I gave orders for my horse to be brought round from the stables. The servant did not understand me. I myself went to the stable, saddled my horse and mounted. In the distance I heard a bugle call; I asked him what this meant. He knew nothing and had heard nothing. At the gate he stopped me, asking: “Where are you riding to, master?” “I don’t know,” I said, “only away from here, away from here. Always away from here, only by doing so can I reach my destination.” “And so you know your destination?” he asked. “Yes,” I answered, “didn’t I say so? Away-From-Here, that is my destination.” “You have no provisions with you,” he said. “I need none,” I said, “the journey is so long that I must die of hunger if I don’t get anything on the way. No provisions can save me. For it is, fortunately, a truly immense journey.” — Franz Kafka, “The Departure” (written in the spring of 1922, published in 1936)
2022.10.26
I got up a little after six, went to the nearby PCR point for a test, came back and packed, checked out, took a taxi to the Weihai bus station. The driver was a talkative young man; he told me how much the pandemic had hurt him — a mortgage and a car loan to pay, every sum reckoned to the last coin, and the moment there’s an outbreak he can’t go out and work, and his savings are nearly gone. Exactly the same view as the ride-hailing drivers in Beijing.
I took the long-distance bus; the station staff didn’t stop me, and I got on without trouble. An hour and a half and I was at Silver Beach — you have to tell the driver in advance which compound you’re getting off at; there were only ten passengers on the bus. I got off, found the place, had the agent come and open the door, checked the room, read the contract, signed it, and paid the money — RMB 4,506: rent RMB 4,000 a year, property fee RMB 506 (84.34 × 0.5 × 12), water RMB 3.05, electricity RMB 0.555, gas RMB 2.8. The place has its small flaws, but they’ll send someone to fix them. In the afternoon I went to the property office to put money on the water and electricity account, and bought a water card (for the drinking-water dispenser — put in RMB 100 and there’s RMB 120 on it; then a bucket for RMB 15, seven and a half liters, and filling it costs only RMB 1.5).
In the afternoon I went out for a stroll too, walking from Aiqinhai Jing to Damuzhi and back. I was too hungry and ate a bowl of beef knife-cut noodles for RMB 10. There are very few restaurants, and the few there are don’t look very clean. There are no places of entertainment. The streets are bleak and the buildings weather-stained. The beach isn’t clean either, and the water isn’t clean — nothing like Weihai. (Later I found I’d simply gone to the wrong spot; Silver Beach has over twenty kilometers of coastline, and wherever there are few people the sea is beautiful.) There really are a lot of stray cats and dogs. I saw some old people out walking, and hardly any young people. Walking is tiring. There are very few buses, one every half hour, and the last one is at five in the afternoon. The laotoule — a kind of electric four-wheeler — go anywhere within three kilometers for RMB 5. But I’ve seen only a corner of the place; I’ll need to try other routes.
Nightfall, and it’s even more desolate. Each building holds only a few households — three or four at most, or just one. The streetlights in the compound are far apart, and they’re motion-sensor; when no one’s walking past they’re barely lit at all. I saw someone using a flashlight, and the flashlight was brighter than the streetlights. The compound is utterly quiet — no one doing square dancing, no one gathered to chat, and you can’t hear anyone’s television either. My rooms are big and utterly empty, the light from the tubes as weak as the streetlights outside, and the fridge whining away.
It’s already cold, and I need to hurry and buy things for the winter — quilts, mattress pads, socks, shoes, an electric blanket, a kettle. And of course I’ll have to cook for myself (if I don’t cook, where would I even eat?), so I’ll need pots and pans and bowls. Having no entertainment and staying home isn’t a bad thing for me — home is exactly where I can write and read; it’s only for exercise that I need to go out walking and sit in the sun. Having seen Weihai’s sea, I feel about Rushan’s sea the way the poem has it — “apart from the clouds of Mount Wu, no other cloud is a cloud.” But in the spirit of “become largely acquainted with the names of birds, beasts, and plants,” I’ll have to go forage the shallows.
The mattress is too thin and too hard; there’s no mattress pad, no thick quilt, no pillow. I’ve ordered a pad and a quilt online, but they won’t arrive for two days. Tonight I’ll sleep on the sofa. There’s no internet, so I’ll have to arrange that myself. For now I’ll tether off my phone; China Mobile gave me 20 GB, which is plenty.
