“From Silver Beach to Beijing is like going from a silent, ethereal snow mountain to a filthy, bustling steel mill.” — Gui Xiaopang
2023.8.31 — Taking the Bus to Beijing
I’ve decided to go away for a while. I’d been at Silver Beach a full five months and hadn’t left it once, not for a single day. In truth I don’t much want to go out, because at Silver Beach I’m so comfortable, so free, that I think no other place is as good as this one, and there’s no need for me to go anywhere else, whether to travel or to live. But for some reason — maybe some worldly logic has a hold on me: “life lies in movement,” “a person should look around the world, relax his mind, broaden his outlook,” “go see friends,” and so on. Still, I think it’s Laozi who’s got hold of the truth: “Without going out of his door, one knows the whole world; without looking out of his window, one sees the Way of Heaven. The farther he goes, the less he knows.” But I’m still a worldly man, not capable of such resolve; there are always stray thoughts. So I’ll go out anyway and look for an answer — to see whether the outside is worth it.
From Rushan to Beijing there are of course many ways to travel. Drive myself — I have no car. Take the train — either go to Rushan Station and take a very slow train, or go to Weihai and take the high-speed rail, which means first taking a bus from Rushan to Weihai; both are a good deal of bother. Fly — too expensive, and too roundabout. Only the long-distance bus is relatively suitable: first, because it’s cheap, only RMB 150; second, because you can board right at the gate of the compound. The drawback is that the ride is very long — eleven hours to reach the imperial capital.
I waited for the bus under the traffic light outside the compound. It arrived twenty minutes late and didn’t leave until 6:50, because it had to pick up people in the east of Silver Beach first, stopping all along the way as it drove over to the west side — and I’m on the west side. Then it headed for Yantai, Qingdao, Weifang, Zibo, Binzhou, Huanghua, Tianjin, Langfang, and Beijing, and only reached Dawanglu in Beijing at five in the afternoon, where you get off and wait for a minibus to take you to the various transport hubs. Since I was already in Beijing and waiting for the minibus is a bother, I might as well take the subway myself — faster and more convenient. The bus saves money, but the trip is too long, and sitting so long, with no room to move about the way you can on the high-speed rail, is extremely, thoroughly uncomfortable. It stops at three service areas along the way so everyone can use the toilet or eat lunch and take a short rest. The whole way goes from hills to plains: in Jiaodong you can still see a few small mountains, and once you reach North China it’s flat as a sheet. Especially just after entering Beijing, at the Yingsi checkpoint, you have to get off to have your ID checked. Beijing really is different — safe, stable, our great capital, the holy land everyone yearns for.
In Jiaodong it was still blue sky and white clouds; the moment we entered North China it turned to haze — whether it was smog or not I couldn’t say; the air was foul and didn’t smell good, nothing like the seaside. Looking at the gloomy sky, on top of the fatigue of the ride, my mood sank to the depths. What kind of trip is this? Not worth it at all! Once in Beijing I even felt my throat was uncomfortable — though in fact the weather in Beijing was passable: not so limpid as the seaside, but not as bad as the terrible smog of 2015 either. It’s just that from the bottom of my heart I don’t like Beijing, this enormous, suffocating city.
Around the Dawanglu subway station the road was under repair, fenced off with green sheeting that blocked the view; I circled round several times without finding the station entrance, and only after doubling back did I discover it was on the other side — a long walk for nothing. Big cities are just a bother. There are so many young people in Beijing, and they’re all very pale, refined and courteous, stylishly dressed, sexy or handsome — but every one of them looks like he’s never been in the sun. People who’ve been in the sun are all dark, like me. And only human beings who’ve been in the sun are the healthiest human beings.
