By chance I come beneath the pines, and pillow on a stone to sleep. In the hills there are no calendars: the cold ends, and I don’t know the year. — Taishang Yin Zhe, “A Reply”
2023.5.6 — Summer Begins with the Frogs Mating
Outside the compound lies a stretch of farmland, only a small part of it in use — planted with wheat and some vegetables; the rest has gone to waste, overgrown with weeds and reeds.
It rained all day the day before yesterday, stayed overcast all day yesterday, and cleared this morning — summer has officially begun.
The moment I stepped outside I heard a chorus of frogs from the fields, rising and falling. The ditches and hollows were all full of water, and it was from there that the croaking came.
The moment I drew near they fell silent, and one after another hopped off the bank into the water, diving to the bottom or into the grass. If you open your eyes wide you can sometimes spot one or two, and there in the middle of the water is a black mass of eggs.
I hadn’t seen frog eggs in a long time. As a child, living in the town, there were ponds and a river right by our house, and in summer you could see masses of frog eggs. The black eggs were wrapped in a clear jelly; if you touched them they were sticky and warm.
If you went on watching those eggs you’d see how frog eggs turn into tadpoles, and how tadpoles turn into little frogs.
I walked on and on into the fields, and at a patch of standing water I actually saw two frogs locked together, spawning. One lay on the other’s back — the top one green and on the small side, the bottom one black and on the large side — laying eggs bit by bit, spreading them out behind.
Since I couldn’t see the one underneath clearly, I picked up a reed and poked them with it. They stopped mating at once and dived to the bottom.
All around, in the fields and open country, the frogs croaked on and on — croak, croak, croak. In the city you never hear frogs at all.
2023.5.9 — The Vendors at the Night Market
In the evening I went for a stroll by the sea, and on my way back through the night-market street I found that the stalls had spilled out all the way onto Changjiang Road by the shore.
You would never see such a sight in winter. There is a night market in winter too, but only a few stalls, clustered at the near end of the road, and it packs up early. Now the whole street is lined with stalls from end to end, thronged with customers.
There are all kinds of stalls: vegetables and fruit, millet and rice, chicken eggs and duck eggs, tea and baijiu, clothes and shoes, cushions and blankets, travel bookings, waterproofing and renovation, phone screen protectors, haircuts and massages, secondhand buy-back, and more.
But the most conspicuous of all are the barbecue and snack stalls, which are gone in winter — nobody sits outdoors eating in the cold.
The barbecue stalls come in every kind — Xinjiang-style, Northeast-style, Shandong-style — with beef and mutton, oysters and squid.
As for the snack stalls: malatang, skewers, half-hatched eggs, mutton soup, soup dumplings and pan-fried buns. Add to that the stalls selling cooked food — pig’s head meat, pig’s ears, pig’s blood sausage, roast chicken, fried chicken, Northeast chicken racks.
People eat at simple tables and chairs out in the open — not just the old but the young too, pretty girls and small children.
You could say that in summer this street is wonderfully lively, and the people who live nearby are lucky. For me, it’s no great distance to walk.
I eat vegetarian, so I just watch in silence. I notice that the vendors’ faces hold no weariness, no bitterness, no resentment against the world — almost all of them are happy, brimming with cheer; at most the years have carved wind and frost into their faces and given them a weathered look.
Yet there is in them no sorrow, no numbness, no grudge, no affectation, none of the self-importance that finds fault with everyone, none of the boastful conceit. Perhaps they don’t love life all that much, but they are certainly working hard at living.
2023.5.11 — Life Should Be Open Country
On the short-video apps there are often wonderfully striking lines of copy. Even though they’ve been worn threadbare and come off as a bit cheap, the first time you see one it still grabs you.
Take “Life should be open country” — the videos it comes with are always of young people off traveling, at the foot of a snow mountain or deep in a wasteland.
There’s obviously a marketing angle to it — telling people to get out and travel, not stay home. Really it’s just telling you to go spend money.