2022.10.27
I woke up on my own a little after seven — I was sleeping in the living room, and the room was so bright I couldn’t get back to sleep. This is probably what truly waking on your own means. I went out for a PCR test at a quarter past nine; the old people must all have finished by then, so there was no queue — you just walked in and did it. It was the first time a test had shown me the sampling time; before, it only ever showed the testing time. Afterward I took another long stroll, around by Weiliya and Shanshui Renjia (third-row compounds — the third row back from the sea — but they looked neat and tidy, with a bus stop right at the gate — very convenient, and if I’d known I’d have rented here), and then back. Plainly, without any way of getting around, relying on your own two legs really won’t do — it’s just too far, and otherwise you simply don’t go out.
Weihai’s risk area went from medium-risk to high-risk. All of this has already become normal and legal. The second half of the year will be harder, I expect. The Rushan disease-control people phoned me too, to confirm my itinerary and how many tests I’d had, and told me to keep testing for two more days. That makes five.
I placed eight orders on one shopping app, two on another, and one on a third — and there was still plenty I hadn’t bought. The rice cooker and kettle I’d ordered online arrived, but there was no rice to cook and no bowls or chopsticks, and no spare power strip — one thing linked to the next. To cook I’d still need a cleaver and a cutting board, oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar. Acquiring all these daily necessities is a big systematic project, and life is one too.
Getting internet set up is a hassle too. My phone data will do for this month, but sooner or later I’ll need a landline connection here, so I may as well do it early. Everyone in the group recommended China Unicom, but going with them means opening a new phone number — RMB 47 a month, plus an installation fee of RMB 130, RMB 100 for a set-top box (may as well have the TV on too, for the World Cup in November), and I have to buy my own router for RMB 129 (theirs cost RMB 299); only once the router arrives will they come out. Without internet I can’t upload my videos.
That morning at Damuzhi Plaza I saw a lot of old people doing ballroom dancing; they looked very happy — maybe that’s the life that suits them. The tide had gone out, and a lot of people were foraging the shallows, but I had no gear, and could only watch from a distance. Someone in the group had dug up a lot of razor clams at another foraging spot. It seems I’ll have to make a few friends here. Starting a new life really does bring no small amount of difficulty and confusion.
I still hadn’t bought shampoo; I’d had two days of plain-water showers. I remembered a saying that went around online: keep washing your hair in plain water and it’ll grow back. I don’t know if it’s true, but maybe I’ll give it a try. The water heater runs on electricity, unlike Beijing’s gas, and you can only shower for a moment before the water goes cold — unlike Beijing, where you can shower as long as you like. At least it saves a lot of water. Call it two more changes in my way of living.
2022.10.28
Yesterday evening someone in the compound was already shouting, “PCR test at seven tomorrow morning,” and this morning at six someone came shouting again — they’re certainly diligent about notifying us. Twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays, at seven in the morning, at the compound gate. There are other PCR points too, open every morning. Someone in the group said Weihai had seventeen asymptomatic cases the day before and they’d all been brought to Rushan for quarantine. No idea whether it’s true. The ride-hailing drivers in Weihai surely don’t dare go out and take fares again. Members of the group were anxiously discussing stockpiling supplies, even though the pandemic hadn’t reached here yet.
Most of the queue were old men and women, and the line wasn’t very long — fifteen minutes and it was your turn. I overheard two old men talking and learned why some people like to fly kites: because their necks are bad, and flying a kite is for the neck. Old people really do have their wisdom. In Shandong you only have to scan the health code for a PCR test, not show your ID card — much more convenient than Beijing, I think; in Beijing you still have to bring your ID card or a photo of it.
The ten kilos of rice I’d bought on the discount app arrived; I went to the pickup point to collect it and hurried to cook some. When I went to open the bag I found I had no scissors, and had to cut it open bit by bit with nail clippers. Truly, “a rickety cart and tattered clothes, opening up the wilds” — starting from nothing. Southerners love their rice above all. With no bowls and no chopsticks, I ate a great deal with a spoon. Someone told me I could drip a little soy sauce on it, but I didn’t even have soy sauce.
The router and power strip I’d bought online arrived too. I phoned China Unicom to come install the internet, but he said he was off work and couldn’t come.
When I got up this morning, a broad band of sunlight slanted into the bedroom and the living room, and as the light moved, the whole day long the place was full of brightness. This is happiness! Diogenes said to Alexander the Great: stand out of my sunlight! Sunlight is the one thing beyond price.