I rode to Jishuitan station and got off to look at the Desheng Gate watchtower beside it — a place I went often when I lived in Beijing, because it’s a transfer point. From here I’d often set out for the Bell and Drum Towers, Shichahai, Nanluoguxiang, Jingshan Park, even the Forbidden City, Chang’an Avenue, and Beihai Park — just as today, to go to Changping, I had to change buses at Desheng Gate. At Desheng Gate West I boarded a bus heading for Shahe. A lot of commuters got on along the way. I know many young people live in Shahe because the rent there is cheap; on the morning of every working day a dragon-long queue forms outside the Shahe subway station, and you have to wait an age to get inside, then squeeze onto a packed train and head into the city to work, earn money, worry, spend money, and wear your life away. I never want to live that kind of life again.
2023.9.1 — The Yonghe Temple
The city bristles with high-rises (not only Beijing — all big cities are like this), blocking the view so you can’t see far. Not like by the sea, where it stretches endlessly, vast and boundless, lifting both body and mind. Beijing’s particular alleyways, the hutongs, are just narrow lanes; in a hutong you can see nothing at all, only the walls on either side, and walking through those cramped lanes makes a person especially cautious. Big cities have hardly any natural landscape, and the so-called pocket parks are pitifully small — no more than a strip of greenery. Because of the urban heat effect, the temperature in the city runs several degrees higher than in the suburbs, higher than in the hills; there’s no cool breeze in the city, only hot wind. But by the sea the sea breeze blows every day, brushing the water, crossing the hills and woods, passing through the house, making you feel cool and cold. In the city the traffic is congested, and the air is mixed with the poisonous exhaust of cars. Shared bikes are parked in dense abandon everywhere, blocking the sidewalks. The air-conditioning in the subway is cold one moment and hot the next, mixed with men’s sweat and women’s perfume, a thoroughly weird smell that leaves you dazed.
When I left Beijing, masks were still mandatory on the subway; now the mandate has been lifted and the great majority no longer wear one — though a few still do, out of habit, or because they haven’t washed their face, or because they’re ill, or because they loathe facing other people. Even the subway announcements haven’t been fully changed over: one line is left advising you to wear a mask the whole trip, as if history hadn’t been wiped clean, leaving a little tail behind.
I was staying at Pokuan’s place, on the edge of the northern Sixth Ring Road — a small apartment. In Beijing, unless you’re some bigwig or rich merchant, of course you can’t afford a grand mansion of hundreds or thousands of square meters, or a high-rise with a superb view over the whole city. Not like my little country place by the sea, where for a very cheap price you can rent or buy a big house with a view of the sea, the stars, the moon, the sun, where you can bask in the sun — or you could rent a ground-floor place with a garden and grow vegetables and flowers, keep chickens, ducks, and fish, and taste the pleasures of country life. The place I rented in Beijing before was even smaller, no different from a cramped cubbyhole, and the price was absurdly high: one month’s rent was enough to rent a place on Silver Beach for two years. If I’d bought a house there, my whole life would have been imprisoned in Beijing. In Beijing you live around the house and nothing else.
Why on earth does a person live? Perhaps the young people burning incense at the Yonghe Temple will tell you. I hadn’t been to the Yonghe Temple in many years — I went only once, just after I first came to Beijing, and never went back; in those three years going anywhere was such a bother, and I didn’t want to either. Only after this year’s reopening, they say, did young people flock there to burn incense and pray, young people becoming the main force. I didn’t quite believe the reports online, but when I went myself I found it was true. And they were all extremely young, under twenty-five. Why do they go there to burn incense? Some sum it up this way: in today’s society, relying on yourself is useless — only praying to the gods is any use. In the past I too would have sneered at burning incense and praying to Buddha, but seeing how devout they were (whether it was for show or not), I couldn’t help taking a bundle of incense — lighting it three sticks at a time — and following the crowd on in, from the Yonghe Gate to the Pavilion of Ten Thousand Happinesses, paying my respects at every hall, though not as properly as those young people did, who queued up, knelt down, knocked their heads, lifted the incense above their heads, and bowed again and again. I stood at the back of the crowd, holding my incense at my chest, going through the motions of a few bows. And at several places dispensing religious articles there were long queues, waiting to “invite” some dharma object; most of those in the queue were young women.
