Therefore every man has perfect freedom, provided he emancipates himself from mundane desires. — Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy
2023.3.1
Last night I took the car back from Qingdao, passing through dark, silent suburbs as if driving through a void, drifting, adrift — and life too is a void. Why am I here? Which way will I go? There’s simply no answer to be found, and life has no answers either.
Back at the compound it was very quiet, the same as before: in some buildings one or two households had a light on, in others not a single lamp. The people here still hadn’t multiplied at all. But I like it that way. I don’t want to hear noise, I don’t want to see bright lights and revelry. I want this place to be a retirement paradise, far from the clamor, calm as water, with no one to disturb me. Back in my little room I suddenly felt a bit cold, and only then realized there’s no central heating at Silver Beach. A few days of central heating in Qingdao had made me soft, and now I couldn’t take the cold. I hurried to boil water and turn on the electric blanket and the electric heater, and cooked myself a scalding bowl of instant noodles to fill my stomach. At last I was back in the ghost town.
After getting back, my body clock has switched over to the lunar calendar again. Today is the tenth of the lunar month, a market day. My vegetables were all eaten up, so I needed to buy some fresh ones. I bought a napa cabbage for only RMB 3.5, and the old farmer bagged it for me in a KFC bag. He weighed it on one of those old steelyard scales and showed me the markings; I said I can’t read it either, just tell me the price. I bought eleven eggs for RMB 15 — enormous eggs, bigger than sea-duck eggs, twice the size of the ones last time; they must all be double-yolkers. Seven long green peppers cost RMB 10; I forgot to ask the price, a bit dear — next time I’ll buy the curved ones. Five cream Fuji apples, RMB 19, the largest variety at RMB 6 a jin. It makes me so happy to wander the market, especially now the weather’s warm. There were noticeably more people at the market, and everyone was beaming, every face smiling. And the thing that surprised me most today was how many young people there were at the market, young women especially. I don’t know where they came from, but I’m glad to see them.
A little eatery has opened outside the compound, called XX Nutritious Fast Food — a very small shopfront, the owner a young man who came from elsewhere to start a business at Silver Beach, they say. You see, not every young person comes to Silver Beach to lie flat; some live properly and work hard to make money.
Spring has already arrived by the sea. It’s getting light earlier and dark later, the days are longer, the earth is lit by the sun for longer, and everything is coming back to life. I wore one layer less and switched my coat for a thin jacket, and when I mooched down to the shore I broke out in a sweat. There were more people on the streets and at the shore, and that actually frightened me a little; the more people there are, the more I want to keep my distance from them.
The wind blew all day, and at night the sky was washed clean again; half a moon shone white, and stars were scattered across the vault. From the south window you could see the moon and Mars; from the north window, the Big Dipper and Polaris. This was the first time I’d seen the Dipper’s ladle from Weihai, and it fixed the true north. The white moonlight came through the west window and fell on the balcony floor, just a small patch, cold and clear, like frost on the ground.
2023.3.2
I paid the February water and electricity bill. The bills for the past four months are as follows. November: water RMB 12, electricity RMB 53. December: water RMB 9, electricity RMB 92. January: water RMB 15, electricity RMB 139. February: water RMB 12, electricity RMB 67. Gas came to nine cubic meters over the four months, RMB 25.2 in all. A person who is willing to lower his desires of his own accord spends less, and worries less too.
Lately people often ask me under my videos: you really don’t eat meat? As if they simply can’t understand it. Yes — I don’t eat meat, and it’s been four months now. Back when I worked in Beijing I ate meat almost every day, at every meal — but the truth is I really dislike meat, I hate it. Even then I wanted to give it up, but I never managed it. How to put it? When you’re slogging away in a big city, so tired, so hard-pressed, of course you should eat a bit better. It’s a matter of energy needs: you do more, so of course you eat more. Now that I’m lying flat in Rushan — not working, not slaving, not hauling bricks — I burn almost no energy, so I don’t need to eat that much. Sometimes I eat just one meal a day, only vegetables and eggs. The things I eat most are napa cabbage, cauliflower, tomatoes, potatoes. I’ve never once bought meat. I don’t eat seafood either. Even though I live by the sea, seafood doesn’t much interest me. I simply don’t want to eat meat, don’t want anything meaty. I want to run an experiment like this, and see what not eating meat does to the body. Or rather, whether not eating meat is the healthy life. To my mind, only not eating meat is the healthy life. Red meat does the body nothing but harm. Of course, this is only my own choice. Whether you eat it or not has nothing to do with me. In any case, I won’t. Once it’s become a habit, I may well keep it up all the way to eighty or ninety. To eat meat or not is every person’s own freedom. (Only when I travel, or go back home, and can’t find a place that serves vegetarian food, or it’s inconvenient — then I have no choice but to eat meat. That part can be ignored.)