In the afternoon I went out for a stroll and another long walk. I found the nearest Jiajiayue Supermarket (a Shandong chain), where you can buy vegetables, meat, and eggs, but I think a lot of things can be bought online, and there’s no need to go to the supermarket — the staff there themselves shout to the customers, “It’s cheaper online.” I also saw a lot of for-sale ads pasted on notice boards: apartments from RMB 100,000 to RMB 300,000, most in the low hundreds of thousands; the villas cost more, but the average price was only three or four thousand a square meter. Today’s route was quieter, and there was a little river with a lot of old people fishing — all retired, I’d guess. Every day you go out for a walk, exercise your body, and observe life.
Leafing through photos I’d taken in Beijing before, I suddenly felt how small Beijing is — a mere patch of ground, something you could frame with your two thumbs and index fingers. And Beijing happens to be perfectly square and straight, and people live inside it. All those years in Beijing I clung to my comfort, never understanding that it was no different from being in prison — shut up in a little square, cramped and absurd and hollow, and yet I thought it the greatest city in the world.
There are a lot of stray dogs here; you often see them while out walking — sometimes one lying asleep in the grass, sometimes four or five chasing each other at play. Someone in the group had picked up a little puppy and was asking whether anyone would adopt it; a lot of unowned puppies starve or freeze to death in winter.
2022.10.29
I got up and went for a PCR test, and found that the nearby market had opened. I asked, and learned it opens on every multiple of five in the lunar calendar — today happened to be the fifth. They sell all kinds of things: seafood, vegetables, fruit, small appliances, breakfast, meat, pastries, bedsheets and quilt covers; there are also people handing out flyers for hot springs and shopping-mall promotions. You couldn’t call it a sea of people, but it was bustling: the old people all hauled little shopping carts, and there was a middle-aged woman haggling over abalone; there were very few young people. I don’t even recognize most of the seafood — scallops, oysters, razor clams, tuna, pufferfish (do they call the sea ones pufferfish too?), long hairtail, mantis shrimp, mud crab, cuttlefish, octopus, pomfret, even small sharks, and more fish and shrimp and crabs I couldn’t name. I don’t know how to cook any of it, and even if I bought it I’d have no tools, so I just wandered around the big market taking photos, like Granny Liu in the Grand View Garden — a country woman among city luxuries — finding everything new and feeling a little timid.
Today was a delivery day; five packages came in all — the quilt, a mattress, sauce for mixing with rice, cotton slippers, a washbasin and bucket. So now I needn’t sleep on the sofa, though I still lack a pillow. You see how much moving costs. No wonder everyone loves a settled life. In Beijing I never used the discount app — never even had it on my phone — and now it’s become my chief guest.
A woman from China Unicom came to register my connection. The moment she walked in she said: your place is huge — how many square meters? Eighty, I said. It looks like a hundred, she said; that balcony is so open. Living alone here is sheer luxury. No doubt about it — a big place is better for my body and mind than a small one. People ought to live in big apartments, not little compartments.
2022.10.30
The mattress and quilt arrived, and I slept in the bed. Only, when I got up in the morning there was no pillow, so I couldn’t lean against the headboard and play with my phone. Whoever invented the pillow, it’s a wonderful thing. In daily life every little object actually has its uses, not to be dismissed.
Off for a PCR test, and on the way I thought: since I started testing on the 21st — I was still in Beijing then, and because I was worried about trouble traveling I tested two days running, and did one on the 22nd too; on the 23rd I got to Weihai and the moment I got off the train they made me test, and then I tested three days straight in Weihai; then I came to Rushan and tested every single day — with today, that’s ten days in a row. Quite a record. Tomorrow I can take a break.
I went to the seaside to look at the sea, and realized my first-day impression had been wrong: Rushan’s beach really is very clean, and the water very clear; it’s only that some areas have more people, so the ground there isn’t so clean, and wherever there are few people it’s quiet and the water and sand are fine. I wrote some words in the sand, took some video of the waves, looked at the sea a while. Far from Beijing, far from the noise — wonderful!
A technician came to install broadband, and at last I had a landline connection; no more burning through phone data, and I could upload video freely. I’ll learn a bit of video editing myself, make some small pieces — maybe I can tell stories with video. Whatever it is, doing what you like to do.
Three more packages came — bowls and chopsticks and plates; a cleaver and cutting board; soy sauce and aged vinegar. Still short of some things to go with them, but whatever’s missing I’ll add as I go; no rush. Life is like that too — take it slow, and you’ll get there in the end. At night I ate two more bowls of plain rice with chili sauce. Satisfied.
2022.10.31
No PCR test today. But I suppose I’ll do one tomorrow; in the evening someone was out below with a loudspeaker announcing a test at seven tomorrow morning at the compound gate. That’s the routine — Tuesdays and Fridays, at the compound. Other days you can only go to a distant point.
