because a teacher at our university was close to an institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and could send a few students there to intern, to let us learn what the institute was like and see whether we might want to sit its postgraduate exam. That institute was the best research body in our field — even more formidable than Tsinghua and Peking University. I didn’t want to do postgraduate study there, but I did want to take the chance to have a trip to Beijing, so I signed up. A fourth-year student led the four of us third-years on a night train to Beijing. But there wasn’t much to do at the institute during that time; it was entirely self-directed study, and no one looked after you or showed you anything. We took the chance to visit the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, and Tsinghua and Peking University, and wandered about the neighborhood of the institute. In those days the Fourth Ring Road was still bleak, with few tall buildings, and many venues for the 2008 Olympics were under construction. I stayed at the institute about two weeks, found it really boring, and slipped away on leave. I went back to Wuhan to see my girlfriend, to give her a surprise. Wuhan summers are frighteningly hot.
The interview before I came to Beijing was, of course, also in Beijing; in those days there was no video interviewing. I booked a guesthouse online close to the company, rented a bed for the night — it was very quiet. The interview at noon the next day went smoothly, and the written test and interview that afternoon went smoothly too; basically it was a case of the company wanting to hire and nobody applying, so of course they would take you. That night I stayed in another compound, in one of those subdivided flats, several small rooms each with bunks, all the residents young people just out of school — some from famous foreign universities, apparently here to start businesses in Beijing, talking about things that struck me as mystical and pretentious. That night was hard to get through; it was simply a pigsty. The third night I stayed in a basement hotel in the south of the city. The south of Beijing feels more like native territory; the little eateries outside were run by Beijing locals, with zhajiang noodles and dumplings and all kinds of wheaten food, which for a southerner like me were very hard to swallow. Then I went back to Chongqing to wait for the result and the notice, and came to Beijing for good at the end of July.
The most vivid impression from that last trip to Beijing was Beijing’s blue sky, and that impression runs right through to today. The Beijing sky, the summer sky, is truly blue. During those days I went alone to the Temple of Heaven and stayed a long while by the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, looking at the sky there, the swallows there, the buildings there; nets had been strung under the eaves of the round building to keep the swallows from nesting. Before coming to Beijing I had spent two years in Chongqing. Chongqing is the city of fog, a mountain city; blue sky is very, very hard to see, and even on a clear day the sky is never that blue — always gray and hazy. To me, Beijing’s sky compared with Chongqing’s blue is like Chengdu’s terrain compared with Chongqing’s flatness. I love blue sky; I love clear days; I don’t like rain, I don’t like gloom. I love the north.
As a Hubei man who had lived four years in the northeast, I am full of praise for the northern climate. In the northeast the summers are not hot (thirty at most) and the winters not cold (there is heating indoors). In Beijing, though summers are a touch hotter, compared with Hubei and Chongqing it is nothing; Beijing gets thirty-five, while Hubei and Chongqing get thirty-eight, thirty-nine. At least in all my years in Beijing I never turned on the air conditioning to sleep at night. Winters aren’t as cold as the northeast either, yet there are four months of heating, from November 15 to March 15 the following year. In early 2020, when the epidemic began and everyone was cooped up at home, the heating was even extended to the end of March. I love heating: indoors you never feel cold, and you can even walk about with no clothes on, and sleep at night in perfect comfort. I imagine heating helps people have babies too. That is summer and winter. Spring is a little short, but the flowers open one after another and there is something to see; and autumn is Beijing’s most beautiful season — pleasant temperatures, the leaves turning color, beauty to the utmost.
As for where to see the leaves, someone else has more right to speak: he has tramped every hill around Beijing and knows the changing face of the place through all four seasons, while I have been to few places and don’t like exercise, so I can only look at the leaves nearby. In the city, by the roadside, on campus — you can watch the leaves slowly wither and yellow, from one to two, to a whole tree, then falling, all fallen, bare. Beijing’s winter, unlike the south’s, has no green, only gray and dusty. That is why people say Beijing is plain. The city itself has many sights — the Temple of Earth, the Temple of Heaven, Beihai Park, the Summer Palace, the Old Summer Palace, Yuyuantan and so on — all good for looking at leaves in autumn. The Xiangshan and Xishan hills nearby, and the many temples and stretches of the Great Wall, have fine views too. The special leaves, of course, mean the red and the yellow: the red is the smoke tree, the yellow the ginkgo. I don’t know much about plants; if you want to know more, you can go and investigate for yourself.
