In this house on this day last year, a pink face vied in beauty with the pink peach blossoms side by side. I do not know today where the pink face has gone; in vernal breeze still smile pink peach blossoms full-blown. — Cui Hu, “Written in a Village South of the Capital”
2023.3.13
What were you doing a year ago? If I didn’t check any records — words, photos, video — I certainly couldn’t recall much, especially the small things. But the big events I still remember a little; after all, it was only a year ago, not ten. March last year was a calm month. But the end of March, and April, and May that followed, would bring things cruel and hard to speak of, especially for the people of Shanghai — the people of Beijing felt it too, of course, and the whole country was shaken.
Luckily we have phones, to take pictures and keep a record, and cloud storage to keep those records safe. In March I was in Beijing. It was spring then, but spring comes late to Beijing: on the evening of March 17 it began to snow, and the next day the whole city was dressed in white — the latest snow I ever saw in Beijing. I went to the Summer Palace to look at the blossoms, and to the Southeast Corner Tower to look at the blossoms, breathing the free air while it lasted. Looking at the photos, that time doesn’t seem so far off; it’s almost as if I can feel the warmth of it. But soon we were all shut in. Life is a strange business: nobody can predict what a few days will bring, nobody knows where the flow of time will carry them. Never mind that a year later I’d be in Rushan — back then I could never have imagined that today I’d be sunning myself on the tip of the Jiaodong Peninsula.
As long as the weather is fine and the sun is out, I’ll sit in it for a long time, as if to earn back all the sunshine I missed. People should get more sun; sunshine does enormous good to body and mind — not only for children, but for the young, the middle-aged and the old alike. Quilts, sheets, pillows, shoes, hats, clothes: all of them should be taken out and aired often too. Here there is sunshine in abundance, free sunshine, and I mean to make the most of it. Sometimes I wonder where time comes from. Isn’t time just the sun moving? And sunlight stands for the sun, so sunlight is time: the sun pours time over our faces, and time runs down our faces and carves them.
Not working, you have the leisure to do many things; working, it seems you can get nothing done. Cooking, for instance: even if it’s only a meal for one, it takes a lot of time and energy, and people who work don’t have that time — they’re so tired from work, where would they find the energy to cook? Washing clothes, airing quilts, boiling water, cleaning the house, walking down to the sea, watching the sunset, feeling the wind, swimming, running, reading, listening to music, keeping a diary, traveling, making friends, falling in love, thinking about life — all of that needs leisure. Yet human beings rush about, and for the sake of survival, for money, for empty reputation, give up so many beautiful things. What a pity.
The wind was strong today too, and the temperature still low. Sometimes I don’t want to go out; it feels as if going out every day is always the same thing — walk down to the sea, look at the sea, look at the sunset, walk back. Every day is much the same. But in the end I talked myself round: I must go out; going out is always better than not going out. Before I even reached the sea I heard a rumbling in the distance. When I first came, I’d have wondered what the sound was; now I know it’s the surf, which means the waves are big today. And they were. Great waves rolled and tumbled, carrying masses of white foam, surging toward the shore. Shot from high up, it would make a spectacular photograph. A pity I can’t fly into the sky; I can only climb up onto the stone embankment to make myself a little taller — which does no good at all. The sunset was beautiful too, unique; every day’s sunset takes a different form, and the colors of the sky around it change endlessly. Although I do the same thing every day, after watching the sunset my mood is wonderfully clear, and I feel the day hasn’t been wasted.
After dark I went back to the compound and found that more of the buildings had lights on — that is, there are more people here now. Indeed there are, quite a few more than in winter. In the household in the building opposite mine, the north room had its light on too; the curtains weren’t drawn yet, so I could see the bed made up inside, and two people sitting on the edge of it, talking. The north side is the coldest, and even that can be lived in now.
2023.3.14
Lately I’ve been reading Zhuangzi. I hadn’t read a book in a long time. The poor aren’t unwilling to read — they lack the conditions, and so they get poorer and poorer. When I was small I read Zhuangzi and envied the freedom of “Enjoyment in Untroubled Ease” and “The Great and Most Honoured Master”; now when I read him it’s more like health preservation — learning to take life and death lightly. It isn’t that I’ve stopped loving freedom; nobody doesn’t love freedom. It’s that I’m looking for how to obtain it, and I’ve found the way, of course: not to fear death. People take life and death far too seriously — afraid of this, worried about that, until they’re tied up in knots, as if bound hand and foot, and in the end accomplish nothing. If you had Zhuangzi’s frame of mind, if you didn’t take death seriously, if you had the courage to risk death and live, to burn your boats and give battle — even if you didn’t succeed, you would have made a change; you’d have defied hesitation and cowardice, authority, and self-satisfied stagnation. That’s enough.