Last night the broadband that had been installed in the afternoon stopped working. I phoned the technician in the morning and he came at noon and fixed it. It wasn’t the router, and it wasn’t the fiber modem; it was the junction box downstairs — so he didn’t even come up; he fixed it below.
At noon I ate plain rice and went for another stroll by the sea. The sun was a bit glaring; I need a hat or sunglasses. I wandered by the sea a long while and got a little tired; I wanted to lie down in the sun on the sand and sleep and have a lovely dream — and if I died just like that, it wouldn’t be bad. On the vast beach, as far as you can see, there are hardly any people — empty and wide and level. Two people were picking things up by the shore, and two were fishing things out of the water.
Three more packages came — dish soap and sponges, laundry detergent (bought by the sack), and a large-capacity electric kettle (for boiling water to soak my feet in winter).
2022.11.1
It’s been more than seven days since I left Beijing, and my travel-history code no longer shows I’ve been there. A former colleague told me some things about work and asked how I was doing in Weihai; I replied only “Don’t disturb me,” and stopped answering him, and he said, “Erpang, you’re heartless!” Yes.
When I woke this morning I saw Weihai’s bulletin: no confirmed cases yesterday, no asymptomatic ones. There was a loudspeaker out below shouting at you to get up and go for a PCR test, but I really didn’t want to get up, and lay in a long while. In I Love My Family, the old man Fu Ming lies in bed and says, “There’s nothing waiting for me to do, so why should I get up!” It was noon by the time I went to Menghuan Wangguo for a PCR test; there were very few people — you just walked in and did it. I timed it: from leaving the house to walking to the seaside takes twenty minutes. I walk fast; a slower walker would probably take thirty.
I strolled by the sea a while more; the sky was very blue, the temperature mild, the wind light, and the sea sparkled silver. On the way to the shore the ginkgo leaves had all turned yellow and begun to fall, while the plane trees had only yellowed a little, a mottle of yellow and green; the reeds had gone white, swaying on the waste ground.
The sun was bright; the balcony and the bedroom were flooded with white daylight, so bright it felt almost solid. I stood on the balcony, and the sun was warm on my back. The sun fell on the quilt and the quilt was toasty; I crawled under it for a nap and woke up very warm.
I thought of Beijing — and with the pandemic of these past years, unable to leave Beijing at all — and I felt that Beijing was a cage, that inside it a person is not free at all, nothing but a prisoner, and still bustling and scrambling to keep up a prisoner’s life. I hear it’s harder to get into Beijing now than before: “the moment you think of entering Beijing, your Beijing health code will throw up a pop-up alert.” What meaning does a life like that have?
This world is not only Beijing, and not only China; and further out still, this universe is not only the Earth. Of course we humans are tiny — if you can’t leave the Earth, you stay on the Earth — but we can leave Beijing and come to Weihai.
Another package came today — a wok — but the oil and salt haven’t arrived yet, and there are no ingredients, so I’ll wait a few more days and then I can cook. I’ve eaten plain rice for days, with soy sauce or the rice sauce, no vegetables, meat, or eggs, so I’m a bit short on vitamins and protein. With no green vegetables to eat, I’m constipated — cause and effect, and no escaping it. The toilet seat is cold on the behind too, and I need to buy a cushion.
October ends and November begins, and it’s a month now since I left my job — no income, no social insurance or health insurance, and yet I’m not at all anxious. Standing on the balcony, in the daytime I can see the sun, at night I can see the moon. Not like Beijing: unless you’ve bought or rented a place in a good spot, in the daytime you can’t see the sun and at night you can’t see the moon — you can’t even see the moon or the sun, so what romance could there be?
2022.11.2
Every night I close the door properly, close the windows properly, draw the curtains properly, and seal the place up; and when I get up in the morning I open the curtains, open the windows, open the door, and let brightness into the rooms. This has gradually become a ritual, and it’s put my life on track.
The shower water falls into a basin and a bucket and I save it, leaving it there, and in the daytime I can use it to flush the toilet and save a bit of water.
In the morning I went out and took a bus, to try Rushan’s public transport — my first bus ride since coming to Silver Beach. To get on you have to scan the health code and the fare code, which is extremely annoying and there’s nothing to be done about it. There are many old people here, and some of them don’t know how to scan; they fumble at the door for ages, and until they’ve scanned it the bus won’t move, and everyone waits for them, and the people sitting behind grow impatient and shout, “Get off, you’re holding everyone up.” At last they scan it, and only then does the bus set off. At the next stop someone else can’t scan; a young man goes up to help, and it turns out the old man does have the messaging app on his phone, but there’s no data signal, so he has to get off. The whole way there are many old people like this who can’t scan. This society is not in the least friendly to the old. And who knows when this idiotic business of scanning codes will end.