In the evening I went to the shore to watch the afterglow of the setting sun, and once again saw colors of extraordinary beauty. Though the sun has moved north, its golden light still fell across the wet sand; the red sun dropped slowly, its outline clear, and at the horizon the sky was a soft orange, shading upward into deep blue. Driven by the wind, the seawater washed the beach like pleasant music. I watched until the sun had gone down entirely and the afterglow slowly faded. I thought I’d have grown tired of sunsets by now, but it turns out every day’s sunset is different — no two days in a whole year are the same.
2023.3.3
“The genial wind from the south blows on the heart of that jujube tree.” Although it was only 12 degrees outside, a stroll along the shore at noon left me sweaty and a bit hot. Spring really has come. The sparrows in the grass are livelier than before, chirping more merrily. Two dogs were romping in the field as if courting. Afraid they might bark at me, I picked up a bamboo pole and held it, swinging it about so it whistled; a weapon and a toy both, and I could play with it all day without tiring. A man’s happiness is just this simple. The tide was coming in, and a sandbar had formed on the beach, covered with seagulls. These gulls aren’t like the ones at Zhanqiao Pier in Qingdao — here they fly off the moment a person comes near. When I’d had my fill of playing on the beach I went back up on land and picked a few pine cones from the little grove by the shore to play with.
While stir-frying I discovered another fact: if you fry for too long your arm starts to ache, so stir-frying takes arm strength. Cooking really is no simple matter. It needs not only stamina, skill and patience, but the cooking fumes are bad for the skin too, and make a person age faster. When AI or a machine can do the cooking, then humanity will truly be liberated. A pipe dream!
2023.3.4
I hear there’s another infectious disease spreading badly just now — influenza A, they call it. I can’t make out what kind of illness it is, and I’m not worried about it at all. During the big wave of Covid infections after the restrictions were lifted, my corner of the world, Rushan Silver Beach, was very quiet; I’ve never caught it to this day. Keep away from the cities, away from crowds, and you can avoid a great many diseases. That’s why the people in The Decameron hide away in the countryside during a plague.
The sun climbs higher and higher and its light grows fiercer; go out without a hat and the glare makes you screw up your eyes — just like last October and November. Walk a circuit outdoors and you feel hot, and it’s time to take off the long johns. The magpies are building new nests; the trees along the road seem to have many more new nests and big nests, and twigs lie scattered on the ground beneath them. Someone online said the sea has its seasons too: the seascape changes with the season, and the shapes of sea creatures change with it. I also saw a sanitation worker climb a pine tree to pick cones, dropping them all to the ground and finally bagging them up — probably to take home for firewood.
2023.3.5
It was cold in winter, so I never went out cycling; now the weather’s warm, there’s a gentle breeze, and I have nothing to do, so I decided to go out for a ride — for exercise and for the fun of it. The bike’s tires were badly flat; I had to pump them up first. Starting from Aiqinhai Jing, I rode down to the shore, then east along Changjiang Road to the Foreign Affairs University, up around the east side of the university to Yinjin Avenue, and then west along Yinjin Avenue all the way back to Aiqinhai Jing. The whole trip took two and a half hours; whenever I got tired I’d get off and walk a stretch, and when I’d rested enough I’d ride again. Once home I measured the distance on the map — exactly twenty kilometers. What a coincidence.
I got up to heavy fog, visibility very low, humidity 98 percent. But as the sun rose and the temperature climbed, the view gradually cleared and the humidity dropped — though out at sea it was still a blank of white, neither the water nor the islands to be seen. In the gaps while riding, I thought of how as a boy I used to walk with my parents back to the village — those happy childhood memories. We loved walking from childhood, loved playing out in the wild, loved the empty, quiet natural world; we will always be country children. Almost back at the compound, in the distance I saw a tree by the gate of another compound thick with clusters of small white buds. I don’t know if it was magnolia, plum or peach; they spread out in one great mass, not yet fully open but all about to burst, “the plain ground for the colors” — a delight and a surprise. Spring really has come.