Today I also made a new dish: hot-and-sour shredded potato. I used to buy potatoes often, but I never cooked with them; I ate them as a staple, roasted. Today I had no other vegetables, so I tried something new. I looked up a tutorial on a cooking app — very simple. But I had no shredder, so I had to use a knife, and my slices weren’t as fine as the tutorial’s; they were more like potato slices, thicker and wider. Never mind. As long as it’s cooked through and edible, who cares whether it looks good? A lot of things are like that: the first thing is to get it done, and doing it beautifully is secondary. After all, there’s always a next time — this time you have the experience, and next time you’ll certainly do better. I had green pepper and red pepper; I stir-fried them hard, then in went the potato, then soy sauce, aged vinegar, salt, and it was ready in no time. Edible, and not bad at all.
I also worked something else out today: why the waves were so big yesterday. Because yesterday the wind was from the south. The sea is to the south and the land to the north, so a south wind pushes exactly the waves toward the shore — hence the high, fierce surf. A north wind only pushes the water out to sea, canceling the force of the waves coming ashore. A very simple principle, and it was fun to work it out. Today is a south wind too. Spring it may be, but the wind still feels cold on the body. “Drunken, I’m sobered by vernal wind shrill” — and you begin to doubt whether spring has really come.
Today’s waves were even bigger than yesterday’s, surging and thundering, fierce and loud. Standing by the sea I felt what Cao Cao must have felt — “I come to view the boundless ocean from Stony Hill on eastern shore” — and also the urge to shout “Work hard! Strive!” the way Stephen Chow does; but in the end what came out was the clumsy line “The rougher the waves, the dearer the fish.” Beside such surf even the sunset was outshone — perfectly ordinary. I soaked it in for a while, body and mind, and then walked back.
By the way, I almost forgot: flipping through my phone photos reminded me that this morning’s sunrise was extremely beautiful too. These days I wake very early, before sunrise. My trips to the toilet are regular as well; I wake with a distended belly and have to deal with it. By the time I’d dealt with it, sunrise time had passed; but from the balcony you can’t see the horizon in the distance — a building is in the way, though it isn’t tall. Soon I saw half an orange sun, and the sky a clean, soft pink. When the whole red sun had risen, its upper half began turning yellow, the yellow seeping downward until the whole sun was yellow, then brighter and brighter, turning white, giving off a glaring white light. No longer as beautiful as when it first rose, so I stopped looking, went back to the bedroom, sat on the bed and admired the photos I’d just taken.
“At sunrise, the sky gradually brightens out of the darkness, and orange, red and yellow light gradually appears on the horizon. The color of the sky changes with the different stages of sunrise, from deep blue to pink, orange, yellow and finally bright blue. As the sun rises slowly, the whole sky is washed in a warm and luminous color, giving a wonderful feeling.” That is a description of the sky’s changing colors at sunrise that I had ChatGPT write for me. I think it’s better than what I could do — good enough to write my diary in my place.
2023.3.15
Michelle Yeoh won a big award. I’ve said it before: at Rushan Silver Beach there isn’t even a cinema. If you want to see a film you have to go into the city, or to Weihai or Yantai. Watching online counts too, of course. But I haven’t seen a film in a long time. I remember that in 2017, 2018 and 2019 I watched over a hundred films a year — even two hundred. After that it was single digits. Since coming here I’ve had even less inclination for it, and the same goes for novels. It’s as if I’ve lost interest in invented stories; reality is exciting enough, cruel enough, absurd enough as it is. Or perhaps the whole world of art is sinking into boredom and mediocrity, and there simply aren’t any good works anymore.