I only rode a short way, getting off at Silver Beach Hospital in Haiyangsuo Township. There happened to be a PCR testing point right at the hospital gate, and I saw only a few people there, so I went and took another test — I’d already taken one the day before, but I couldn’t resist when I saw there was no queue.
In a mutton-soup shop across from Silver Beach Hospital I ate a portion of dumplings; I counted twice, and it really was nineteen dumplings for just RMB 18. (Later a reader told me that in the heart of Silver Beach there’s a dumpling place — celery and pork, twenty-five of them, for only RMB 16, cheaper still.)
At noon three packages arrived — a stew pot (too big) and two pillows (one bought from each of my two shopping apps). In the afternoon three more — three trash cans, six bags of salt, a small tin of peanut oil. The wok that arrived yesterday had rusted today; I don’t know if that’s normal. The things I buy on the discount app really aren’t all that reliable — cheap goods are no good; or else I just don’t know how to shop, and must take a little loss. (A friend said a new wok needs to be “opened” and taught me how: with no lard, boil peanut oil, rub it on several times, wipe it dry, and leave it to stand.)
Around ten old people in the compound gather in the evening at the foot of one building’s wall to play cards and chess and chat, looking quite at leisure, until it gets dark.
2022.11.3
Today is the tenth, another market day. I wandered back and forth several times, and in the end bought a kilo of oysters. When I told the vendor, “I’ll have a kilo,” he frowned and said, “A kilo? How are you going to eat that?” There were only seven of them. I took them home and steamed them for eight minutes and ate them with vinegar and soy sauce. After steaming, the oyster meat shrank to a little ball. It really wasn’t enough to eat. Maybe I don’t know how to pick the plump ones — after all I eat so few, and I don’t know oysters well. And I steamed them a bit too long, so they went tough; from now on only five minutes.
At the market I also bought a seat cushion (RMB 5), a pair of scissors (RMB 5), six scouring pads (RMB 2), two brushes (RMB 2), and two glass cups (RMB 4). And the eggs and dried noodles I’d bought on the discount app arrived — and I found that the market has both of these.
In the afternoon three more packages came — an air fryer, a gift from a well-off friend; and three bars of soap and a box of six little tubs of instant noodles that I’d bought myself.
In the evening the property office was out below shouting again: “Everyone to be tested at half past seven tomorrow morning.” The time had moved to half past seven; it used to be seven.
The people selling vegetables at the market are all old, sixty or seventy, with rough skin, deep wrinkles, unkempt hair, bent backs, uneven teeth, dirty clothes, weathered faces, and clouded eyes — utterly ordinary and lowly Chinese farmers, and yet their faces are perfect for painting, because they have such character. I wanted to photograph them, but I felt a little awkward and that it would be an intrusion; perhaps next time I’ll make a point of photographing people. The ones selling seafood, meat, and general goods are mostly middle-aged. I’ve been photographing the seafood — fish, shrimp, crabs, shellfish — all along, but seldom people, and I haven’t noticed them either, men and women, middle-aged and old. I should look from a different angle.
In the evening I fried myself two eggs. After so many days of plain rice, today was the first time I’d cooked on the stove — a big step forward, you could say.
2022.11.4
Today I went out twice, to the seaside twice. In the morning I went for a walk and did a PCR test along the way. The sun was in the south and the beach in the north; I stood on the sand gazing at the sea, the waves churning in along the shore, one after another, while in the distance the surface sparkled and shimmered silver. In the afternoon I went out to watch the sunset; to the west there’s a winding coastline, so you can’t see the sun drop into the sea — you can only see it drop behind the shore. The orange sun cast an orange light, tinting the sea and the sand orange; the clouds shifted and changed, and though there was no deep-crimson afterglow, a few pink clouds had their own beauty. I stayed until the sky darkened, feeling a little cold and a little hungry.
The temperature has dropped; in the evening it’s very cold sitting in the living room, and there’s no central heating. I’ve put on long johns, and I’ll most likely buy an electric blanket for the winter — otherwise I certainly won’t stand it, and my hands and feet will get chilblains. At a time like this I can’t help missing Beijing’s heating; they’re about to turn it on. Still, compared with the south, it’s not so damp and cold here, and the daytime sun is warm; there are many clear days, and the sky is very blue, not overcast.