In a big city you can’t go barefoot, you can’t go bare-chested, you’d even be embarrassed to lift up your clothes; you can’t sit on the ground, can’t lie down on the ground; when you badly need to pee you can’t go do it in a grove or a green strip. A person must know his manners and not behave like some primitive. But by the sea I can ride my bike bare-chested and let the wind flow over my body, and I can feel the wind’s temperature and its force. I can fling myself into the sea and run wild; I can charge recklessly along the road (because there are few people and few cars and the road is wide and empty); I can wash my feet in the ditch by the fields, listen to the insects singing in the fields, watch the birds start up out of the grass. I can shout at the top of my voice, entirely without restraint.
I asked my friend in Beijing, “In Beijing, is there anything that makes you happy?” She said, “No.” “In Beijing, is there anything that makes you anxious?” She said, “A whole pile.” I sighed, helpless. Just what is there to be happy about in Beijing? I really couldn’t say.
2023.9.2 — Missing Weihai in Beijing
Someone asked what I’d come to Beijing for. I said, to see you people who aren’t doing so well. As I see it, they really aren’t doing well in Beijing. Of course I don’t wish them ill — or maybe it’s just my ridiculous prejudice. Compared with them, I’m far too happy. Apart from having no money, I have only freedom. I don’t need to worry about housing (the rent is too cheap), or about work (I have no work), or least of all about personal relationships (I have no social life) — my old diaries from the seaside make that plain. I lived in Beijing seven years; I know what life in Beijing is like, I know what kind of environment they’re in; even if I hadn’t come, I’d know what state they’re in. Coming to Beijing was only to see them face to face, to prove that we’re still alive and not just entities in the bit-world.
Having gone so long without leaving the house, I find that going out is no great fun. First, getting to Beijing means not only a long ride but carrying a pile of heavy things. My conclusion: going out is just carrying a pile of gadgets. Laptop, phone, power bank, charging cable, razor, tripod — a deadly nuisance. Why can’t people go out light and easy? Once in Beijing, Beijing is too big — going anywhere to see a friend takes a long time and costs a lot of money (RMB 5 of transport fare is enough for a meal for me on Silver Beach). Of course, seeing friends is a happy thing: eating with them, chatting, hearing them tell stories, telling my own, letting off some feeling.
Everyone knows Beijing has a great many arty young people; they love reading books, watching films, listening to music, and then getting together to discuss and learn from one another, gradually forming literary circles, film circles, music circles — what’s called Beijing culture is circle culture. I told my friend that when I went to Rushan I stopped reading books, watching films, listening to music altogether, because I can watch the sea, the rivers, the sun, the moon, the stars, and listen to the birds, the insects, the cicadas, and the wind and the waves; my own life is a novel, a film, a piece of music, and I can create too — keep a diary, shoot videos, hum a tune. There’s no need for me to take in other people’s secondhand experience anymore. And I have little interest in those activities where you sit still for a long stretch doing nothing but seeking some spiritual thrill. I’d rather climb mountains, wade streams, ride my bike, and take in nature’s influence outdoors.
My friend said, some people are happy living an ordinary worldly life — fretting over national affairs, caring about family trifles, being besotted with romantic matters; in these things they find all kinds of pleasure. Not like you, interested only in nature. And many people need social life — not like you, who doesn’t socialize at all. They want friends, they want to fall in love, they want marriage, they want affairs, they want to live alongside other people; and you only want to keep away from the crowd and hide from the world. Everyone’s life is different — as long as you like it, that’s enough.
