Still free, still myself, forever singing my song aloud, out across a thousand miles; forgive me this life of mine — unruly, unrestrained, in love with freedom — and afraid that one day I’ll fall; to abandon one’s ideals, anyone can do that — so who’s afraid of a day when there’s only you and me? — Beyond, “Boundless Oceans, Vast Skies”
In early September 2022 I told my boss I was quitting, and a month later the paperwork was done (it could have been done in a week). In October I stayed on in Beijing for nearly another month (my lease ran to October 23), said a proper goodbye to Beijing, and then got on the high-speed train to Weihai. The pandemic wasn’t over yet, and the endless variety of epidemic-control measures still had you by the throat. I spent just three days in Weihai; on October 26 I got on the bus from Weihai to Rushan Silver Beach, and my life in Rushan began.
In the blink of an eye I’ve been at Rushan Silver Beach a full six months — half a year, made up of one month of autumn, three months of winter and two months of spring. It’s late spring now, and early summer is almost here. What I’ve been through in these six months — neither long nor short — I’ve recorded in great detail, day by day. Anyone interested can go and read the earlier pieces. This one I mean as a summing-up, a look back, to gather up the journey of these six months and see what I’ve gained.
As for why I went to Beijing to drift, and how I made up my mind to leave, I explained at length in “Seven Years Drifting in Beijing” and the three-part “Quitting” — no need to go over it again. In short: the pressure of the work and the endless churn of the epidemic-control years made life in Beijing finally unbearable. I was too tired, worn out in body and mind. Another moment and I would have broken down. I wanted to go to the seaside, do nothing, quietly look at the sea, rest and recover, let my mind come back to normal, and become a happy person.
The world changes and nothing lasts. I remember in my first days in Rushan there was a PCR test every day; after that they’d call you out for one every few days. But it wasn’t compulsory — if you didn’t go, nobody bothered you, and outdoors you didn’t even have to wear a mask. All thanks to how few people there are here. Rushan is called a ghost town, “the Hegang by the sea.” In winter you can walk the streets and hardly see a soul, and there are no tourists at the shore; the whole beach, and the sunset, belong to you alone. And if you’re the only one there, what do you need a mask for — are you sick in the head? At night the compound is pitch dark too, the streetlights all switched off, and you can be in bed by seven. Even after the restrictions were lifted in December, the huge outbreak in the big cities never reached here; the antigen tests and medicines I’d laid in were completely useless. And now masks aren’t compulsory anymore. It’s all over, gone up in smoke — like a dream, an illusion, a bubble, a shadow; like dew, like lightning.
The great majority of the flats here stand empty; to call Silver Beach a ghost town (in winter) is no exaggeration at all. By November there are desperately few people — and my compound counts as one of the busier ones — and at night on average only two or three flats in a building have lights on; some buildings are entirely dark, and the fuller ones have only four or five. Winter is cold, and there’s no entertainment of any kind, so you switch on the electric blanket at six or seven and stay in bed. Yes: no central heating here. With heating, I’m sure there’d be more people. Precisely because there is none, Silver Beach’s own publicity slogan is “To Sanya for winter, to Silver Beach for summer,” and anyone who winters the season out here is a wonder. As for property prices here, and rents, the climate, the transport — there’s plenty of reference material and commentary online, so I won’t say more.
Why did I choose Rushan in the first place? Because it has the sea, of course. But plenty of places have the sea — so why Silver Beach? First, it’s in the north. Second, it’s in Weihai. Third, the rent here is the cheapest. I’m a southerner, but I don’t like the rainy, humid southern climate. I’ve lived in the north a long time, and I like dry weather with plenty of clear days. Go too long without seeing the sun and I get depressed. Sunlight is the best medicine there is. So I didn’t go to a southern coast. And Weihai’s sea is the finest in the north — though Rushan’s sea is nothing special. And it was the lowest rent that drew me to Rushan rather than downtown Weihai or Rongcheng.
In my first three months I went to the shore almost every day, sometimes two or three times a day. To an inland person the sea is full of magical attraction. Before I came to live by the sea I didn’t even know that it rises and falls twice a day, that there are two big cycles a month, and that the tide is highest around the third and the seventeenth of the lunar month — never mind which hours of the day are high tide and which low. Now I can work it out for myself. Standing at the shore looking at the vast water, listening to surging or gentle waves, feeling a fierce or a mild sea breeze — all of it relaxes me utterly and makes me forget every worry and care. I go less often now, but every visit leaves me perfectly at ease.