Are there artsy young people at Rushan Silver Beach? I don’t think so. Artsy young people can only live in cities; cities have cinemas, art galleries, cafés, bars and live music venues, shopping malls, libraries. At Silver Beach there’s nothing. This is a ghost town; they won’t come. What artsy young people would there be out in the countryside? Only farmers and fishermen, and people lying flat, the decadent and the disappointed. Artsy youth love only the big metropolises, all neon lights and roaring crowds; they won’t even go to a small county town. Where there’s a city, there’s art — and youth.
There’s a good deal in Zhuangzi that criticizes the Confucians, and I love reading it. Today I came on a line — “Parents all wish their sons to be filial, but that filial duty may not secure their love” — and it struck me like a blow to the head, and everything suddenly became clear. I’d always felt there was something wrong with filial piety, but I couldn’t say what; only at that moment did I suddenly understand. Yes: filial piety isn’t necessarily love. Filial piety is only a norm, a device. Those above, in order to control those below, trot out rule after rule and shut people inside them. If they explained the principle clearly, those below might understand them. But they have no idea why one should be filial; they only demand filial piety, obedience to those above, listening to those above, no questioning those above — and that distorts filial piety, distorts love. Love comes from the heart; it cannot be forced. (There’s another reading: that a filial child doesn’t necessarily receive his parents’ love. I think it comes to much the same — filial piety isn’t necessarily love, and love isn’t necessarily filial piety.)
I saw the sunrise again this morning, an ordinary sunrise with nothing special about it. But then I thought: even this ordinary sunrise was once something I dreamed of. In the old days, living in a big city, you simply couldn’t see the sunrise — tower blocks blocked everything, and how is a person at the bottom of the heap like you supposed to see the sun and its light? You’re like a rat living in a sewer. And you couldn’t wake up early anyway; you wanted to sleep in every day, and every day you felt that going to work was agony, that you’d rather be dead. Now you’re out in the countryside, you don’t go to work, you wake at sunrise and get ready for bed at sunset, nothing blocks your view, and sunrise and sunset are both yours.
A week without a shower — time to have one. And when it comes to showering, that’s when I feel my hard life most keenly. Never mind that showering once a week seems inconceivable to many people; the fixtures and the conditions in my bathroom alone would make plenty of people turn tail and flee this ghost town. Many agents, when they show a place, will tell you how very livable their flat is, how very beautiful the photos are — but once you come and see it, or live in it for a while, you find there’s plenty wrong with it. Take my water heater: it heats water terribly slowly, over an hour each time, and then the hot water runs out in no time; the shower head won’t stay fixed, so I have to wedge myself into the corner between the washing machine and the wall and not move; the head is badly worn and leaks all over, dripping onto the washing machine. And there’s no exhaust fan and no window. For someone with my cleaning obsession and streak of OCD, these conditions are really poor, really unbearable. And I think back to Beijing: that bathroom with its wet and dry areas separated, the clean floor and walls and drain, the gas water heater where you turn on the tap and there’s hot water and you can shower as long as you like, the central heating in the bathroom, and a heat lamp as well — taking a shower was such a pleasure. Of course, for that I had to bear the pressures of living in a big city, living in a tiny flat, paying sky-high rent. That was the price that went with it.
2023.3.16
Today’s sunrise was prettier than yesterday’s, because today’s sky was purer than yesterday’s; the colors around the morning sun were fresher and plainer, and that soft orange was intoxicating — if only time would stop and the sky keep that tenderness forever. With the sun rising, in the quiet compound you could hear the early birds singing, clear and sweet: chirp chirp, twitter twitter, chatter chatter. The sky grows light earlier and earlier, and I wake earlier and earlier. Say I wake at six and go to sleep at ten: that’s sixteen hours in a day. What a long, long day! You can put it to good use, of course, and get a great many things done. Spring is so good!
The twenty-fifth of the lunar month, a market day. I only needed to buy cabbage. I eat extremely simply; cabbage and eggs are enough for me. Even if it’s like this all year round, it never bores me. Sometimes I doubt myself — why do I live this ascetic life, why did I leave the big city, why can’t I put up with the pressures of work the way other people do, am I a failure, and so on. But I quickly dismiss such thoughts. The question I should ask myself is whether I’m happy. In the end I bought two big cabbages (I meant to buy only one, but the farmer forced another on me; only RMB 4) and one cauliflower (RMB 14).