In Beijing today it’s 20 to 28 degrees; in Rushan, 18 to 30. Beijing’s sunrise is at 5:43 and its sunset at 18:46; Rushan’s sunrise is at 5:25 and its sunset at 18:22. Weihai opened its fishing season on September 1, and to my regret I missed the great spectacle of the reopening — I’ll have to wait till I’m back to see what big changes there are in the seafood market. Today is the eighteenth of the seventh lunar month; there’s still a spring tide — at 4:51 this morning the tide was 428 centimeters, and at 4:50 this afternoon, 421 centimeters. I missed both. I think missing some of Weihai’s natural changes is a greater pity than missing certain people’s worldly affairs. In Beijing I’m missing Weihai.
2023.9.3 — City and Countryside
At Silver Beach there are no big malls. Not like Beijing, where the malls are so vast that I, a country bumpkin, am often struck dumb with astonishment. You can’t tell east from west, can’t tell which floor you’re on, can’t find the elevator, can’t find the toilet, can’t find the exit, can’t find the subway station; the mall swarms with people, especially young people — slender pretty girls, a constant flood to the eye, and yet they pass you by. Eating in a mall — wow, what a restaurant, what a dish, this is so good, this is so good to drink; wow, this is really expensive, can’t afford this one. I told my friend that at Silver Beach I actually don’t eat meat, but when I’m out I can, otherwise I’d have no friends.
Public transport is very developed and convenient too — except that the rides take too long. Not like Silver Beach, where there are only a few bus routes, no shared bikes, no subway, not even taxis, and the buses are infrequent: half an hour at the shortest, nothing after five, and forget going out at night. Convenient as the transport is, can any of it make a person happy? The long commute leaves you exhausted; to see a friend and come back takes several hours — better not to go at all; the car exhaust smells awful; the noise frays your nerves; the flashing headlights dazzle you; the subway air-conditioning gives you diarrhea; and the taxis are too expensive. But in a big city you have to put up with all this and make it a habit, take it for granted, and forget that our primitive ancestors migrated all over the world on their own two feet.
My friend said, you could keep a pet — tease a cat, walk a dog. I said, at Silver Beach there are plenty of stray cats and stray dogs, and people often post in the group saying there’s a litter of puppies here, whoever wants one come get it, free of charge of course, no money; kittens too — but I can’t keep one. First, because I’m a person who can stand loneliness only too well, and don’t need any companionship; second, because keeping a pet costs money, and I eat so simply myself — a pet would eat better than I do, and I have no money, my whole life is about saving money; third, because once you take in a pet you’re responsible for it to the end, and I’m a rootless man who doesn’t know, and doesn’t care, where tomorrow will be. And I think keeping pets in a city erases an animal’s nature; it’s no different from locking people up in a concentration camp. I’m a man whose nature yearns for freedom and the outdoors, and if one day I have a house in the countryside, I’ll probably keep a few cats and dogs.
My friend said, I want to fall in love, but I can’t! I said, why can’t you — as long as you want to, surely you can. She said, in Beijing it’s a men’s market! The scales fell from my eyes — it’s true: in big cities there are far more single women than single men, and women are so choosy, so many women who want to fall in love really can’t. I was only looking at the question from a man’s angle. She said, I use a dating app and everyone it recommends is a vocational-college grad; I’m a master’s degree holder, ugh — do you have friends? Introduce me to a few. I was stumped and said, people in their thirties don’t want to date, people in their twenties just want to make money. She said, ugh, it’s so hard. She asked me, didn’t you date over there? I said, over there it’s all old people, very few young women, and the ones who’ve lain flat are all very much their own person — it’s hard to find a match. She said, mm — people who are too independent don’t need a partner, and people who are too much their own person can’t find someone who fits.
I especially like comparing arms with people to see whose is darker. On the subway, in the mall, I found that none of them is as dark as me; they’re too white — they’re white-collar workers who sit in offices and never receive the sun’s baptism, refined and courteous, and they look very frail. I told my friend, they’re far too unhealthy. My friend was left speechless by my childish behavior and said, right now you look down on everything about Beijing — this is no good and that is no good, only the seaside is best. I said, that’s right, no place is as good as the seaside; living by the sea is the happiest thing.