Downtown Weihai faces north, and is a famous snow nest: every winter the snow is heavy and deep, quite a spectacle. Rushan belongs to Weihai too, but it faces south, so it doesn’t get Weihai’s snow, and when it does fall it isn’t heavy — though compared with the south and with Beijing it’s still a fair amount. In my winter at Rushan I saw snow five or six times, sometimes a light dusting, sometimes heavy; and whenever it snowed I’d run straight down to the shore to look at it. Snow at the shore is the most romantic kind, of course. Once it snowed especially hard in the night; the moment I woke I put on my clothes and went to the shore, walking along the road, walking on the beach, looking at the snow, treading in the snow, playing in the snow — utterly happy.
And of course there’s the incomparably beautiful sunset. Watching the sun over a long stretch has also given me a lived understanding of the theory. At the winter solstice the sun is at its southernmost; then it begins to move north, at the spring equinox it shines straight down on the equator and keeps moving north; at the summer solstice it’s at its northernmost, then it starts moving south, at the autumn equinox it shines straight down on the equator again and keeps moving south, and at the winter solstice it’s southernmost once more. Because Rushan’s sea lies to the south and the land to the north, the sunset on the winter solstice is the finest: its light falls on the sea and sets it shimmering with leaping gold. By February, in spring, it has moved over the land, and you can no longer see the gold leaping on the water. In that respect Rushan Silver Beach isn’t a good place to admire the sunset. And with the wind so strong here, you rarely see a fine red cloud. There’s always something imperfect.
And there are the moon and the stars. In Beijing I lived in a low-floor rented flat with a bad aspect; all year I saw neither sun nor moon, let alone stars. But in Rushan I can see the sun, the moon and a sky full of stars from my balcony. In winter I can sit in the sun on the balcony all day long, from eight in the morning to five in the afternoon, and tan myself dark and healthy. Isn’t sitting in the sun the happiest thing under heaven? Diogenes would say yes — even Alexander envied him; envied me. I saw a total lunar eclipse too, the moon swallowed bit by bit and then bit by bit restored to its full round. And the stars: they move, and the old phrase “the stars wheel and the Dipper turns” became something concrete. Once, too, Venus, Jupiter and the moon stood in a line; and countless times Venus has kept the moon company.
Sun, moon and tides all connect to foraging the shallows. For an inland person it’s a novel amusement too. Children love playing with sand and water, and that’s probably bound up with some primordial memory of the sea. Silver Beach is a flat, even beach, more like a tideland, with no stones; the commonest things to forage are razor clams and clams, and there are crabs, but they’re all too small — or else seaweed and kelp washed up on the shore, and creatures I can’t name. Foraging takes a certain amount of gear and transport, and I have none, so I only watch the villagers at their work from the sidelines. Sometimes I envy them: nature’s bounty solves their food problem. When the spring tide goes out I often go down to the shore to watch them foraging; the busy scene on the beach fills me with respect for working people.
The moon connects to market day too. People who live in big cities certainly have no idea what going to market is; but Shandong’s country markets are astonishingly prosperous. At Silver Beach there are seven or eight markets, and their days follow the lunar calendar: the Xiaotan market falls on the fifth and the tenth, the Gongjiazhuang market on the second and the seventh — there’s a market at least every day, and there’s also a night market that opens daily, so you need never fear going without. The stalls mostly sell food, and household goods too. From watching the fun at first to joining in later, I’ve turned into something like a local: on market days I go and buy vegetables, eggs, fruit, sunflower seeds. I’ve gained a rough grasp of what food costs (I never used to care about grain or vegetables at all), and I cook for myself, and I’ve learned that cooking is no simple matter.
I don’t eat meat. That’s a rule I set myself when I came to Rushan. In fact I’ve hated meat since I was a child. And eating vegetarian makes me feel plainer, healthier. I want a pared-down life, a restrained life, a pure life. I don’t eat sugar either. I’ve stopped drinking cola. There was a time I simply could not have lived without cola. But at Rushan I gave up cola too. I drink only plain boiled water. I eat just two meals a day — admittedly because I don’t work, and without heavy exertion you don’t need to eat like a horse. I’ve grown thin. The cheekbones have come out again after all these years, the double chin is gone, and because I sit in the sun all day I’ve turned very dark; the fat round my belly has shrunk a great deal and my jeans hang loose on my hipbones. I’ve lost nearly ten kilos.