I’d thought that with the morning weather so good, the sky so clean and the sunrise so beautiful, the day would be bright and sunny with warm spring breezes. Instead, by noon and afternoon it was overcast, the air full of chill, oppressive, and chilly even sitting indoors, like winter. The spring weather here is so changeable; who knows when it will really warm up. I heard Henan had heavy snow, a thick layer of it on the ground — very abnormal too. And I thought: today is the day Beijing’s central heating shuts off; without heating, they’ll be feeling the cold too.
There’s no nightlife at Rushan Silver Beach. The old people go to bed early. The young have nowhere to go for entertainment. The streets are quiet and empty, with only the dim light of the streetlamps. The seafront is pitch dark too; you can’t see the water, only hear burst after burst of surf. Maybe in summer it’s livelier, more people around, people dancing on the square, people barbecuing by the sea. But outside the high season it’s very quiet, very desolate. I’ve spent winter and spring here, so I have some standing to say so. If you like liveliness and fear loneliness, this place definitely isn’t for you; I suggest you make your way in a big city. For a short rest and a bit of lying flat, though, it will do.
2023.3.17
Scrolling videos, I came across a girl talking about her life in Fuxin, Liaoning (Fuxin, like Hegang and Rushan, is a mecca for lying flat; housing there is extremely cheap). She said she’d bought a house, and at last she could hoard books to her heart’s content. Yes: buy books and hoard them. For that alone I followed her. Beautifully put — buy a house and you can hoard books. That’s what I dream of too. In the old days I worked in Beijing; now I’m lying flat in Rushan, and all this time I’ve never dared buy many books, because books are the heaviest thing there is, and moving is a particular nuisance. For artsy young people like us, books are the most important food for the spirit, and also the most troublesome thing to move (not one of the most — the most). But we don’t have a house of our own, or a study of our own, so there’s nowhere to put them; and the moment you have to move, the books can only be sold, or thrown away. Maddening. With a house of your own you could buy books freely, as many as you liked — books are so cheap — read whenever you liked, and look things up easily too. To have your own house, your own study: what a beautiful thing that would be.
But I don’t recommend buying a house at Rushan Silver Beach. Even a very cheap place takes around RMB 100,000 (a second-hand flat), and you’d have to redecorate and furnish it, buy furniture, some means of transport, and so on — call it RMB 200,000. Money isn’t the main thing, and the house isn’t the big problem either; the main thing is the life you’d live here afterwards. If you buy a house here, can you live here long term? Most of the people who buy here are retired old people; they don’t have to worry about work, about earning money, about marriage and children. Unless you can find a decent job, and put up with the loneliness here, and intend to stay for the long haul — then you might consider buying. If you’re only here for a short time, rent; why waste so much money on buying a house? Isn’t it better to put the money into savings?
The daytime weather was still murky, which puts you in a bad mood and kills your appetite; the ideal warm spring and opening blossoms hadn’t arrived. Nor are there many artsy young people at Silver Beach — nobody to share blossom-viewing spots with, and I don’t know where the flowers are, so I have to go looking for them myself. At noon I cycled down to the sea and found the wind rather strong; I hadn’t gone far before turning back, and I came home gasping for breath and drank a lot of water. In the evening, though, a great many bright stars came out in the sky, especially in the southern sky toward the west. Tomorrow will probably be a clear day.
2023.3.18
Though it was a clear day, there were thin mists and clouds in the sky; the sunlight wasn’t very strong, and it didn’t feel warm on the skin. The wind was from the north, and a north wind is cold while a south wind is warm; north and south winds alternate, and March will probably go on like this — mostly overcast and windy, with the temperature never rising to 20 degrees. And only at 20 degrees do I consider the weather warm and pleasant.
I truly love clear days. Beijing has 146 clear days a year; Shanghai 69, Wuhan 69, Kunming 96, Dali 118, Changchun 149, Weihai 102, Chengdu 24, Chongqing 37, Lhasa 97, Guangzhou 66, Shenzhen 26, Xiamen 35. The south is too hot, too humid, too rainy — it seems only the north suits me. Without the sun I couldn’t live.
I stayed in all day and went out for a stroll at six in the evening; the sun had already set, the sky was half dark and half light, and there was no lovely afterglow on the horizon. There was a bit of breeze outside; it felt cool on the face, not cold. That’s probably the difference between going out and sitting at home: sit at home without moving and you feel cold, but step outside and start moving and you feel comfortable. So go out often.