2023.3.6
I woke a little after six and looked east from the balcony, and there was the morning sun, yellow and red (I don’t know what word to use for that color), the newly risen sun so beautiful, the universe so mysterious and sacred. Because the sun has moved north, I can now see it rise between the two buildings — in winter I couldn’t see the morning sun at all, blocked completely by the building in front. If I could sit on the balcony and watch the sun rise slowly from the horizon (or the sea horizon), what a blissful experience that would be.
Today is the fifteenth, a market day, and also a spring tide (spring tides last three days). I bought a few necessities (napa cabbage and garlic — the cabbage will last five days, the garlic half a month), and held myself back from buying anything I didn’t need. A person should be restrained, not fritter money away, not be held hostage by consumerism, let desire settle; indifference to worldly success makes one’s aims clear, and tranquility makes one reach far. Some of the old farmers at the market have no QR code and take cash only; his scale is a steelyard, not a digital one — I don’t know how many customers he loses that way. His napa cabbage was only RMB 0.5 a jin, and he said it weighed eight and a half jin. I can’t read a scale either, so I just gave him RMB 4. The old farmer selling garlic talked to me in a thick dialect I could hardly follow; all I could tell was that he was praising his garlic. Eight heads of garlic, RMB 7.
At noon I made a point of going to the compound where I’d seen the white flowers yesterday, to see what flowers they actually are. The trees are planted outside the compound, and the flowers really are still buds or half open, not fully out — from a distance a scattering of white, but up close you can see that inside and at the base they’re purple-red. The color is very plain and elegant; each bud is wrapped in two or three little downy pods that protect it. I looked it up on a plant-ID app and it said it’s a spring-welcoming magnolia, also known as the spring-welcoming flower, or spring-welcoming tree. Spring at Silver Beach has truly arrived.
At the same time I’ve been realizing more and more that I have no interest in people (men or women alike), nor in the relations between people; I’m interested only in nature — in animals and plants, in the sea and the mountains, in weather and the sun, moon and stars, in these non-human things. There was a film I used to love, Into the Wild; its protagonist was my idol, and I wanted to live the way he did, far from crowds, in the Alaskan wilderness. My fondness for Thoreau rests on the same thing. It isn’t that I dislike people; I’m just tired of all the procedures and rituals of dealing with them, of having to think of others, of political correctness — those things only bore me. If I had to give myself a label, it would be “naturalist”: I love nature more than I love people.
2023.3.7
Another heavy fog when I got up; there’s been a lot of fog lately. But soon I could see the morning sun, like an egg yolk, with a small red band at its lower edge; the distant towers were hidden in the fog and invisible, only the mixed trees nearby were visible, so it looked as if the sun were rising out of the woods.
The days are getting longer and longer, and sometimes I miss winter; in winter the days are short and the nights long, so you can stay in your warm bed with a clear conscience. But now it’s bright so early that I’m ashamed to stay in bed. Now and then I get bored, with nothing to do, restless with idleness, so I go out and cycle. Today I rode west to Chaoxi Lake, along Huanhu West Road and Huanhu North Road, then back to the compound — 16.5 kilometers in all, nearly two hours. The fog hadn’t lifted during the day either; it must have been haze, a gray murk, not clear at all. There were hardly any people by the lake, very quiet, and the lawn beside the walkway faces the sun, just right for sitting and sunbathing. The willow branches by the road are starting to turn green, plainly different from winter’s gray, and soon it will be “ten thousand branches trail green silken threads.”
In Beijing I often went out cycling too, on shared bikes, roaming the busy avenues, looking at the shops and the passers-by along the way — from the Fourth Ring to the Second Ring, to Chang’an Avenue, from Dongdan to Xidan, to look at Tiananmen and Xinhua Gate. But cycling at Silver Beach is utterly different. Here there’s no one and no traffic, the road is empty and you can see far ahead; there are no buildings along the road either, only the sea and waste ground. No traffic lights to watch, no one to get out of the way of, none of the irritating noise, none of the poisonous exhaust. It doesn’t matter if you get off and push; if you need a piss you just go in the woods. You could say you do exactly as you please.
