Young I left home and old I come back; my accent is unchanged, my temple hair grown thin. — He Zhizhang, “Random Lines on Returning Home”
2023.1.31
Not since I went home once, on October 18, 2019, had I been back — three years and three months, and now I was home again. Three years without a single visit, and I hadn’t missed my family at all, nor missed my hometown. To many people that may seem unthinkable, unforgivable. But I won’t put on airs: I truly hadn’t missed them. I hadn’t missed my family, and I hadn’t missed my hometown. I prefer to be out on my own, drifting and wandering.
A man is taught from childhood that a man’s ambition lies in the four corners of the world; after long years of drifting, the hometown recedes and the far shore becomes home instead. The first thing I felt, back home, was that I had returned as a guest. Nothing in my hometown was familiar anymore; the changes were earth-shaking, and walking down the street I couldn’t tell which way was which. The old memories were gone, replaced by new things. It was growing newer and better, but all I felt was confusion and helplessness: this was not my hometown, this was a thoroughly alien world.
I landed at Wuhan Tianhe Airport and took the subway to the Wuhan high-speed rail station. I still remember that many years ago Wuhan had no subway; to get anywhere you had to take the bus, and the buses in Wuhan flew, careering around and scaring outsiders half to death. I was going to Wuhan Station to take the high-speed train home. Taking a high-speed train home was, before, beyond imagining. But now the intercity line is open — fast and convenient.
A little over an hour and I was home. Then a bus into the city proper, and I walked the rest. Three years ago when I came home I was still in the old house; now my parents have moved into a new one. The new flat was bought in my name, but I’ve never spent a single day in it — my family had to come downstairs to let me in, or I couldn’t get through the door. That was the moment I felt like a guest, not the master of the house.
The moment they saw me, everyone said the same thing: “How did you get as black as a coal ball?” I gave a mild smile, and didn’t dare tell them I’d spent three months in the sun in Weihai and three days in the sun in Lhasa, the City of Sunshine. I love the sun; I like being dark.
After so long in the north I’ve grown used to the climate — more than used to it, I’ve come to like it. Mainly it’s that there are many clear days and little rain, so you can see the sun and sit in it often, and the air is dry, not damp; in the south it rains and clouds over constantly, you never see the sun, and the humidity is high. I’ve said it before: I love to sit in the sun. Without the sun I can’t live. I can’t go back south. I can only grow old and die in the north.
To my parents these words sound a little cold, a little heartless — they can’t work out why you don’t love your own hometown. Because they’re not like our generation: they’ve stayed in their hometown their whole lives and have no experience of living anywhere else. They don’t even know what central heating is, or that the north is clear and sunny most of the time. They have only the experience of life in their own hometown, so it’s only natural that they don’t understand us.
When I saw that the toilet at home was a squat toilet, I asked them why they didn’t install a flush toilet. They’re getting on in years; squatting must be uncomfortable, and a flush toilet would be so much easier — but they just said, “We’re used to it.” I explained the advantages of a flush toilet, and they wouldn’t listen. Then there’s bathing: I’m used to a shower, but they still insist on washing in a basin, and they said a shower wastes too much water. I explained that a shower actually saves water, and they wouldn’t listen either. It’s all just habit. They’re used to the old way of living, I’m used to the new, and we simply don’t fit together.
2023.2.1
Back in my hometown, my whole rhythm of life is thrown off. In the morning I can’t sleep till eleven — I have to be up at seven or eight for breakfast. Outside, I never eat breakfast. My family are sure you must be eating badly out there, so they cook a mountain of food and heap your bowl to overflowing, as if they won’t be satisfied until they’ve stuffed you to bursting. Outside, I don’t eat meat either. At home everything is meat, as if you’d never tasted meat in your life. In fact I don’t want meat at all; I just want vegetables. For me, eating vegetarian is the healthiest thing. Luckily it’s only a few days at home — I’ll put up with it. Back in Rushan I’ll go on living my own way: going my own road, following my heart, not being like everyone else.