The sales office at Yinlong Bay was brightly lit; in the lobby there were actually a lot of people looking at flats and asking questions and walking about. Looking in from outside, table after table — buyers and agents in conversation. It looked busy. Could the property market really be picking up? Or perhaps, today being Saturday, there were more people. I don’t understand the property market; I’ve no idea who’s buying. But the flats here really are cheap.
Outside Yinlong Bay, Weishanhu Road is the night market; the night market is of course much livelier than in winter too — plenty of stalls still waiting for customers, and some packing up, getting ready to leave. I bought some eggs, RMB 7.5 a jin, fifteen of them, RMB 12. The egg seller was a fairly young woman, about thirty, and she suddenly spoke to me: “You live nearby, don’t you? I see you often.” I’m a bit socially anxious, so I hurried to say, “Yes, I live over there, at Aiqinhai Jing.” I never expected to be recognized by a market seller — which shows how small Rushan Silver Beach is. Maybe a lot of other people know me too; it’s only me who thinks I’m hidden away from the world, invisible.
Not only were there many more people at the night market; there were many more on the roads and by the sea as well. In winter, by six or seven in the evening it was completely dark and there was hardly a soul on the street. But now there are many people walking by the sea, and people on the streets heading to or back from the sea, and more cars too. So it’s not like winter, when I’d be walking alone on the road and feel frightened. Now there’s nothing to fear. Though there are more people and it feels safer, I’m always a little tense, afraid that strangers will talk to me, afraid of being too close to people.
2023.3.19
Overcast for days, and at last the sun came out. The sunlight was strong, so I took my pillow and quilt out to the balcony to air, and lay back in a chair myself, basking all day. Before sunrise there was some dawn glow, though it wasn’t especially gorgeous. The sun has moved further north and is now hidden by several tall buildings, so I can’t see the beautiful sunrise. What can you do. The weather was good, but I didn’t want to go out, because I know this place is gradually filling up with people, and that isn’t what I want to see. I like it empty and quiet.
Many things are irreversible; only recently have I admitted this fact. Age, for instance: that number will keep growing, never shrinking, and you will keep getting older. Growing young again is impossible. No child will call you brother; they all call you uncle, then older uncle, then grandpa. In your twenties you fear nothing, you think you’ll stay fierce all your life, that nothing can hammer you flat. But time can. It flows deep and silent, eroding everyone equally. The hairline, too: once it has retreated it will never advance again. Gray hair will only increase, never decrease, and it will never turn black again, even though you’re only in your thirties. And it isn’t only the hair on your head: your beard goes gray, the hairs in your nostrils go gray, and one day you find that your pubic hair has gone gray too. Your eyes, already short-sighted, will never improve; the prescription only deepens. And once you’ve put on weight, getting thin again is much harder than it was when you were young — some people simply can’t get thin again at all. It isn’t only the body’s changes that are irreversible; the changes in the mind are irreversible too. The more knowledge you take in, the heavier your thinking becomes; the past piles up in your head, more every year, and even if you no longer remember it, the knowledge and the past are stored away in some corner of your brain and become a weight in life that you cannot bear. The people you have known, the experiences they brought you, pleasure or pain, are all kept, and from time to time they disturb you. You cannot be as simple and callow and innocent and pure as you were when you were young. Your body ages and your mind grows bloated; no amount of exercise, no cosmetics, no trying to forget, no trying to break free makes any difference. Inevitably you become an adult — an adult with a heart that isn’t broad and a body that isn’t light — stumbling and staggering, rushing toward the finish line, which is death.
2023.3.20
One day without going out is bearable, but the second day I absolutely must get out for a stroll, or I’ll come down with depression. Think of last year, when at this time a lot of people still had to stay at home for a week, two weeks, even a month, two months, three months — too frightening. It’s all right now: go out as much as possible, go out often. How many days in a life can you go out at all? When you’re old and can’t walk, you can stay at home every single day. Being old is pitiable. Luckily the weather was good today too. I wandered down to the sea; the tide had gone out a long way, baring a flat beach; the wind wasn’t strong and the waves were gentle, patting the sand softly. Some red floats had been washed up on the shore, the corpses of small crabs and sea corn, foam, plastic bottles, seaweed. There were many gulls resting on the sandbar, and a stray dog on the embankment eyeing me. I walked to the mouth of the Baishatan River and followed it upstream: the willows along the bank were budding, seeping green; quite a few people were fishing from the bank, their little buckets on the ground with small fish in them, probably crucian carp and minnows. On the water there were still many coots paddling about; they hadn’t flown north yet. The weeds and reeds in the water hadn’t turned green.