In the evening from the balcony I could again watch the full moon rise — a dim yellow disc, shedding its pale light over the earth. There is only one sun, and only one moon, yet they don’t look lonely in the least, rising and setting with such indifference, over and over. A full moon is a common enough sight, but if you work it out, there’s only one a month, only twelve a year; add cloudy days and rain, or being too busy to look up at the sky, and five or six sightings in a year is a lot. Those beautiful things — why not look at them properly? (Tonight’s full moon is also called the worm moon, the last full moon of winter; the little insects are about to wake and come up out of the earth.)
2023.3.8
I go to bed early every night, so I wake early too. There’s no need to stay up late. In a big city, if you don’t stay up late you seem abnormal. But I live in the countryside. I woke at five or six in the morning, when the sun was still below the horizon; sunrise wasn’t until 6:13. I got up and looked out the window — heavy fog again, and east was just white. I waited a while longer, and only at 6:35 did I see the red sun; it had already risen to the treetops. The red sun gradually turned yellow, egg-yolk yellow, then shed the yellow too and turned white, and dazzling.
The forecast said today’s high would reach 21 degrees, which would be very hot. Today is also the seventeenth of the lunar month, the last day of the spring tide, and I mustn’t miss the ebb — I had to go down to the shore and see. Low tide was at 10:34. The height of each low tide is different; today it’s 41 centimeters, which counts as quite high. I remember one low tide was minus 7 centimeters, and that day there were a great many people out foraging the shallows. So today there were very few — only a scattered few villagers poking about in the sand at the water’s edge. The beach isn’t cold any more either; it’s not like winter, when the wind stiffens your face and numbs your fingers. Now it’s a gentle spring breeze, soft as water.
The trees along the road are full of magpie nests; there are some under the baffles of the streetlamps and on the frames of the power pylons too. There really are too many magpies here, and too free and casual about it; some nests are built so low you could jump up and poke them. But there are few people about, and no one’s going to bother with such a pointless thing. Four cats had gathered together, lying in the grass sunbathing and sleeping, squinting at me with contempt. When a black stray dog came near they got up warily and hid in the bushes beside them, and the dog never saw them.
I hadn’t gone to watch the sunset for a few days; a pity, with all this fog and haze lately, and the sun moving further north, there really isn’t much to see. But a walk out is always good. The Yinlong Bay night market was quite lively, lots of stalls; I saw a few young girls. People were playing on the basketball court and the tennis court by the shore, all young or middle-aged men. Under the boards of the viewing platform insects were chirping away, the crickets waking up, probably. A few red floats had been washed up on the shore. The setting sun went from yellow to red, the red growing paler and paler, and at last it vanished.
2023.3.9
Another day of heavy fog, humidity very high, a bit raw and cold, the sun quite invisible. Nothing much to see outdoors either. So let me talk about my cooking here. In my seven years working in Beijing I never once cooked, not even during the worst of the pandemic. The good thing about a big city is that life is convenient — takeout, convenience stores, no worry about where the next meal comes from. Rushan is different: no takeout, no convenience stores, you have to do it yourself. From a man who couldn’t cook at all, I started cooking for myself and stuck with it. Cooking isn’t really hard — doing it well is hard, of course; all we need is to make it edible.
After four months and more of cooking, I think the most important part is preparing the ingredients; once the prep is done, the rest is easy. Take one of my meals and I’ll walk you through the whole process. As much rice as you want to eat, that’s how much you scoop; wash it, plug in the cooker, and wait. The cooking of the dish is the main thing. I used to make two dishes, a fried egg and stir-fried cabbage. I don’t eat meat. Now I make just one: this today, that tomorrow. It saves trouble, saves money, and helps me lose weight. For the fried egg I usually crack in two or three, and fry them in oil and salt till they turn yellow and red. Stir-fried cabbage takes more preparation. Garlic: peeled and chopped. Green peppers: washed and chopped. Cabbage: peel off three or four leaves, tear them up, wash them. Set these three aside, and when the rice is about ten minutes from done, put them in the wok. Stir-fry, turning them over and over, and they’re done in five minutes. I used to cook cauliflower too, but cauliflower has to be washed and then boiled a while to soften it, which is a lot of bother, so I gave it up. It’s the preparation that takes the most time and patience. Without a good frame of mind, or a good kitchen, it’s hard to become someone who cooks.