Without heating, how did I get through the cold winter? The coldest day was minus 13, a touch warmer than Beijing outdoors. But indoors at night it was only 4 or 5 degrees; thick ice formed along the windowsills and only slowly melted when the sun came up. I bought an electric blanket and a small upright electric heater. The blanket had to be on all night, with thick clothes piled on top of the quilt, or I’d wake in the small hours frozen; the heater uses too much power, so I ran it only an hour or two. December and January are the coldest, February and March warm gradually, and the electric blanket is slowly given up. The wind off the sea is strong, so in the daytime I had to put on thick clothes, trousers and shoes before I dared go out. In the end I got through the hardest stretch.
Because my hairline has receded badly, I even ran an experiment: washing my hair without shampoo (a folk remedy from online). I kept it up a full three months. In the end it made no difference at all — which proves that shampoo isn’t what makes you go bald. What makes you go bald is the enormous pressure of living in a big city. And baldness, greasiness, aging, death — none of them can be reversed. A person isn’t a spring; you can’t press him down and have him spring back to his original shape. The oppression, the unequal relationships, bind you and do you permanent damage. You can prettify them or hide them away, but the damage will leave its brand and its shadow in you forever.
Silver Beach flats are cheap and shabby, so a lot of the fixtures work badly. The bathroom has no heat lamp, for instance, and the water heater runs on electricity and takes over an hour to heat the water (unlike Beijing, which uses gas — turn the tap and there’s hot water), and there’s no extractor fan. Every shower I take I take in fear and trembling, getting it over fast, no dawdling. In Beijing I bathed every day; here I bathe once a week. So I save a great deal of water. I also put a basin and a bucket at my feet to catch the bathwater and use it for flushing the toilet. No shampoo, no body wash, one bath a week, water saved — good habits formed.
This place plainly doesn’t suit anyone afraid of solitude; it belongs only to those who like quiet and are good at being alone — quiet is their nourishment. The great majority who live here are retired people from elsewhere, without financial pressure, who’ve come to pass their old age or recover from illness, because the ecological environment here really is good. They have their circles, of course — the old people in their own compound, or fellow townspeople from other compounds. Then there are the young people who’ve given up, who don’t socialize. And some who dislike life in the big cities, or who couldn’t make a go of it there and have come hoping to find work (of which there is almost none) — they count as people who strive and love life, and they do socialize. I have no social life at all. On my own I’m perfectly content. I don’t need friends. I’ve never known what loneliness is. If it weren’t for earning a living, I’d rather not deal with anyone; I could live deep in the mountains, or on an uninhabited island.
Aren’t you afraid of illness, of death? With a great many things, so long as you don’t think about them, they don’t happen. The more you think about them, the more they happen. Death and life are ordained. When life comes, it cannot be declined; when it goes, it cannot be detained. Life is the follower of death, and death is the predecessor of life. Life is a burden, and death has none of it. All things are one storehouse; death and life are of the same form. His life is like a floating, his death is like a resting. At the very moment of birth there is death; at the very moment of death there is birth. Only without fear of death and without anxiety about the future can you be free, can you be happy. If I live happily then of course I’m healthier; I won’t fall ill, I’ll live long. If you’re unhappy and unfree, you’re likelier to fall ill and likelier to die early. When days are short and the dull nights long, if you want to be happy you must do it now. Man’s life between heaven and earth is like a white colt passing a crevice — gone in an instant. You must be happy. That’s the conclusion I’ve drawn from reading Zhuangzi. Before, I merely envied the freedom and easy grace in Zhuangzi; now I understand that to win freedom you must not fear death, you must be brave, you must look on death as a going home. That’s the only path. Money and power cannot buy freedom; desire only sinks a person deeper.
Since coming to Silver Beach I’ve read only two books, Walden and the Zhuangzi. Everyone knows Walden, but those who’ve read it carefully, thoroughly and deeply must still be very few. Only after coming here could I calm down and read it slowly, all the way through, and take it in. There are many aphorisms in it; I’ve quoted plenty of them in earlier pieces, so I won’t go on. I love his solitary life in the wilderness, that closeness to nature combined with such restraint (especially in food and drink — utterly plain. Drinking only plain water is what he taught me). Silver Beach is still a small town, not some remote back country of mountains and forests and lakes. Given the chance, I’d sooner live as a farmer — build my own house, grow my own grain, be self-sufficient. That’s also why I love Into the Wild.
Rushan Silver Beach and Rushan aren’t the same thing — a white horse is not a horse, and Silver Beach can’t stand for the whole of Rushan. Silver Beach is just the seaside part of Baishatan Township in Rushan, also called the Coastal New District. Some local villagers live here, but most of the flats were sold to outsiders, old people especially. There are plenty of reports online saying these old people were taken in, that prices have crashed and they can’t sell. But these old people only ever bought for holidays; they don’t live here long-term. Of course the place will be depressed — like every small county town in the country without people or industry. But if you rent here for a while, or you have freelance work and buy a flat cheaply to settle down, it’s not a bad choice; it’s a very good place to rest and recover, or to lie flat. (I should warn you: if you’re on your own, try not to fall ill out here. Six months here and I still don’t know where the hospital is.)