But as for me, I’m actually living that life. I’ve kept my distance from the crowds and live by the sea — the ends of the earth, you might say. I’m not traveling; I’m living in the “open country.”
Thoreau too.
As a country child I loved running off into the wild from an early age, playing in the hills and the water, steeped in nature.
My second-favorite film is Into the Wild, and I used to daydream about living that way. These days, scrolling short videos, I’m also very fond of Bear Grylls’s wilderness-survival shows.
And what “Life should be open country” really means is that a person should dare to take risks, rather than seek a settled life. Because a settled life is certainly not in the open country.
To dare to take risks is to keep away from the crowds, not follow the herd, and go into unknown territory — the open country — and survive there. Only that counts as being brave.
In other words, the heart of that line of copy is: be a brave person. Seen that way, it isn’t so cheap after all.
The cheap ones are only the un-brave, and the crowd.
2023.5.12 — Time Is No Longer Defined
Only as I was about to go to sleep did I realize it was Friday — the day office workers love most. But for me, time is no longer defined.
Since I came here, time is no longer divided into work hours and rest hours; every day of mine is rest, every day is happy time.
Only, I go to market and forage the shallows by the phases of the moon — because market days follow the lunar calendar, and the spring tides fall on the first and the fifteenth. Those special days I do keep track of.
I no longer make a point of remembering what day of the week it is, what day of the lunar month, or even what month, what year. Time is like the air, filling the universe, invisible, untouchable, and no need to care.
Forget the limits of time, forget the constraints of space, forget your obsession with things, forget the bonds of people; forget yourself, forget everything.
The Zhuangzi says, “Forget things, forget Heaven — that is what is called forgetting yourself. He who forgets himself may be said to enter into Heaven.” I feel as if I’d attained the Way.
Though I haven’t yet managed to forget myself, I’ve taken a big step; I understand time and space better than the self I used to be.
Time no longer matters, nor does how long a person lives — because the present is eternity, and if you possess the now you possess everything.
Don’t get tangled up in the past, don’t put your hopes in the future; living well each day and each moment of the present — that’s the real business.
It’s like walking on the beach: the waves gently pushing toward the shore, the gulls standing still, the sea breeze brushing softly, blue sky overhead, fighter jets roaring past — and everything simply is, so natural.
You’ve already forgotten time — very good, you “have ascended to the hall,” but you “have not yet passed into the inner apartments.” The next step is to forget yourself.
2023.5.14 — The Catcher in the Rye
Being a southerner, I only got to know wheat this year. I’m ashamed to say it — “can’t tell one grain from another” is me, all right.
Back in winter, when I walked out into the fields, I saw plants lying low to the ground like grass, and had no idea what they were.
Only in spring, when they grew tall with stems and leaves, a mass of deep green, did I realize it was some kind of crop. I scanned it with the plant-ID app on my phone and the penny dropped — so this was wheat.
Wheat, oh wheat — how wonderful you are!
Wheat divides into winter wheat and spring wheat: roughly, north of the Great Wall is spring wheat, south of it winter wheat. Winter wheat is the main kind, sown around October and harvested in May or June. Spring wheat is sown in March or April, and harvested in July or August.
The growing process is roughly: sprouting, tillering, overwintering, jointing, heading, flowering, grain-filling, ripening. (Don’t laugh if I’ve got any of it wrong.)
The obvious difference from rice is that rice needs a great deal of water, while wheat is a dryland crop and needs very little.
By mid-May the wheat had grown much taller and put out many heads; the heads are ripening, and the harvest is near.
I like to walk in the wheat fields and look at the wheat; the green filling your eyes and the fresh scent filling your nose bring a calm to the heart.
I’d like to be a farmer. I’d like to know the land and feel the turn of the seasons. “Caring about grain and vegetables” — I think farmers are the true poets.
I don’t know when such a wish could ever come true. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking — but one must have ideals.