I only cook the above once every two days, because prepping the vegetables is really too much trouble — the washing, the chopping, the frying, it eats up so much time. To save time, on alternate days I make steamed egg. Steamed egg is the simplest: beat two eggs, sprinkle in a little salt, add a drop of sesame oil, put it in the rice cooker and cook it together with the rice; when the rice is done, the egg is done. Tip the steamed egg into the rice, mix it in, and lunch is dealt with. For dinner it’s usually noodles; there are two kinds, instant noodles and dried noodles, but you still have to add a few cabbage leaves and two eggs and boil it all together, or it doesn’t taste good. Yes — my life is just this simple and pure, low on desire.
Oh — don’t forget to wash the bowl, the pot, the chopsticks. So for one person there’s really no need to prepare much; one dish is enough. Living like this, with a clean heart and few desires, I’ve kept it up for four months now, and I don’t feel unhealthy or undernourished, and I don’t hanker after all that fish and meat; meat is even filthy to me. I’ve lost weight too — no more double chin, a better jawline, cheekbones more pronounced, my whole body cleaner and lighter, and my state of mind far more placid and steady. Poor as I am, I “do not allow my joy to be affected by it.”
Oh, and drinks: I drink only plain boiled water, just like when I was small. “I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man.” As for the cola I was once addicted to, I haven’t had it in a long time — I’ve quit it completely. Alcohol, I never liked. Coffee doesn’t suit me. Bubble tea is too sweet. Tea I can’t afford. Only plain water doesn’t breed or feed my desires; it keeps me indifferent and calm.
Today’s fog deserves a proper note too. When I got up it was thick fog, no sunrise to be seen, though the trees outside the compound still showed faintly. At noon the fog thinned a little and the sun appeared now and then, giving off a very feeble white light. By evening the fog was thicker still, thicker than in the morning; the trees outside the compound were gone from sight, and the towers of the neighboring compound too. Visibility reached only my own compound, maybe fifty meters, and even the building opposite was lost in the murk. The humidity was extremely high. This is the first time I’ve met fog this heavy at Silver Beach. Noted.
2023.3.10
There are a lot of everyday things too — save wherever you can. Shampoo and body wash: don’t buy them, just wash with plain water. A hair dryer isn’t necessary either; let it dry naturally. Clothes, trousers, shoes and hats: buy them only when they’re truly worn out. I have no social life anyway, so I needn’t worry about my appearance at all, no one to show off to. Snacks serve as staples too — bread, instant noodles, pickled mustard — and the rest I do without. A bicycle I did buy; after all, getting around here is inconvenient without one. No electric bike; and certainly no car — those are far too expensive for me. No books either. No stationery. No useless decorations. No fresh flowers. No pets. I’m like a plant: all I need is soil and sunlight.
When I got up the fog was still all around, but at noon the sun came out, the temperature shot up to 20 degrees, and it was quite scorching. I went out to look at the magnolias I’d seen a few days before: the flowers had opened a little more, and a good many bees were gathering nectar, showing you their backsides. Some of the flowers are white, some red, and quite a few petals had fallen on the ground — “fallen petals are not heartless things.” A pity no one appreciates them in a ghost town, like a beauty fallen among the common folk. Turning back and crossing the fields, I saw a beautiful hoopoe, its crest fully spread, like one of those Indian headdresses — so lovely there are no words for it. I hurried to get out my phone to photograph it, but it flew off in a flash.
In the evening I went out for a stroll. The ground-floor flats in the compound all have gardens; two old people were sowing seed on a patch they’d turned over — I don’t know what they were planting. Two old women were working in the field and chatting, in halting Mandarin; you could tell at a listen that they weren’t locals, probably renting land from the locals. Some old people here have nothing to do, so they rent a bit of locals’ land and grow vegetables to pass the time. At the night market there was a young couple with a stall selling apples — they looked in their early twenties, very sunny, cuddled up together playing on a phone. Down at the shore there was a young woman who’d just come to Silver Beach, in a pink knit hat, sitting barefoot on the embankment, swinging her feet and looking out at the sea. At the night market I bought apples, eggs and century eggs: six apples RMB 20, sixteen eggs RMB 13, five century eggs RMB 10.