I have no plans for the future; I hate a life lived by the book. The three years of the pandemic especially made us all see clearly that the future can’t be predicted, that a person doesn’t control his own fate. However well you plan for the future, it will be disrupted and broken and come to nothing. My original intent was simply this: I was far too tired, I had to rest or I’d collapse, and I meant to rest properly for a year. As for what I’ll do after that year, I don’t know myself. For all I know, in a year a comet will hit the Earth and humanity will be gone. Who can say. Anyway, I’ve saved some money, and in Rushan I spend at most RMB 20,000 a year, so I can go ten years without working, without doing a thing. Worst comes to worst I’ll go back to the big city and work for a wage; if I can’t find work, I’ll go home to my hometown and farm and raise pigs — or find a crooked tree and give that a try.
I don’t have much interest in people, men or women; I care more about mountains and rivers, sky and sea, sun, moon and stars, plants and animals. I don’t think that’s coldness toward people — some people love their pets more than they love humans; each of us simply has his own emphasis. I’m tired of socializing; to me it’s all pointless activity. Meeting up and chatting is nothing beside looking at mountains and the sea. Mostly it’s that Aquarius is a bit misanthropic — like Holden in The Catcher in the Rye, I think they’re “a bunch of phonies.” I have physical desires, but “hell is other people,” and I don’t want to trouble anyone. I don’t want to trouble others, and I don’t want to be troubled. Of course, if I go back to “civilized society” and into the city, then I’ll have to be a phony too.
Rushan Silver Beach doesn’t really count as a city. There’s no McDonald’s here, no KFC, no movie theater, no takeout, no shopping mall, no subway and no taxis, and it’s still fifteen kilometers from the center of Rushan. In six months here I’ve never once been to downtown Rushan, and I don’t want to; I feel no attachment to cities at all. Scrolling short videos I sometimes come across Beijing’s roads, Beijing’s buildings, Beijing’s crowds, invariably with a Zhao Lei song as the background music, and the sight and the sound of it repel me; I swipe away fast. To me the big city is a prison, a gladiatorial arena, with no natural life, no plain feeling; the faces there are written over with desire, or exhaustion, or the two alternating. I’m a country child. I prefer the wilderness, I prefer nature.
In six months here, the most absolute feat was surely not going home for the New Year. On New Year’s Eve I stayed alone in the “ghost town,” in a freezing room (no heating), I didn’t phone my family (outside, firecrackers were going off all around, but my family thought I was in Beijing, and Beijing doesn’t allow firecrackers), I didn’t send greetings to friends; I waited for the New Year with a mind as still as water. Why not tell my family? Very simple: I didn’t want them interfering. To this day they don’t know. I never miss home or my family; I have no homesick streak. I don’t think there’s anything abnormal about that at all. A person is an independent being to begin with — do whatever it is you want to do. And by my count I’ve now gone four Spring Festivals without going home. After this year’s, though, I did go back once, in early February.
By the end of January I’d been in Rushan a full three months. To be honest, I was getting bored. You can’t go on squatting in one place forever; you have to go and see what’s outside. So I bought a train ticket to Lhasa and spent a few days there (see “A Few Days in Lhasa”). I was excited to go, but “I’d buy osmanthus and bring wine along, but never again the travels of my youth.” What I’d say to young people is: while you’re young, get out and about more; travel helps you understand the world. Leaving Lhasa I went back to my hometown for a visit (see “Notes from Home”). At the end of February I went to Qingdao (see “A Few Days in Qingdao”). At the end of March I went to Xiamen and Quanzhou in southern Fujian (see “A Few Days in Southern Fujian”). But travel costs a lot of money too, and I was caught again between the ideal and the reality: no money means earning money, or not going out at all.
Not working is all very well, but earning some money would of course be better still. As far as I know, the young people lying flat out here take on a bit of side work — making short videos (on the video sites), running a stall (buying household goods wholesale and selling them at the market), working as a property agent (there are far too many flats here; agents are everywhere), being a security guard or doing property management in a compound, writing on the beach for tourists, pet-sitting, going to people’s homes to clean or care for the elderly — or they already have freelance work (writing web fiction, writing novels, drawing illustrations, making ads for products, boosting in games). So long as they bring in over RMB 20,000 a year they break even (better off than a farmer who only farms). (Stop asking me what happens if I get ill. I don’t get ill; poor people can’t afford to get ill. If you’re afraid of illness, stay in the big city.) I post a few videos on a video site too, but it comes to a few coins a day — a hobby, nothing more. So far I haven’t found a way to make money. If you have one, I’d be glad to hear it. Nobody’s going to quarrel with money; as long as it’s legal, anything goes.