At night I heard a stray cat caterwauling, like a baby — miaow, miaow. Spring has come, and it’s the mating season for animals again. “This is a season for love; the air is full of the smell of couples. A lonely person is shameful.” Where in a ghost town would you find love? The young have all gone to the big cities; the countryside is decaying and withering. The life you choose to live, you have to bear the consequences of.
2023.3.21
Today is the Spring Equinox: spring is already half over, the sun is directly over the equator, and day and night are the same length. From here on the days are longer than the nights, right up to the summer solstice. But Shandong is still rather cold; the high is only in the teens, I don’t dare take off my long johns, and everywhere is still withered and yellow — the grass isn’t green, the leaves aren’t green — and at night I still sleep under a thick quilt, though I’ve stopped wearing the down jacket. Today is a market day too, the thirtieth of the second lunar month. A pity I had nothing to buy; the fridge is well stocked with food.
Lately I’ve been making hot-and-sour shredded potato a lot. Ever since that first time, I’ve found it quite tasty, and it’s no trouble to make. Do a dish over and over and it becomes especially easy. Probably the same with a job. I used to think cooking wasn’t easy either, but now my view has changed again: cooking is repetitious work, and for a chef it may be thoroughly boring. Do the same thing over and over and it does become tedious; that’s why people seek excitement, adventure, do something different, invent something, create new dishes. But work with no room for invention really does feel dull. Life is the same: if every day repeats, every week repeats, every year repeats, then a life has very little meaning in it.
I filed for my tax refund; it came to over RMB 2,000 back to me, which I hadn’t expected either. I don’t remember how much tax I paid, and I can’t make sense of the rules for paying and refunding; I’ve only heard that Chinese people’s taxes are terribly heavy. A refund makes me happy. I’m going to withdraw my housing fund in full as well — once the withdrawal conditions are met. With this money I can rest for longer.
2023.3.22
Overcast, with light rain falling like fine threads, mist over the fields, soft as butter; the dry ground and the withered grass drank their fill of this rain, precious as oil. “Good rain knows its time right; it will fall when comes spring. With wind it steals in night; mute, it moistens each thing.” I ate my brunch and went out on the bicycle, a light breeze on my face, cool and pleasant. The tide had gone far out; some people were foraging the shallows, not many — I hope they all found something. I heard Beijing has a bad sandstorm; spring always brings two or three of them. “Your city is getting rain; his city is getting mud.”
The rain kept falling. In the afternoon it didn’t stop; it got heavier. Truly good rain! Everything is reviving, waiting only for this one spring rain. The rain fell pattering down, washing away the earlier mist so that you could see farther into the countryside. The air became exceptionally fresh; one breath of it and you’re invigorated. The wind is gentle and cool too — put your head out of the window and it’s like a hand stroking your face. On a rainy day, though, with no sun, the temperature is of course lower. And when the temperature drops, you get hungry easily. I ate three meals today. In the morning, noodles with egg and cabbage. In the afternoon, two baked potatoes. In the evening I was hungry again, so I boiled plain rice, but I didn’t want to cook a dish. So when the rice was done I dripped a few drops of soy sauce onto it. Wow — a taste beyond anything on earth. Perfectly content. I haven’t eaten meat for five months now, and I don’t want any at all. I think my body and my spirit have both been purified.
2023.3.23
I’ve been at Rushan Silver Beach five months now, and it’s six months since I quit. Six months without going to work — truly happy, truly relaxed. Body and mind both utterly loose and slack, no longer taut. When I was working I worried about this and fretted about that every day, forced myself to sleep early at night and forced myself awake in the morning — driven through life. Now I sleep when I want and get up when I want, entirely as nature takes its course. In Zhuangzi’s words, letting things take their natural course is the Way.
But with no work at all, and nothing to occupy you, you get bored; you still have to find something to do, paid or unpaid. You need some interests, and if the interests can turn into money, so much the better. Or get some exercise — run, ride a bike, swim in the sea, get the body strong and fit. Or read, learn new knowledge and new skills; or simply put out some thoughts and ideas, which also keeps your way with words from deteriorating in this solitary life. Or travel, see the great landscapes, feel different cultures. In short, don’t shut yourself in, or you’ll go senile before your time.