2023.5.15 — The Heat Arrives at Last
Until last night I was still under my thick winter quilt — the quilt that saw me through Silver Beach’s cold, unheated winter.
But to still be under a thick quilt now really did feel stifling — miserable, tossing and turning and never comfortable.
So I got up and pushed the thick quilt onto the rug; the first layer laid over the bed is a thin blanket, and that blanket serves perfectly as a light quilt.
And the electric blanket can be put away too, not to come out again until November or December this year.
Spring has really gone. Outside the flowers have all fallen — “the reds and purples, one and all, have turned to dust.” Summer has truly come.
The scene and the feeling are utterly different from winter — an earth-shaking change. The daylight lasts longer, and the one thing I can do here — thinking — has grown more too.
But thinking too much isn’t a good thing. What a person needs more is action. Or else to think nothing at all.
I hope summer will be kind to me: just as the wheat is harvested in summer, may I too harvest rich results. God bless.
2023.5.16 — The Sand Bubbler Crab
The beach in April and May looks different again from the beach in November and December.
The most obvious thing, of course, is the sun’s position. In winter the sun is to the south, but in summer it has moved to the north. That makes the look of the sea different too: in winter you can see gold scattered across its whole surface; now you can’t.
The water temperature is different too, naturally. In summer you can take off your shoes and wade in, or swim; in winter you wouldn’t dare.
Foraging the shallows in winter you can see dense little razor clams in the sand, and no few painted crabs; in summer they’re rare.
But the intertidal zone along the shore is now full of little round holes — pencil-thin, going straight down — that don’t look dug by an animal so much as punched by some tool.
Around each hole are many little sand balls, round, like pellets of dung, spreading out over the whole beach. It’s a touch frightening — a nightmare for anyone with trypophobia.
Those are the “pseudofeces” left by a kind of crab that filters its food. Just as the tide goes out they filter organic particles from the sand, leaving ball after ball near the mouth of the burrow. When they’ve finished eating they slip into the hole to rest.
Sometimes when the tide is out you can see them nosing about near the burrow; but the moment you draw close or make a sound they race back to the hole along some reserved passage. Some burrows are shallow enough that you can dig them out and have a look.
They’re only the size of a soy bean — unlike the painted crabs or the little green crabs — and their color is like the sand, only paler. Beneath human feet they’re terribly fragile creatures; you can tread one to death without meaning to, or wreck its burrow.
And cars often drive along the beach, rolling right over them; I don’t know what becomes of them, or whether all is well with them under the ground.
Someone told me this crab is called the sand bubbler. I’ve come to know one more living thing.
2023.5.16 — The Sea Is Cool, the Breeze Gentle
How many months it’s been, I can’t remember clearly — November, December, January, February, March, April: six months. After six months, I went into the sea again.
It was only a simple thing — taking off my shoes, walking into the water, paddling about near the shore for a while — yet the first joy of summer felt like being born again.
I cycled to the shore, locked the bike on the embankment, took off my shoes and left them on the slope, and walked down onto the sand.
The sand near the shore is very fine and dry, baked hot and pale, a little too hot for the feet. But plants still grow in it: the shayincao, its leaves big and green, its little white flowers out.
Closer to the water the sand is wet, dark, and no longer burns your feet. The seawater is clean and lively, much the color of the sky at the far horizon, a gray-blue.
I waded in the water a good while — cool, pleasant — the gentle waves washing ashore and stroking my calves. I even saw sardines darting quickly along the bottom — couldn’t catch them, of course.
Because high tide was at noon, there were few people on the sand and few on the shore; I had a whole stretch of beach to myself. “Rivers and mountains, wind and moonlight have no constant owner; whoever has the leisure is their master.”
After playing in the sea a while I came ashore and sat a while, letting the sea breeze blow and the sun shine down — not even heaven could be better.
On the way home I saw again a few pink-flowered black locusts, the whole tree in purple bloom, crowded thick, with green leaves and blue sky behind them — lovely.