Before the New Year my father had a stroke — a cerebral infarction — and was in hospital for a long time. The pandemic controls hadn’t been lifted yet, and I was holed up in Rushan and couldn’t come home. It was my two elder sisters who looked after him. Once people get old they get every kind of illness; there’s no helping it. My parents often say to me, when you’re old, what will you do on your own? But young people don’t think that far ahead — and after the upheaval of these three years, the world changes so unpredictably; who knows what the world will look like in three or five years. Why wear yourself out worrying?
My mother, though, is healthy — not like my father. Women outlive men, and I’ve no doubt she’ll live to ninety. She can look after my father. But when she grows old, who’ll look after her? Her son isn’t at her side; only her daughters are. It’s better to have a daughter than a son — sons are born only to be buried in the grass. But if you asked me to come home, of course I’d refuse a hundred times over; I’d rather die out there than stay in this little place. I don’t know what I’ll do later on either. I can only take it one step at a time. Right now I can barely look after myself.
My eldest sister has two sons. Her husband, for reasons no one can explain, suddenly started limping — he drags one leg when he walks. Her parents-in-law are very old too, just like mine, and her father-in-law was seriously ill last year and still hasn’t recovered. My second sister has two daughters. Her husband was also seriously ill last year — for two whole months he couldn’t eat at all and had to be fed liquid nutrition through a tube; he’s still in the recovery stage. And my second sister isn’t the sharpest, either — a few years ago she was scammed out of RMB 370,000 over the phone. Every family has its own troubles to bear.
Of my grandparents’ generation only my grandmother on my mother’s side is left — she’s ninety. My grandmother and grandfather on my father’s side, and my grandfather on my mother’s side, have been dead for many years. Death is a release for the one who dies, and a release for everyone else too. “Some among the kin still grieve; the rest have already begun to sing. What is there to say of death? The body goes back to the hill.” Old age is truly pitiful. If you’re free of illness and pain, fine; but once illness comes, the whole family suffers — and it’s both a duty and a responsibility, with no way to escape it. I only hope I fall ill rarely and never become a burden to others. Looking after yourself well is how you take responsibility for others. And if there’s really no way around it and I need looking after, then the only thing is to make more money and pay someone to do it. If I have no money — then I’d be better off dead.
An ordinary person’s life is not so easy — especially in middle age and old age. And it’s precisely because I’ve seen these problems that I think: to win the greatest possible freedom, a person should simply not marry and not have children, not trouble others and not want to be troubled by them — come alone, go alone. The elders really have no need to be so hard on the young. The world of the young is already utterly different from theirs; the young have their own lives, and they’ll manage them themselves. There’s no need to preach at them — your sermons are all out of date and do no good at all. If you can help the young, help them; if you can’t, keep your mouths shut. If you don’t understand, at least don’t interfere. Just be a polite person.
So long as you’re in your hometown, living under the same roof as your parents, you can’t escape this kind of interference. That’s why I’ve always believed that young people shouldn’t live with their parents — they should even keep their distance, the farther the better. At least then you get a brief taste of freedom. Freedom is the most precious thing there is.
2023.2.2
The day I came back was brilliantly clear, the temperature up to twenty degrees — but I got in late, and by then it was night. The next day it clouded over and turned much colder, and the forecast said fifteen days straight of cloud and rain. I can’t stand this weather at all. I love only sunshine and clear skies. I just can’t adapt to the southern climate — the north is best. Sitting indoors without moving, all you feel is cold, your hands and feet freezing. It’s colder here than in Rushan — and Rushan has sun, so you can sit in it, warm and dry, and the indoor temperature gets up to ten degrees. At home the indoor temperature is the same as outside, just a few degrees; you have to put on every piece of clothing you own, and you lumber about like a bear.
My nephew loves to cling to me. Children are too noisy and restless, and all I want is to be left alone in peace, so I went out and walked down to the river. A park has been built along the bank, much prettier than before (by “before” I mean when I was in high school — my memories all stop at high school, since I left home when I went to university). But what have those brand-new facilities to do with me? I’m away from home most of the year and can’t enjoy them. Across the river, at Matou township in Jiangxi, a cement plant has gone up; it looks busy and bustling over there, while our side is silent and still.