I’ve started reading Thoreau’s Walden again. I’d tried it many times before and never got through it, never really read more than a few pages, but now I can read it — there are so many wise lines in it, and I feel them as if they were my own. Isn’t my life now much like that?
Some books you simply can’t read — or can only read superficially — until you’re a certain age, with enough knowledge and enough of life behind you. When you find you can read it, that you understand it, then you’re no longer the shallow person you were.
Last night I showered but didn’t wash my hair — too cold, and I haven’t used shampoo in a long while; I didn’t use body wash on myself either. Tonight I don’t want to shower either; I haven’t sweated and I’m perfectly clean — mainly it’s the cold, and cold feet. I only boiled water and soaked my feet a long while. Then I climbed into bed, pulled the quilt over me and left only my head out, and read quietly; outside all was silent, as if I were in a vacuum.
My friends in Beijing are all talking about health-code pop-up alerts; I’m like an outsider, completely unconcerned with all that — Beijing has nothing to do with me. You’ll notice that many people who live in Beijing are anxious, bad-tempered, cold, self-centered; all of it is produced by Beijing’s oppressive, sealed-in environment. I used to be that kind of person too; when my parents phoned, that was the attitude I took with them on the phone. No wonder they didn’t want to call me, and were always hurt and sad. The me in Beijing really was a jerk, thoroughly unlikable. It’s so good to have jumped out — only by jumping out, leaving Beijing and looking at it from outside, do you see clearly from the sidelines, and realize your former warping.
Coming to the seaside and no longer going to work, I too have become calm and broad-minded, unhurried, all smiles — only, I have no money.
2022.11.5
The several rolls of toilet paper arrived; one in the toilet, one in the bedroom, one in the living room, so I don’t have to carry a single roll from here to there and back. I’ve bought a great many things on the discount app again. I could uninstall my old shopping app — the discount one is better value. In Beijing I never used it — never even had it on my phone — but in Rushan I’ve found it really is handy: it suits our class of poor people.
In Beijing I never ate dumplings either, but since I had that portion of dumplings across from Silver Beach Hospital, I’ve found the dumplings here very good too. It’s not that my tastes have changed; it’s that the taste of the dumplings has changed. Shandong dumplings are not like Beijing dumplings — just as many local specialties, once they get to Beijing, turn into something else and stop tasting good. You can see how important it is to change your surroundings.
The vegetables I’d bought on the discount app arrived too — baby greens, tomatoes, cucumber, and cauliflower — and a friend taught me to make tomatoes scrambled with eggs. But once the dish was done I found I hadn’t cooked any rice, so I cooked rice as well — a really basic mistake, and I couldn’t help laughing at myself. Only when you start cooking for yourself do you realize that a lot of things aren’t that you can’t do them, but whether you want to and whether you have the conditions to — and doing them well isn’t easy either.
Though from the balcony I can’t see the sunrise or sunset, once the sun’s risen a little, around seven or eight, the light slants onto my balcony and into the bedroom, and it lasts till the sun comes close to setting at four or five in the afternoon — the bright light revolves around my rooms. Spread the quilt on the bed and you can put it straight in the sun: in the morning the sun warms the head of the bed, in the afternoon the foot. I’ve heard people get depressed because they get too little sun. In a big city, if you can’t afford a big place, if you can’t buy a place with plenty of daylight, if your rooms are cramped and dim, you get too little sun and of course your mood suffers, you can even turn strange. Now every day I can soak in this much sun — it’s simply too happy for words. I’ve decided to buy a rug, spread it on the balcony, and sleep in the sunlight — turn into a sunflower.
I didn’t go to the seaside today, and felt I’d let the sea down, let myself down. From now on I must still get out more every day; going out is good for the body.
2022.11.6
Since I came to Rushan on October 26 I still haven’t bought shampoo; every time I wash my hair with plain water, and my hair really has become healthier — after washing there’s a kind of “lotus rising from clear water” confidence. So the method I read about online really does work. We’ll see how it is if I keep it up a month.
By the sea, standing apart from it all, Beijing’s affairs have nothing to do with me and Beijing’s people have nothing to do with me; far from worries, far from the clamor, far from every piece of pandemic news, my heart is as still as water. “Leaning alone in the close bamboos, I am playing my lute and humming a song too softly for anyone to hear — except my comrade, the bright moon.”