2023.5.20 — Time Slips Away; the Cherries Red, the Plantains Green
Right below my building there are two trees. One is a cherry; and the other is also... the other I don’t know what it is either.
In spring the cherry blossomed, pink flowers swaying in the light breeze — it set your heart rippling, lifted your spirits.
At the time I couldn’t be sure what tree it was, so I lumped every tree that blooms pink in spring under “peach.” It is in fact a peach relative, but peach trees come in many kinds — cherry, mountain peach, juicy peach, yellow peach, nectarine — impossible to tell apart.
Now it’s summer and it has set little fruits, plainly cherries. Only the fruits are really too small. I asked a neighbor who was picking them, can you eat these? Of course you can, he said — try one.
The trees in the compound are all ornamental, but planted haphazardly, a jumble of varieties, and nobody prunes them, let alone sprays them. You just pick one and pop it in your mouth. The pit takes up half the fruit, and the flesh is pitifully thin — hardly more than skin.
Sparrows do fly up into the branches to peck at the flesh; maybe plenty of caterpillars and ants live off them too.
Though they’re poor eating — all pit and no flesh — the color is lovely: one by one, half-hidden against green leaves and blue sky. “The cherries redden, the plantains turn green.” There are no plantains on the peninsula, so I’ll look a bit longer at the cherries.
There’s a little pavilion beside the trees, where the old people chat, play cards, play chess, sing. In the ground-floor yard of the building in front, the old folks grow a lot of vegetables too, and have put up trellises, waiting for some gourd or vine to climb them.
And in the wheat fields outside the compound the wheat is almost ripe: the kernels fuller and fuller, heavy, heads bowed low; the color turning from green to yellow, and at last to a shining gold that will leave the farmers grinning ear to ear.
Every day I go and walk in the wheat fields: the breeze lifts the wheat into waves that rustle, birds call, insects chirr, sky above and earth below, bright sunshine — and standing there in the open country I feel closer and closer to the real, and further and further from the unreal.
2023.5.22 — A Secondhand Life
Leaning on the windowsill with my neck craned out, I look up at the Big Dipper overhead, and at Polaris, which the Dipper points to; and I look at the crescent moon in the west, and at bright Venus above and to one side of it. A cool evening breeze blows on my half-bare chest, and I feel utterly happy.
And just then I worked out a little truth: why reading is “useless” and watching films is “useless” — because both are only taking in someone else’s secondhand experience, like secondhand smoke.
That is, you aren’t experiencing the story in the book or the film for yourself; you’re just feeding on someone’s leftovers.
As the wheelwright Pian said to Duke Huan in the Zhuangzi: “Then, my prince, what you are reading are only the dregs and sediments of those old men.”
And a person simply must go and experience things himself. Never let yourself swallow other people’s crap or eat their dregs.
When the crescent had set, and it was eleven at night, the stars came out more numerous, brighter, more insistent.
Stars across the whole sky, in every direction — like diamonds. The longer you gaze, the clearer they become, stretching out from near to far, as if the deep sky were hiding many more, and if only you look hard enough you’re bound to discover new ones.
Scenes like this came many times in winter too, especially on clear days after a big wind. But I can’t record them with any simple camera; I can only keep them in my head, in my heart, until they become part of my body.
2023.5.26 — Knowing the Names of Birds, Beasts and Plants
The locust trees along the road are in bloom — some white, some purple. The white ones people want; the purple ones are for looking at only.
People pull the branches down, or just snap them off, and pick the white flowers to take home and make into something to eat, or else to sell at the market — RMB 5 a jin.
And the ground is covered with a little daisy-like flower called coreopsis, so yellow and bright it dazzles the eye. An older woman broke off a big bunch, carried it in both hands to take home and put in a vase — it would look just right, I imagine.
Others were picking unopened buds, long and green. I asked what they were, and they said honeysuckle; I asked what for, and they said to brew as tea, to clear away heat and cool you down in summer.