2023.9.4 — Where Happiness Is
I was staying on the edge of the northern Sixth Ring Road, north even of Shahe, and I went to see a friend in Changying, east of the eastern Fifth Ring Road. First I took a bus to Shahe, then the Changping Line to Zhuxinzhuang, changed to Line 8 to Nanluoguxiang, changed to Line 6 to Changying — a full two hours. In Beijing, seeing a single person is no easy thing. After dinner my friend drove me back, and it was 51 kilometers. Driving through the night, it felt as if we’d driven out of Beijing and into Hebei. He said, exasperated, how is this any different from the countryside back in our hometowns? I said, Changping District used to be Changping County; Hai Zi taught at the China University of Political Science and Law, and to get into Beijing he had to ride the bus for a whole day.
Beijing’s outlying districts (there are no more counties now) — Changping, Shunyi, Yanqing, Miyun, Huairou, Pinggu, Mentougou, and so on — count as the Beijing countryside. If you can’t afford a house in the city, you can buy in Changping or Shunyi, where prices are of course cheaper than in the six central districts; or some people live in Miyun or Mentougou to begin with and don’t need to come into the city to buy at all. Renting is the same: if you can’t afford the Second or Third Ring, you rent outside the Fourth or Fifth — places like Shahe, Tiantongyuan, Sihui, Changying. Go to Shahe or Tiantongyuan and you’ll find they’re about like the county town back in your hometown — not even as bustling, you might say, as your own county town; you could call it countryside. Some students come to Beijing to study only to find their school is at a Changping or Liangxiang campus — a great disappointment. Where’s Beijing in this!
Except for Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, every other city is a small city — cities come in sizes. Besides cities there are townships, and below the townships there are villages. Many who come to Beijing to work are country people; some stay, some leave. Some like city life, some like country life. There’s no need to argue over which life is better; what suits you is what matters most. Take the hutongs inside Beijing’s Second Ring — to some people they’re just an urban village, utterly run-down, and they wouldn’t live there for anything; but others envy them to death, feeling that living in a hutong is the only real Beijing style. And I just want to live in a quiet seaside countryside.
My friend asked, are you still paying social insurance? I said, no. He said, is social insurance even any use — apart from seeing a doctor and being old? I said, I suppose not, I don’t really know; anyway I don’t fall ill and I don’t think about being old, so I don’t need it. Right now I very much believe a certain idea from Chinese medicine: so long as you’re in good spirits, you won’t fall ill. In Beijing I was under pressure every day, anxious, and that’s why I got sick. I quit my job and live by the sea, the air is fresh, every day I’m happy to death, full to death, not a bit anxious — so I won’t get sick. As for what to do when I’m old — I said, I don’t even know what the world will be like in three or five years, so why should I fret over things thirty or fifty years off? Fretting over this and that every day — how tiring!
My friend asked, don’t your parents boss you around? I said, they’d like to, but they can’t. My friend said, same here, ha ha. I said, so long as you’re a bit far from home, there’s nothing they can do about you. So I’ve never understood why some people live with their parents — if I had to explain it, it’s that they’re not independent enough, in spirit or in money. And I’ve always been a loner. My ideal is not to go about with people. Won’t your social skills deteriorate, then? They really will. But I’ve found a solution. Just like those first three months after I got to Silver Beach, when I spoke to no one — afterward I found I couldn’t speak, mainly couldn’t speak Mandarin; but a little practice brings it back. For instance, when I write in my diary I read it aloud once, or when I shoot a video I add a long stretch of voice-over.