2023.3.11
The temperature dropped sharply today and the north wind picked up; it felt cold going out. But there were plenty of farmers at the market, hollering to sell their vegetables — not like me, so frail the wind could blow me over. Since there were still vegetables in the fridge and I’d bought eggs yesterday evening, there wasn’t much I needed at today’s market. I made a couple of circuits and in the end bought only green peppers, potatoes and salted duck eggs. Over these four or five months I’ve more or less settled into a routine of cooking and eating here — I know what to eat, what to buy, how to arrange my mealtimes, and so on; things are reaching a steady material balance.
I happened to hear the cheeping of chicks — cheep cheep cheep — and looked around for the sound, and found that a family was keeping chicks in their ground-floor garden, black ones, running about in a small way inside the fenced yard. Not bad at all — you can keep chickens here. Some people keep dogs, some grow vegetables, some keep chickens. I just don’t know how they’ll house the grown birds when the chicks get big. Chickens lay eggs, and you can also slaughter and eat them once they’ve grown — two birds with one stone. I remember when I was small we lived in the town and kept chickens at home, and pigs too; now and then I’d pick up ducklings that a duck herder had lost in the river and raise them together with the chicks. We had all kinds of fruit trees too — peaches, tangerines, plums — and a fish pond in the back yard where we raised fish, not to mention vegetables. That’s a fair picture of how I love animals and plants.
I’ve said before that the ground floors here all have gardens, ten or twenty square meters or so, but the great majority stand empty and gone to seed, grown over with weeds, with no one to clear them and no one to farm them. A real waste. If these empty plots were all put to use, broken and planted with garlic, scallions or chives, or chickens and ducks, or even a little fish pond, how idyllic it would be. Of course, that’s just me dreaming. In a ghost town, when there aren’t even any people, what crops would you grow? Even in a pure village, back in my hometown, no one farms the land any more — farming won’t make you rich, it’s hard even to be self-sufficient, and it’s backbreaking; who’d want to be a farmer? Only retired city people who come here for their old age, with nothing to do, do a bit of farm work to while away the boredom of their twilight years.
2023.3.12
Around sunrise it was still cloudy, no sign of the morning sun; then soon after seven a gale blew up, force seven or eight, whipping the branches about, making the window glass creak and the house tremble, and blowing the clouds from the sky so that the deep blue showed through, utterly clear. I stayed curled up in bed, listening to the wind outside, howling without cease, so distinct — as if my hearing had grown sharper. In fact it isn’t that my ears are more sensitive, but that my surroundings are quieter, with no other noise, so the wind sounds amplified. If I were in the city, with traffic and voices all around, I certainly wouldn’t hear the wind so clearly.
With the wind so strong, there were noticeably fewer people out strolling, and many vendors didn’t come to set up at the night market. I walked down to the shore to wait for the sunset. The sky was clear and bright, and the sun sank slowly. The spring equinox is nearly here; the sun is directly over the equator and continuing north. The setting sun was a bright white, nothing special in itself, but around it the orange was very beautiful, a gentle consolation. The orange reflected off the wet sand by the shore and turned the beach orange too. Only now it can no longer set the sea shimmering with leaping gold. The sun kept dropping, sank below the horizon, and still the sky was orange, a shade paler than the darker color before; looking up, it was deep blue. The sky’s colors are the purest of all. Two bright stars stood in the sky — probably Venus and Jupiter.
In this shifting of colors, the orange slowly paled, blue pressed down on the orange, black pressed down on the blue, and sky and earth were no longer distinct. Night fell, and I went home. My stomach was empty; I’d meant to buy a few jujube cakes at the night market, but the cake vendor hadn’t come. I’d always thought I disliked cake and sweet things, but it isn’t so — it’s just that back then, in the big city, I wasn’t hungry. Now that I live in a ghost town and lead this extremely “temperate” life, I’m often hungry, and so cake tastes very good too. I hope the temperature comes up quickly tomorrow and the gale stops, and then I won’t feel hungry. God bless the people who have finished their meal.