In the city proper the high-rises stand shoulder to shoulder; the townscape turned over from old to new long ago. When I was in high school there were barely any high-rises in the city — everyone lived in walk-ups, and we’d never seen an elevator. Now they’re all elevator buildings, much fancier. I spent seven years in Beijing and always lived in walk-ups, and now I come home and I’m living in a high-rise. Honestly, I don’t like elevators at all; I like climbing stairs. Those early walk-up buildings now have mottled walls, shabby and dated interiors, dim rooms, a precarious look about them — like my parents in their declining years. And yet aren’t six- or seven-story buildings better? The state has even ruled that county towns aren’t allowed to put up buildings of more than seven stories.
There are of course far more people and cars on the streets than before, and the shops look lively, and there are plenty of new kinds of stores that didn’t exist before — bubble-tea shops, coffee shops, gyms, Lanzhou noodle places, parcel depots. Back when I was in high school, who could have imagined a county town developing into this? Just as my father, when he was young, could never have imagined phones, computers, cars, and electric bikes in the future. But anyway — I’ve been drifting outside so long that the time I’ve spent away now exceeds the time I’ve spent at home. I told my mother, I feel no attachment to this place anymore, just as you, living in the county town, feel no attachment to the countryside. I don’t know whether she understands that.
There are more ships on the Yangtze than before, too. In high school, during PE, I often went down to the river with a few classmates to look at the Yangtze and feel the river wind — enough to make your heart light and your spirit happy. We’d chat, and say we absolutely had to get into a university in Beijing. In the end we were all ordinary people; we got ordinary scores, went to ordinary schools, and now we’ve all become ordinary people living ordinary lives. The grand words of youth were nothing but the recklessness of the young. Only the water of the Yangtze still flows east without end, caring nothing for what happens in the world of men.
My hometown’s location is terrible. It first rose on shipping and river ports, and shipping declined long ago, yet the county town hasn’t moved. It has grown eastward, but the great trend for China’s county towns is only toward more and more decline — everyone is heading to the big cities, to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and the provincial capitals, the population is shrinking, aging is severe, and I don’t know what hope a county town has. Even if I wanted to come back, to make it easier to look after my parents, what work could I find, how could I earn money here, how would I support myself?
2023.2.3
I’ve lost touch completely with my classmates — from primary school, middle school, high school, university, and graduate school, not one. Among my classmates there’s scarcely anyone I’d call a friend. And colleagues from work — even fewer friends there. Which is to say, I have no friends at all. Maybe people simply don’t have friends. Everyone is lonely. What we call a friend is just someone we huddle up with because we’re afraid of being alone. But this time, back home, I did get in touch with a high-school classmate — my deskmate, in fact. He’d been leaving me messages online all along, and asked me to add him as a chat contact so we could talk. I told him I didn’t like chatting. I said, I’ll get in touch when I’m back. And so it was three years before I came back. I feel I owe him something, so I may as well reach out to him first and have a chat.
After university he went into the army; when he was discharged he came home and, well, didn’t really know what to do — no proper job, in any case. He told me he’d recently been working as a trainer at a gym — temporary, just for fun. In the army he’d had to run ten kilometers every day, so he was in superb shape. Being a fitness trainer probably poses no problem. He married early — his daughter is seven now, his son five. And yet he looks about the same as he did in high school. He said the same about me, and I knew he meant that I’m sloppy and unkempt. I’m certainly far more weathered than I was in high school; though I don’t cut my hair, it’s gone a lot grayer and thinner. But he — a married man, in a small city, from a well-off family, not scraping by in a big city like me — he looks much younger, and there’s none of that gloom and bitterness on his face that I have.