In fact, what young people call lying flat is only lying down for a while — resting body and mind. Perhaps at the outset they really do mean to lie there for life, doing nothing, slouching about, idle as can be. But after lying down a while they get bored too. Young people have to find something to do, to discharge their abundant energy. Otherwise, if they just lie flat forever, they’ll sink into nothingness, lose any pleasure in life, and might well end up doing something bad, or doing away with themselves. Young people today are too tired; they need to stop and think about the meaning of life — what they really want, what kind of life they want to live. Perhaps they still can’t work it out after stopping, but that’s the normal state of being human: nobody knows what he wants, or what he wants to do. Life is a process of exploration.
Autumn is cool, the most comfortable season; winter is bleak, the hardest season to endure; spring is warm, the most vigorous season, everything reviving, flowers a blaze of color, leaves full of green, all life and energy, the earth in new clothes. As for what summer looks like, I can only imagine: dry heat and fierce sun in the daytime, enough to make you drowsy, but you can wear short sleeves and shorts and sandals and go swimming in the sea; at night it’s neither hot nor muggy, you don’t need the air conditioning, and you sleep bare under a blanket, perfectly comfortable. That’s the year’s four seasons at Rushan Silver Beach. And a person — does his life have its four seasons too, high points and low, harsh winters and mild springs, going round and round, rising and falling, or forever falling, falling, falling with no floor? Rushan’s summer I still have to wait for; my life likewise remains to be seen.
Should I settle at Rushan? As a child my dream was to wander everywhere, and now, past thirty, I still have no resolve to settle down. To settle, for me, is to be tied down. I don’t want to be tied down by a house, or by a job, or by marriage, or by anyone at all — or by heaven, or fate. That’s an ideal state, what’s called freedom. But some young people here have bought flats, and a lot of them regret it; they want to sell, and even at half the price they can’t. Why do people buy houses? At bottom, out of fear — fear of having nowhere to live, fear of dying out in the open. Of course having your own place is a lot safer; but for safety you pay a price, you compromise. It depends what kind of life you want. If you want a stable life, you settle for things as they are; if you want a drifting, unsettled life, you have to bear the wind and the dew. I still think freedom is worth more than anything — even though freedom is a hollow, elusive illusion.
Here in Rushan I’ve thought a great deal and written a great deal, but spoken very little — I’ve had few occasions to use my mouth. First, I don’t like socializing; second, my close friends are scattered and few. Speak little and your powers of expression decline. I only noticed the change when I went traveling; while I was at Silver Beach I’d never realized it, because there I hardly speak to anyone, and only when traveling do I need to talk to people. For instance simply ordering food (at Silver Beach I never eat out) — I’m desperately reluctant to talk to anyone, my voice goes small, my words come out unclear, my Mandarin turns very non-standard, and I can’t tell the -ng endings from the -n or the retroflex consonants from the rest. That’s probably a side effect of going my own way. It also shows that in Jin Yong’s novels, when people play deaf and dumb for decades and then suddenly open their mouths and speak fluently — that’s pure fiction.
Though these six months have been an extremely hard, plain, self-denying life, every day here has been happy (I’ve kept a diary every day). Compared with being a beast of burden in the big city, I have no troubles, no anxieties, nothing to worry over or fret about; I don’t have to force myself up in the morning or force myself to sleep at night; there’s no difference between a workday and a weekend — every day is the weekend. I don’t even reckon time by the week but by the lunar calendar (a big market every five days, a spring tide every fifteen). My body has rested, my mind has been cleansed, and I’m grateful for everything these six months have brought me — a precious treasure.
Summer is drawing near; the visitors and residents here will multiply, and the compound, the streets and the shore will all become lively (to me, noisy). I like the quiet natural state with few people, not the clamor of a city. Perhaps I’ll leave and look for somewhere else. But that’s for later, and I expect I’ll record it in detail too. In any case, these six months have taught me a great deal; I’ve learned what happiness is, and what freedom is. So: What is happiness? Happiness is freedom. What is freedom? Freedom is having nothing to fear.
April 25, 2023, Rushan Silver Beach Resort, Weihai, Shandong.