And on the side of a trash bin by the shore I saw a herb with a single flower, the color of Danxia’s red sandstone. The flower caught the eye at once, but I didn’t know it. The plant-ID app said it was a corn poppy — oh, so this was a corn poppy. How beautiful!
I also saw a lizard about 15 centimeters long, hiding in the grass by the road. If it stays still you’d never spot it; when it moves it’s very fast. Later a friend who’s an expert told me it’s called a Mongolian racerunner.
The tide was going out, and there were still many sand balls rolled by sand bubbler crabs on the beach. I saw a few running and quickly caught them, turned them over in my hand — smaller than a glass marble.
And near the water there were two egg-sized crabs, green, with hard shells, females, lying in the sand. I picked them up, played with them a while, then threw them back into the sea. A pity I don’t know their exact name.
There were also many broken shells of small razor clams washed up by the sea, and dead sea corn, yellow and wrinkled.
Afterwards I walked to the mouth of the Baishatan River and went upstream; on the tidal flats by the river I saw many river crabs, claws raised, propped on the mud as if working some spell; at any sound they all ducked into their holes.
On the way home I saw wild roses — red, pink, white — spilling over the iron railings of a compound, branches in full bloom.
Not far off in the fields the wheat is nearly ripe; when the time comes I’ll come and “watch them reap the wheat.” Around the wheat fields a lot of vegetables are planted: peanuts, corn, potatoes, garlic, chives, eggplant, taro, green peppers, tomatoes...
From time to time I hear a cuckoo calling — cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo. Its call is so sweet and melodious it must be a handsomer bird than the magpie or the sparrow.
“Locust blossoms and poppies open in turn; amid the cuckoo’s call summer turns new. The wheat heads along the road stretch endlessly on — only now do I know I am a man outside the world.”
2023.5.29 — No to Pale, Thin and Young
One day I was livestreaming from the shore, looking at the sea, and a viewer spoke up: “Your hands are so dark — is that from the sun?”
I couldn’t help laughing — this friend’s eye was awfully sharp, to have spotted my pitch-black arms. Yes, I said.
Since coming here I go out every day to look at the sea, sit in the sun, watch the sunset, and I soon turned into a man with a black face.
Sitting in the sun in winter is a happy thing. If it’s too cold outside or the wind too strong, I sit and sun myself on the balcony — back then the sunlight could still reach into the living room. Now it’s summer; the sun no longer comes indoors, and you have to go outside to get it.
At first I went out in short sleeves; after only a few hours outdoors my arms were red and burned. Over the next few days the skin began to peel and turned from red to black. Once black, they never burned again — the black became a kind of protective coloring.
But the parts the sleeves cover are still white — a sharp line of black over white. My back and belly are white too; I need to tan all of it.
Once I saw a guy reading on the shore, bare-chested, and his color was perfectly even — a handsome wheat brown.
Only then did I find the nerve — I could take my shirt off out there too. Why be embarrassed? It’s not as if I’d be stripped naked.
So I went to the shore, took off my short-sleeved shirt, bare-chested, sat on the sand with my back to the sun, and let the sun paint my back.
When my back had had enough sun I turned around, faced my belly to the sun, to let it darken too.
And since I wear shorts, my legs will soon darken as well. Only my backside — unless I wore a thong — will never darken.
2023.5.30 — The Village Circus
Sitting at home in the evening I suddenly heard a voice over a loudspeaker from the road outside, repeating several times before it gradually faded away:
“Good news — tonight at 7:30, beside the Menghuan Wangguo amusement park at Silver Beach, there will be an acrobatics and circus show and an animal show, free to watch, starting at 7:30, at the Menghuan Wangguo amusement park at Silver Beach.”
I had nothing to do anyway, and lively occasions are rare at Silver Beach, so I decided to go and have a look, join in the fun.