I went out at noon and didn’t come back until past four. I love walking so much. Yesterday I looked into the tides a little: the morning tide is called chao, the evening tide xi; there are two high and two low tides a day, about six hours between high and low, and twelve hours between the two highs — but the exact times are hard to work out, since they’re reckoned from the phases of the moon and impossible to remember. You can only use an app or a little gadget, a bit like a foreigner who’s no good at math relying on a calculator. The first and fifteenth of the lunar month have the strongest tidal force, though a spring tide generally comes two or three days later — so it’s the third and the eighteenth that have the biggest water. I’m going out to see the spring tide, at two o’clock sharp this afternoon. (No wonder when I last went to Weihai and reached the shore at night the tide was so fierce — it wasn’t just the wind, it was that it happened to be high tide.)
I walked west along the coast for a long, long way, to the entrance of Chaoxi Lake, and then followed the lake shore, winding this way and that, back — about fifteen kilometers in all. At two o’clock the tide kept pushing forward, higher and higher, the waves bigger and louder. “I come to view the boundless ocean from Stony Hill on eastern shore. Its water rolls in rhythmic motion, and islands stand amid its roar. The autumn wind blows drear and bleak; the monstrous billows surge up high.” I took off my shoes and walked into the water; it was icy cold and clear, and gentle and comfortable, and walking barefoot on the sand is much lighter and quicker than in shoes. Only, once you’re ashore the sand is hard to wipe off your soles. Sea ducks were diving in the water, and gulls soaring in the sky. People were swimming in the sea, drifting on the waves — they’re brave. I wanted to go in too, to feel the cold of the water and get close to the sea, but I have no trunks, and no one to watch my clothes.
The water of Chaoxi Lake isn’t very clean; there’s a lot of litter along the shore and a bit of a smell, and yet people still fish from the lake edge, and a flock of waterbirds was feeding in the lake; the reeds had gone white and swayed in the wind; there were very few pedestrians or cars, and dogs swaggered down the road.
2022.11.7
I went out to see the sea today too. Though there’s no outbreak in Rushan, you still have to get tested — only not as often as in Beijing. In the compound it’s twice a week, though some say that even if you don’t test, no one makes you, unless you need to scan your code to go somewhere. People who stay home have no social life and may go out very rarely; one said he’d gone a week without testing, another said twenty days. Being an honest, cautious sort of person, and since going to the seaside takes me past a testing point anyway, I did one on the way — it showed I hadn’t tested in three days.
The sea is the same sea as ever, forever vast, and on the rise, not yet at its peak — plain, unremarkable water and surface, and yet I never tire of it. Yesterday I walked fifteen kilometers, twenty thousand steps (which is to say ten thousand steps is 7.5 kilometers, and one step is 0.75 meters). Not especially tiring, but tiring all the same; in the afternoon I slept at home and had a lot of dreams, dreaming of this one and forgetting that one, and woke up a little dazed.
A few more packages came — a toilet-seat cushion (so my behind no longer feels cold on the toilet), two power points (counting up, I’ve bought four new ones, plus the one I brought with me, that’s five — finally enough), a small box of wafers (for snacks, for when I don’t feel like cooking), and twelve cans of cola (I still couldn’t escape the lure of that fizzy comfort drink). Not quite an ascetic, but I’m pretty frugal.
After leaving my job the one thing I’m never short of is time; I can do everything slowly, unhurried, calm and leisurely — not like the big city with its frantic pace, always anxious and rushed and fretful, and in the end unable to do anything. If only I can keep this state of mind for a long time.
2022.11.8
Today is the fifteenth of the lunar month: both a full moon and a total lunar eclipse. Moonrise at 4:42, the eclipse at 6:15. But when I got up it turned out to be a foggy day, a white blur. I thought: once the sun comes out at noon and the fog thins in the afternoon, I should be able to see the moon at night. Yet when I walked to the shore in the evening, sea and sky were one color, drowned in thick fog, and the sun was only a dull red too, and soon went under. Never mind the moon — the moonrise itself was utterly hidden. A little disappointing, but on the way back I was amazed to find the blood-red moon in the sky to the east by north, with a small bite out of it, and I hurried to pull out my phone to take pictures and record video, and the bite grew larger and larger. Back home I stuck my head out of the north bedroom and looked a while longer; it had become a small thin hook.
The fifteenth of the lunar month is a market day too, and I’d meant to go out and photograph the old people selling vegetables — their old-farmer look is so striking. But the fog was too thick and the light was poor, and I was still too embarrassed to deliberately point my phone at them, so I gave it up. I only bought some things to eat and left — youtiao (sold by the jin after all: RMB 8 a jin, two sticks for RMB 10), pickles, winter jujubes, bananas (constipation), green peppers, garlic, white sugar, potato starch. Three trips to the market now, and I know how it works.