It rained all day yesterday, and today it cleared. That’s the good thing about the north: rain doesn’t last long; a single day is a lot. The north wind was rather strong and carried some dust to the seaside, but compared with Beijing the filth is much reduced — not yellow, but gray. The sunlight was good, though, bright without being fierce, and sitting on the balcony in the sun with my feet up was as warm as winter, and made me drowsy.
The wind blew all day, a force-six or force-seven gale that made me afraid to go out. I have to say the wind here really is strong, and frequent. They say the wind in Weihai proper is stronger and more frequent — that side faces north, it’s especially cold in winter, a real snow nest. Rushan, being inland, faces south, and the wind is a little lighter and the snow much less, so you could say we’re luckier than Weihai. Just from experiencing the seaside climate, I’ve gained a great deal in my life. “I came, I saw, I conquered.”
2023.3.24
Overcast and windy again. March is the month with the most overcast days, worse than winter. When it snows in winter there’s still sun — what they call sun-snow. But March is fitful, clear one moment and cloudy the next, with big swings in temperature between day and night and strong winds; it isn’t a lovely month. By the lunar calendar this month is still the second month, a leap second month, still early spring. Besides, Rushan’s central heating didn’t shut off until March 20. (But the great majority of compounds at Rushan Silver Beach have no heating at all; only Rushan proper has it.) At noon I strolled down to the sea; the tide was far out and the view wide open; some people were foraging the shallows. You hardly see razor clams anymore; there are clams scattered about, but sea corn is still everywhere, showing their fat heads. Gulls stroll about at their leisure; the north wind was strong but not cold; the seawater pushed gently in, and my shoes got wet again.
Sometimes I wonder whether I’ve romanticized life here too much. In winter there’s no heating, for instance, which rules out most northerners. There’s no takeout, no 24-hour convenience stores, no subway, no taxis; buses run very rarely; there’s nowhere to go for entertainment; the streets are pitch dark at night — which rules out a lot of young people too. The rents are cheap, but the flats are in fact terribly maintained: shoddy decoration, badly worn furniture and appliances, and the moment something goes wrong it’s a headache. And if you fell ill or had an accident, you wouldn’t even know where the nearest hospital is. This is the countryside; call an ambulance and who knows when it would come. I don’t talk about these things only because I personally can put up with hardship and have a high tolerance, and I write a lot of it off as small-probability events and don’t think about it. But for other people a lot of it has to be considered, and that’s why they won’t choose to come here.
I think of these bad sides because last night the ceiling light in the bedroom broke. At first I thought the power was out; only later did I realize the tube had gone. It took me a long time even to get the cover off — it was too high, and the catch was too well hidden. Once it was open, I tapped it and poked at it and it wouldn’t come on, so it probably really was dead. I poked the capacitor in the middle, and managed to puncture its insulating wrap. That shows you the quality of these appliances. I could get someone in to fix it, but I don’t know any repairmen here, and even if I found one I’d have to pay. The agent said they only cover the first seven days after you move in; after that, problems are your own to solve. If I don’t fix it, I could use a desk lamp, that’s not impossible — but when I move out, the agent will dock my deposit for the broken light. A lot of people say the agents here are shady, and in the end they always find some reason to dock your deposit or not return it at all. And it isn’t only the lights: other fittings and appliances have problems too, so when you move in you should photograph and video everything and keep the evidence, in case the agent won’t be reasonable.
Five months at Rushan Silver Beach, through autumn, winter and spring, and I know the place quite well now. It has many good points and many bad ones; it isn’t a perfect place. No place is perfect, of course. If I praised it unstintingly that would be untrue; if I ran it down unstintingly that would be a private grudge. If you ask whether I ever find it boring here, I’d say: for the first three months, not at all — every day I wanted to go and look at the sea and the sunset. But after three months the enthusiasm fades a little, and it’s no longer every day — only once every two or three days. I’ve also traveled elsewhere: to Lhasa, to Qingdao, back to my hometown; now and then you have to get out and look around. Stay in one place and anyone would tire of it. I admit it. As for what will happen to my state of mind in the sixth month — that is for the next installment.