The so-called circus had just one vehicle and four people. The vehicle had an Anhui plate (the boss later said they were from Fuyang, in Anhui). The four were a girl of fifteen or sixteen, a boy of eighteen or nineteen, a girl in her early twenties, and a man of thirty-two. The oldest was the boss, and he stressed again and again that none of them had been to school.
Their equipment, props and costumes were all simple: the sound system played music from a phone, two rows of spotlights stood at the front and back of the pitch, and their only animals were two big snakes just awake from hibernation (the boss said one was seven or eight jin, the other over twenty — but only the small one was ever seen). The youngest boy and girl wore cheap red and green gymnastic suits, and the older woman and man wore casual clothes.
Right at the start the boss said: our show is free, because we have a sponsor, RMB 900 a day, so first he had to advertise for the sponsor. And he began promoting a pair of glasses that blocks radiation and lets you see in the dark. He couldn’t keep his tongue straight — “child” came out as “chile.”
Then the show began: they carried out the snake box, but the snakes wouldn’t cooperate and couldn’t be got out, so the boy and girl just put on an act of alarm and surprise. The second item was a bit more interesting: the woman in her early twenties stood on a plank with a roller underneath, and there on the wobbling plank she flipped a bowl from the front of the board up onto her head.
After that the nineteen-year-old boy performed climbing a ladder on his hands, skipping rope upside down, and spinning plastic hoops while standing on his hands.
Then more advertising. They promoted their medicinal liquor for bruises, telling how miraculous it was: they, who practiced acrobatics, never went to the hospital, they just rubbed this liquor on. And that old people living by the sea easily get rheumatism, and this was good for that too.
When he’d finished, many old people crowded up to ask about it and buy. It came in a plastic bottle, only RMB 25, and they sold plenty. The boy and girl walked a few rounds of the pitch again, asking if anyone else wanted any.
There were many old people present — it’s mostly old people here to begin with — and though they may not have believed it, it was like health supplements: buying gives you a little comfort either way.
And so a good while passed. It turned out the acrobatics troupe didn’t make its money from performing, but from selling medicine and advertising.
When the medicine was sold, the boss said: “Just now the police from the local station came to remind us — the college entrance exams are coming up. Since I never went to school, I didn’t know. The police asked us to finish early and not disturb the students nearby. So to end, we’ll let you have a look at the snake — seeing a snake is like seeing a dragon, and it’ll bring you good luck.”
They opened the box again to let everyone see the snake, and people all pressed up to look. I hesitated a moment, then squeezed in for a glance too. It was a striped snake over a meter long, as thick as an arm; someone said it was a python, coiled motionless at the bottom of the box.
It was almost nine. The evening breeze blew, the night was cool as water, the moon now showed, now hid among the clouds, the frogs croaked, a stray cat crouched in the middle of the road, and I walked home alone.
2023.5.31 — Life Between Heaven and Earth Is Like a White Colt Passing a Crevice
I’ve been at Rushan Silver Beach more than seven months now. When I came it was autumn; now it’s summer — I’ve crossed winter and spring.
Summer here is especially comfortable too. At noon it does get scorching, of course, but so long as you go out in the morning or evening you don’t feel the heat — and morning and evening are anyway the loveliest hours of the day.
May is a turning point: in early May I still needed a thick quilt, long trousers and a jacket; now all I need is a short-sleeved shirt, shorts, flip-flops and a thin blanket. Traveling light, life has grown much easier, and the world has grown more beautiful.
Mainly because there are few people here, it’s peaceful, far from the big cities, far from the noise, far from whatever’s trending, far from politics, far from commerce, far from the restless young crowds — this place is like the Peach Blossom Spring, like Walden Pond.
Besides the sea there are the fields; besides the little river there are the little hills; there are retired old people, and there are the lying-flat deadbeats. Bright sunshine, fresh air, the calls of birds and frogs, the wheat quietly ripening, the fierce heat on its way.
For June I have only one wish: to tan my whole body a bit darker — like a black loach, or a black whirlwind.