It takes twenty minutes to walk to the shore, and I remembered that getting to work used to take me twenty minutes too. Now everything has changed — the wheel of fortune turns, as the saying goes — and my mood is utterly different: then it was like going to a grave, like going to my death; now my step is light and I’m happier than I can say.
In the evening I made a new dish, braised eggplant, and again found I was missing things — flour, a slotted spoon, a vegetable basket, bigger bowls and plates. Braised eggplant uses a shocking amount of oil; it came out edible and went down well with rice. Only, after eating, the dishes were a mess, and there were dishes and pans and spatula and chopsticks and the rice cooker to wash. Buying food and cooking and tidying up are no simple housework — being a housewife (or househusband) is not easy. If only people didn’t have to eat.
2022.11.9
Today is foggy again, thicker than yesterday — at noon you still couldn’t see the sun, and it was damp and cold. I don’t know whether people by the sea are more prone to rheumatism. Online it says Weihai is indeed foggy in winter, but someone in the group says it isn’t, and I don’t know which to believe. I’ll have to spend a winter here myself to find out; a lot of things are like that — you only really know once you’ve done them yourself.
Fog or no fog, I still had to get out and walk. The seaside was a blur of fog too, and where sea met sky you couldn’t see a thing. I walked a long way along the coast and then came back the same way, without making a big loop like last time. When I set out the tide was low and the water had dropped a long way; I picked up two phones in a row by the shore — I don’t know which two unlucky souls lost them, and of course they were ruined by the water. I threw them into the grass on the way back; whoever finds them will probably be happy for a few seconds and then disappointed, just like me. There were very few people by the sea; it was like a place of silence, with people walking out of the fog and walking back into the fog. A few thin-legged gulls stood idly at the water’s edge, motionless, as if lost in thought; only when I got close did they take off and circle in the sky and fly away somewhere else. Every day this way: watching the birds fly and fly, the tide rise and rise, the sun go down, the moon climb up. If a whole life could be spent like this — how happy that would be!
2022.11.10
Last night someone in the group said that from tomorrow there’d be three days of testing in a row. No idea what had happened. Early this morning a loudspeaker was going in the compound: “Everyone to be tested at seven.” I didn’t want to get up, thinking I’d go later to the testing point by the sea. But when I got up and went to the seaside, that testing point was shut (because of the three days of testing they wanted us to do it in the compound, so it wasn’t open here). Utterly speechless. Someone in the group asked the worker in the white hazmat suit whether something was up, and the worker answered, “Something is up, but I can’t tell you.”
So I just went to look at the sea. Today was a giant tide (the seventeenth of the lunar month, higher even than a spring tide): low tide at half past ten (46 cm), then the water would come in, and high tide at half past four in the afternoon (372 cm). Because the tide was out, a lot of people were foraging the shallows; they wore tall rubber boots and carried shovels and buckets and other digging tools, and I had nothing, and could only watch from a distance, getting my shoes wet and muddy — so to forage the shallows you must first have gear. Some people dug up a lot of long razor clams, some dug up a lot of ordinary clams, some dug up a lot of tender white mantis shrimp, and flocks of long-billed, thin-legged gulls joined in the fun on the mudflats; people coming and going, birds flying out and back — the seaside was a busy scene. Only, the weather was gloomy, and the photos and video didn’t come out well.
It’s half a month since I came to Rushan, and I’m gradually getting familiar with the place — at least I know my own compound and its surroundings pretty well. I’ve looked at the sea many times and am not yet tired of it. When I first arrived I’d brought very little, and now I’ve more or less bought everything. Though this place is extremely deserted — no subway, no convenience store, no McDonald’s or KFC, no bar, no cinema — for someone like me, who fears noise and dislikes socializing, it’s a great blessing. Every day I go out and walk, and there’s no one and nothing on the road — “Why don’t you slowly walk and chant at ease?” At the shore, the empty beach and the boundless sea put your mind at peace; the sea wind on your face, your feet in the seawater, feel like a massage, relaxing you, making you forget your worries. The sun is plentiful, more than enough sunshine — you’d have a hard time being depressed. As for no central heating — it’s much warmer here than Beijing, and much drier than the south, so the cold winter won’t be too cold, I imagine. No takeout, so I cook for myself, which has improved my hands-on ability and given me some concrete sense of the price of food.
All of the above is no more than my one-sided, superficial impression of first coming to Rushan. Time will not stop; the sun will rise as always; the moon waxes and wanes, wanes and waxes; the tide rises and falls twice a day and cycles twice a month — while a person has only one fleeting life.