The good thing about living in the city is that there are so many places to wander without going far. The first year I used my brother’s annual parks pass and got into many parks for free — to clear my head, to take photographs, to exercise. Beijing’s roads are broad; some say people on one side of a road never cross to the other, and a broad road is just right for cycling. I often cycled out for fun, from the North Fourth Ring all the way south to Chang’an Avenue, from Dongdan to Xidan, past Tiananmen — cycling along Chang’an Avenue felt lovely and free and easy.
For us poor folk these are all we have to enjoy — free public things, like “the clear breeze on the river, the bright moon among the hills — inexhaustible in supply, never-ending in use” — while the luxury shops at Guomao, the famous primary and middle schools in Haidian, the high-priced flats in the six central districts are beyond our reach. This is the difference between the ideal and the real: it looks as though I live in Beijing, looking quite the part, but in fact I have nothing.
Speaking of flats, take the one I rented: five square meters, partitioned, old and shabby, RMB 2,300 the first year, 2,800 the second, no rise the third, up a hundred to 2,900 the fourth. It was inside the North Fourth Ring. Then the landlord wanted the flat back and I had to move and look for somewhere new. Having lived in shared flats four years, I really didn’t want to share with anybody again; I looked for a one-person place, and however expensive it was I would live alone. In the end I found one — a little 38-square-meter flat, fully fitted, fairly newly decorated, with a kitchen, a bathroom, even a television in the bedroom. I was very pleased with it. But do you know what the rent was? RMB 6,500, plus a service charge. I could only put up with it. For freedom, for privacy, for a comfortable life, I could only rent at a high price. What else could I do? And as for buying a flat — take the prices here. When I first came it was seventy or eighty thousand a square meter, and now it has reached a hundred thousand. That is to say, the flat I rent now, if I wanted to buy it, would cost at least RMB 3.8 million, and with all the various fees, four million. Who can afford it? And anyone without a Beijing hukou — the household registration that ties a person to one place — has to pay social insurance in Beijing for five full years before they are even eligible to buy.
I remember that before I started work, the man in charge at the company said to me: “We can’t give you a hukou, you know!” At the time I was very naive and thought a hukou was of no use to me at all, because it was impossible that I would stay in Beijing forever; maybe after a couple of years I would quit and go and live somewhere else, so I said it didn’t matter. I really had given the hukou no thought. A freedom-loving person like me, and such a proud one — what is a hukou anyway? A hukou is a certificate that restricts people’s movement, that separates country folk from city folk, the poor from the rich; it is a fetter, an insult, a badge of inequality. I did not come to Beijing to work for a hukou; whether I have one or not is all the same to me. Some may think this is sour grapes, but I truly do not care, because even now I have never made up my mind to stay in Beijing forever and become a Beijinger. I am a free man; I go wherever I want to go. Besides, even if they gave me a hukou, could I afford a flat? Having a hukou does not mean having a home. I cannot give up my freedom for a flat — no mortgage slave, no shackles. To hell with the hukou!
Talk of flats puts me in a temper; it is the eternal heartache of us paupers. Since we can’t afford it, then let’s not buy — give it up! Not buying a flat, not marrying, not having children is our last act of defiance against this world. Let’s talk about the weather instead. When I first came to Beijing there was often smog in autumn and winter, and it was severe — sometimes visibility was under fifty meters, like the end of the world; my nose would be blocked, my throat itchy, my eyes uncomfortable, and I felt my hair and body were all dirty. In those days you had to wear a mask — an anti-smog mask (little did I think that years later I would have to wear a mask again because of the epidemic — ridiculous, ridiculous); at home I even bought an air purifier. But they did put real effort into cleaning it up; two or three years later the smog was rarely seen, no mask needed, the purifier off. In the last two years the number of smog days has fallen markedly, and heavy smog can be counted on the fingers. Of course I don’t know exactly how they did it, but one thing is plain: there are fewer and fewer non-locals in Beijing. When I first came there were plenty of street vendors by the roadside; now they have all been driven away, and many of the little shops that had holes knocked through the walls along the street have closed. The government report of June 2022 said: “We have met the goal of reducing the resident population of the six central districts by 15 percent from 2014, making Beijing the first megacity in the country to pursue development by cutting back.” I don’t know when they will “relocate” me too.