But I know that in a small county town he must be bored out of his mind. The year he first came back he was always at the arcade playing games, and he loved to gamble on the slot machines — they say he lost a lot of money that year. Later he opened a shop selling security systems, but it didn’t make money either, so he shut it. In a small county town there’s nothing to do for fun except drive to Wuhan for sauna and massage, and prostitutes. Once he married he settled down a bit, but he’s still idle, picking up bits of work with his father and his brother-in-law, and playing mahjong the rest of the time.
He phoned another classmate and told him I was back, and asked him to come over for a chat. That classmate was actually on good terms with me too — just not my deskmate. He drove over quickly. He’s plump, with a fair face and red lips and jet-black hair. Both of them are married, both have two children, both bought flats and cars long ago. Not like me — in Beijing (they don’t know I quit my job), with nothing, renting, no girlfriend, no wife, much less children, all alone. I don’t envy their lives, but by worldly standards they’re undoubtedly far happier than I am.
This classmate isn’t as simple as my deskmate; he has a lot of ideas and follows national affairs and the international situation. My deskmate didn’t even know what “run” meant — the net-slang for getting out of the country — while this classmate knew all about it. He’d even gone to Singapore to work for a year, and now he’s thinking about how to get his wife, children, and parents out too. He said that given my temperament, Northern Europe would suit me, and suggested I “run” as well. I do like Northern Europe very much. But I’ve chosen to lie flat: I feel none of it means anything. Emptiness.
We just sat together drinking tea and talking. We didn’t even talk about the past. Everyone has his own life, and we’re not in the same city; we’re all ordinary folk, neither rich nor powerful, and we can’t offer each other anything. Once we part, there’ll be nothing left to talk about.
2023.2.4
In a southern winter, the coldest moment of the day is getting up in the morning. The bed is warmed only by your own body heat (I’m just back for a visit, so there’s no electric blanket), and the indoor temperature is only a few degrees (even if it’s a little above the outdoor temperature, that’s only because of human body heat). You get up and put on your clothes, and the clothes aren’t dry and warm either — they carry a dampness and a chill — and you shiver as you pull them on one by one. You go to the toilet and your backside freezes; and it’s a squat toilet, so your legs go numb in no time. Indoors, if you don’t keep moving, your feet stay icy, so all you can do is pace back and forth, or go out and wander; and the more you move the more you have to eat, and the more you eat the more you have to move. Set beside the north, of course the north — indoors with central heating, the temperature high — is more comfortable and pleasant, and people there are more relaxed and lazy. Anyone who’s lived in the north (or at least spent a winter there) tends to be won over by central heating and never wants to go back south.
Let me tell two things a relative told me. Her neighbor is a middle-aged divorced woman who keeps two little dogs. On New Year’s Eve she dressed the two dogs up prettily, put them in the middle of her bed, and posted online, “The doggies sleep with Mommy” (more or less). My relative frowned and shook her head and said, “Honestly, it’s disgusting. I can’t bear to look!” The other thing was her comment on Sichuan’s move to let unmarried women register births: “Isn’t that just encouraging the other woman? From now on you can have children without getting married — society will fall apart!”
My little nephew speaks Mandarin at home, and his parents speak Mandarin to him too — only the grandparents’ generation can’t speak Mandarin. The children can’t speak the dialect at all anymore. Hearing Mandarin at home, I certainly can’t get used to it. But what can you do to hold back this tide? The dialect will vanish in the end. Every evening they watch the poetry show on TV, and the poetry show is of course all in Mandarin, never read with the old rhymes. Everything is changing. Luckily I have no children — I only have to look after myself, and when I die, that’s the end of it.
The old people said that during last year’s peak of infections the city funeral home couldn’t keep up; exactly how many died, no one dared put a number on it. Fortunately none of the old people in my family were badly affected — otherwise I don’t know what I would have done. My grandmother is ninety; she did have surgery once for something else, but she’s more or less recovered now and was untouched by Covid. Covid has already become history.