A big reason I like the north is that there are more clear days and less rain, and in winter you see snow. Beijing doesn’t have as much snow as the northeast, but there are several falls every year, which is enough — not too much, not too little, never cloying, never to be resented. Going to the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace to see the snow on a snowy day is a very romantic thing. Every time it snows I am excited; if it is a holiday I will certainly go somewhere to see the snow, take photographs, post them, and show off. As for rain — in earlier years there really was little, and Beijing rain is often a thundershower, falling at night and clearing by day, over quickly — but these two years it has rained more and more often, as if trending toward the south, probably because of warming and the rain belt shifting north. If Beijing turned into the Jiangnan of the south, that would be a strange thing.
Because there are more clear days and fewer wet ones, the north’s dryness is common knowledge. Since coming to Beijing I have never once had the runs. There is an endless supply of nose-dirt, earwax and eye-grit, you have to shower every day, the room is covered in dust within a few days, and when you shake the quilt at bedtime you can see the dust dancing in the lamplight — suffocating. And so every time I go south on business, my first impression is how mild and moist the south is, and my skin feels noticeably softer. Northerners, too, because they get so much sun, have darker skin; you seldom see a fair-skinned girl. In Chongqing I was quite fair; in Beijing I turned dark, like a weather-beaten farmer.
To say I look like a farmer is a bit of an exaggeration — how could someone living in the city look like a farmer? Besides, my job is sitting in a cubicle; I get little sun and little exercise. When I first came to Beijing I weighed only fifty kilos; now I’m sixty. Before, there was no spare flesh on my belly or waist; now you pinch and there is a layer of fat. Before I had abs; now, however I clench my stomach, I can’t see them. Before there was a deep frown line between my brows; now it is faint — not because the cares are gone, but simply because I have grown fat, there is more flesh, and it doesn’t show so easily. Before I had no gray hair; now my temples are grizzled, my hairline has receded, and I am badly balding in an M — that is a real care. Because in Beijing I cannot see hope. No hope of making money, no hope of buying a flat, no hope that life will get better, no hope that anyone could ever like me — and I won’t ever like anyone either; life has worn away my illusions about love.
I work at a traditional state-owned enterprise. The work isn’t hard and the responsibility isn’t heavy, but these years the restrictions have grown tighter and the work harder and harder; what was once easy, meaningful, satisfying work has become impossible to do freely — you are cautious, afraid of stepping on a landmine, the rules multiply, the rules and boxes bind a person till they can’t breathe, and one-size-fits-all measures are more and more common. A eunuch can live on after being cut, but what dignity is there in a life like that? I have no power to change the great trend; I only want to escape, and I grow ever more silent.
Seven years in Beijing, seven years at one company — to a young person that may seem incredible, but I don’t want to explain, I will only say that among state enterprises this is very common. Of course colleagues come and go: some leave within a year, some after a few years, some after a dozen, each for their own reasons. At work it is hard to build a close relationship with colleagues, to become good friends — let alone with superiors and leaders; everyone is connected only by work. I lived more than four years in that first place, with two roommates. The first roommate married; his wife went home to have the baby and was away the first year, and only came the second year, and they lived together in the master bedroom. The first year I thought he wasn’t married, because I saw him bring women home. The second roommate married too — his wife elsewhere, two children, often coming from out of town to be with him; the room was a mess, noisy and chaotic. I lived in the small secondary bedroom and didn’t want much to do with them; apart from splitting the utilities we hardly spoke — strangers under one roof; after two years I didn’t even know their full names. It often made me sad: a man married with children, still unable to afford a flat, still sharing with strangers. I have little interest in socializing, not like northerners, who love to gather in crowds. Apart from some friends my brother introduced me to, I rarely went out of my way to meet anyone; in the first few years I had some appetite for it and met a few people online, met them face to face and chatted, but in total never made many friends. In later years I was all the more content to be alone — wandering out alone, going to the cinema alone, keeping to myself, which was very pleasant too. People are all islands; I have never felt lonely, but pursued my own inner peace and emptiness.
As a southerner, I can illustrate my impression of northerners with one example. Everyone knows that Beijing people like to address anyone as nin to show courtesy. But at home I never say nin — never to anyone, parents or elders, teachers or seniors — I always just use ni. I had always thought nin was only a written form; I never imagined it was used so often in the north. At university one of my roommates was from Wuqing in Tianjin, where the dialect is even more standard than Beijing speech; he would call his own father nin, the respectful form. At the time I was shocked and curious — why be so formal with your own father? I can’t say nin; the word is awkward in my mouth, because our dialect has no final -ng sound, and our n isn’t even a true n, so if you make me say that word I feel embarrassed and fake. I try not to say nin — so much so that I try not to talk to people at all, because in a Beijing setting not saying nin is very impolite. I want to keep to my own principle, and I am at odds with the whole environment. And I don’t eat dumplings — I loathe dumplings. The zhajiang noodles are dreadful too.
Beijing food has nothing famous — they say Beijing is a desert for foodies. In fact I don’t much care about food; on workdays I eat in the company canteen, and if you don’t mind getting tired of it you can eat all three meals there — you can even go at weekends. Apart from the canteen, takeout is so developed now, and so cheap; a bachelor like me can’t be bothered to cook, it is too much trouble. If I don’t eat in the canteen and don’t order takeout, I can go to the 7-Eleven or FamilyMart nearby and buy things — city life is so convenient that it makes people lazier and lazier. But I don’t think that is young people’s fault; their work is so hard and they can’t afford a flat — where would they find the energy for a kitchen to cook in? “There is a pair of lovers hand in hand, still lingering at the door of the 7-Eleven; they have nowhere to make love, and can only hold each other, trembling.”
In Beijing I also had a few romances, all of which came to nothing. If you ask why, it can only be reality. Love is not a castle in the air; love is treating someone to a meal, it costs money — the cinema costs money, traveling costs money, exhibitions cost money, buying flowers costs money, buying birthday presents costs money. Without money what can you do? I am not handsome, my education isn’t high, my pay is small, and I can’t sweet-talk; all the more lacking in confidence, I have lost even the urge to court the opposite sex — as if I had turned frigid. Reality makes a man impotent, reality makes a man hang his head, reality makes a man bend down, reality pins a man to the ground, never to rise again, unwilling to get up. What is this “good life” they speak of? I have no idea at all. They say it is for the people — I don’t seem to be that people. I just want to be able to afford a flat — a hundred thousand a square meter. I just want a little freedom — a PCR test every three days.
From October 2019 until now, I have been nearly three years without going home. When the epidemic broke out in December 2019 I wasn’t planning to go back, and it was lucky I didn’t, or I would have been stuck in Hubei for months and unable to return to Beijing. At the end of 2020 the company again urged everyone to spend the New Year in Beijing; dutiful, obedient me naturally answered the organization’s call and did not go back. At the end of 2021 it likewise urged us to spend the New Year in Beijing, and I did not go back either — though in name one could go, it required layer upon layer of approval, and not only was the paperwork a bother but in the end the top probably wouldn’t approve anyway, so I decided not to make trouble for the higher-ups. So I missed three Spring Festivals in a row. A truly obedient, law-abiding citizen — is there any reward? None. The obedient only lose out; the rule-abiding only ever shortchange themselves. So what if my parents miss me? And whether I can go back this year, 2022, is hard to say. How many three-year spans are there in a youth? And in my “seven-year record” the epidemic takes up three years; the first four years I can barely recall. Time will not turn back; I cannot get back to 2019, or to 2017, or to 2015 — a person only grows old, bit by bit.
In the snap of a finger, seven years have flown past, and thirty has receded far into the distance. I came to Beijing out of anxiety about turning thirty, and now I am all the more anxious — not a bit more mature or steady; instead, because of the epidemic, I have turned irritable and depressed, and I don’t know how long it will last. “At thirty, I stood firm” — for ordinary people thirty really is only just beginning to stand; only then does a person begin to have a few ideas of their own, begin to understand this society, understand life, understand the human heart. Thirty is not old at all; thirty is practically an infant. Human beings are full of weaknesses — the weaknesses of human nature; society is not so beautiful either; the darkness of human nature often leaves you gaping, and while good things are taken for granted, dark things hit you like a club. An individual’s fate is like a twig in the waves; freedom is a luxury, equality hard to achieve, and everyone has a will to power.
Now I live alone — “I hide in my little room and make it a world of my own; what do I care for winter and summer, for spring and autumn?” — and when the Tao Yuanming-style pastoral life I long for might come to pass, when I might go to the seaside, when to Tibet, when to Dunhuang, no one can say. Epidemic or no epidemic, body and mind both seem to be trapped. By what? By work — this helpless work. If only a person could not work. Why must people work? What is work for? “Never forget the original heart, never forget the original heart.” What the original heart is, I don’t even know. The original heart is happiness. Just as when I came to Beijing — anxiety brought on anxiety. This, I suppose, is the limit of a life.
July 15, 2022, Shaoyaoju, Chaoyang, Beijing, a rented flat.