I asked my mother who’s left in the countryside (by which I mean the village, where my grandfather lived). She said there are only three old people now — two grandmothers and one uncle — and this uncle often goes to stay in the town and is only occasionally in the village; not a single young person. Nobody farms the fields in the countryside anymore. Our family’s house there was sold to relatives long ago. And the town — where I lived for years — I haven’t been back in ages; I don’t know what it looks like now. The last time I went back I found it completely unrecognizable. What hometown do I have left to speak of? The village is where my grandfather and father lived; I never lived there. The town is where I did live, but now I don’t even recognize it. The county town is where I lived after high school, but the old house has been rented out, and I’ve only stayed in the new one once. Call me back — there’s not one of them I’d want to go to. I can’t go back to my hometown; and outside, I’ve lived in so many places and been nothing but a passer-by in all of them. I’m like a rootless tumbleweed, like duckweed, grass rolling over the ground, an unmoored boat — “Life is a wayside inn, and I too am a traveler.”
To this day I still haven’t tested positive. Even if I have, it was asymptomatic. In Rushan I certainly never caught it, because I came into contact with nobody and was almost always outdoors in the open, by the sea. But once I left Rushan I found that plenty of people outside had stopped wearing masks — they’d all had it. The world outside is nothing like Rushan Silver Beach. Outside, you have to come into contact with people, talk to people, eat with people, share a closed space with crowds, and you can’t escape being infected. The world outside frightens me and leaves me at a loss. I want to go back to Rushan, away from the big cities, away from the crowds. I want to be alone.
2023.2.5
Today I go back to Weihai. I don’t know why I say “back to Weihai” either — Weihai isn’t my home. But I definitely prefer the north to the south; in the south you can’t even see the sun. It was cloudy the whole few days I was home — leaden skies, a gray haze, enough to make anyone unhappy. Only the sun, only sunlight, only the sea, only the sunset can save me. Without sunlight I can’t live. The weather governs a person’s mood; we’re ruled by the sun, everything is because of the sun. I want to follow the sun, like Kuafu, the giant who chased it.
The moment I’m back in the north I’m especially happy — at last, back in the north. The north’s clear days, the north’s crisp dry air, the north’s openness and flat wide plains, where you can see far into the distance — not like the south, so cramped and crowded, crisscrossed with waterways that cut the land into patches, and with so many big mountains and small hills blocking the view so you can’t see far. So without question I love the north; I want to stay in the north.
Another reason is that I’m happiest when I’m by myself, and loneliest in a crowd. When I’m alone — in Weihai, in Rushan, in Silver Beach — alone by the sea, alone on the street, alone in the empty outskirts, I don’t feel lonely at all. But when I go back to the city, back home, onto the crowded, noisy streets, into the supermarket, I’m thoroughly unhappy, depressed. All I want is to escape — yes, escape. Leaving the crowd is my life; getting away from people is my aim. To leave, to go where there’s no one, where I needn’t talk to anyone, to look at the sea, look at the sunset, walk home alone, and fall asleep in the dark and the silence.
First I took a bus to Anqing, then changed to another for Weihai. The south was one gray haze; once we entered the north, at last there was sun. On the train I watched the sun go down in the west and the full moon rise in the east. Once we were in Shandong I saw fireworks going off in many places: today is the fifteenth, the Lantern Festival, a day for family reunion — and I’m on the road, away from home. It was already ten at night when I reached Weihai, so I booked a guesthouse, very close to the bus station, right beside Hanlefang. At night Hanlefang is quite lively, full of young people eating all kinds of snacks. I was extremely tired and just wanted to get back to my room early, so I didn’t buy anything to eat at Hanlefang; back at the guesthouse I ordered takeout. Takeout — in the big city there’s takeout, so convenient. The difference between takeout and eating in is that with takeout you don’t have to come into contact with anyone, and I don’t want to come into contact with anyone.
Long hours on the road are truly exhausting. Why did I choose this kind of life — is life really nothing but endless rushing about, endless striving, until you’re utterly spent, until death comes, and only then can you rest? No one can give me an answer. If I must have one, then the answer is: no money, poor. Let me get to Silver Beach quickly. I want to rest properly and do absolutely nothing — nothing at all. Get some proper rest!