I’ll tell you — I lived in Beijing so many years that I know it very well, and there’s nowhere in particular I want to go; I’ve been everywhere worth going. Mainly I came to see you, to see whether you’re doing well (as I see it, their lives haven’t changed much, about the same as when I left). It seems most of you aren’t very happy; you feel life is just like this, not much to it — only a daily repetition. The women still seem a bit eager — they want to fall in love; but the men only want to make money, desperately make money, feeling that making money is the sole meaning of life and that without money you’re nothing. We don’t talk about literature, and we don’t talk about films; we only want to know whether literature makes money, whether films make money — and if it doesn’t make money, then forget it (in Wang Xiaobo’s words, everything is heading, beyond recall, toward vulgarity). A lad in his early twenties is nearly thirty, and one in his early thirties is nearly forty. We don’t talk about how much money you’ve made; name a few things that make you happy — and there seem to be none.
2023.9.5 — Not Knowing of the Han, Much Less the Wei and Jin
Staying in Beijing is unbearably dull. There’s nowhere to wander when you go out; the city is all high-rises and concrete streets — not like Silver Beach, where I go out to the shore every day, walk on the sand, wade in the sea, breathe the sea wind. In the countryside everything the eye meets is a fresh color — the fields emerald green, the sky azure blue, the sea deep blue-green, the dawn clouds deep crimson, the setting sun golden — and people are tanned dark as chocolate. But in the city there’s only concrete gray, and because it lacks the moderating presence of nature, it’s clearly much hotter than by the sea, so you can only stay indoors and sit in the air-conditioning — while at Silver Beach I don’t even have a fan and don’t feel stifled. I’ve never liked this closed, cramped, unexpandable city environment; I only like a place that’s open and broad and free, with a cool breeze. My friend is self-employed and says he can hole up at home a week without going out — I could never endure that; I have to go out, out to get some air. But Beijing has nowhere to get air. My friend can order takeout every day, but at Silver Beach there’s no takeout; you have to cook for yourself. Cooking for yourself not only gets you light, clean, healthier food, it also cultivates patience. Of course, people with jobs are even less able to cook — they can only eat in the canteen, or at a restaurant outside, or else it’s takeout again.
The city has no natural landscape, so a person can only be tangled up in all kinds of human relationships all day long, never immersed in nature — and they can hardly understand nature anymore. What wind is, what rain is, what sunlight is, what plants are, what animals are, what the waves are, what frogs croaking is — all this can exist only in their imagination, as shallow as reading books or watching films or listening to music. Only by going deep into nature can you gain subtler, truer, deeper feeling. In the city a person’s senses are dull, numbed: the high-rises keep you from seeing far, the noise keeps you from hearing clearly, the foul air keeps you from smelling anything, the heat waves leave you unable to tell hot from cold, and there’s no love left in the heart. I keep stressing nature because I love nature and don’t like the city. I also know many people don’t like nature — they prefer the city; the city makes them feel safe, in the city they’re happier, the city can satisfy their motley desires: the literary dream, the film dream, the music dream, the wealth dream, the love dream, the appetite. To each his own — follow your own heart.
The difference between working and not working is this: working means living by counting the time; not working means “not knowing there had been a Han dynasty, let alone Wei and Jin.” If you work, you have to set the alarm in the morning, and it rings several times before you’re fully awake; you rush for the bus or the subway; how long you’re crammed in the car; whether you reach the office early, on time, or late; you clock in; how long you work in the morning; how long lunch takes; how long the noon break can be; how long you work again in the afternoon; whether you have to work overtime at night; when you get off, you ride home; how long you’re crammed in the car again; back home you flop on the bed and for how long you can play with your phone; how long the takeout takes to arrive; how long you shower; when you get into bed; how long you sleep at night; and in the morning you’re woken by the alarm again — day after day. But I, at the seaside, with no job to go to, don’t even remember what day of the week it is; there’s no difference between workdays and rest days; I can squander time to my heart’s content, not caring whether time is fast or slow, long or short; I sleep as long as I want, I watch the sunset at the shore as long as I want; I eat slowly, walk slowly; I lie on the sand and sun myself, and the sunlight moves across my body; at night I stand at the window watching the moon and the stars, watching how the moon moves, how the stars move; watching how the fields change through the four seasons, how the sea’s temperature changes, how in a single day there are two high tides and two low tides, how the migratory birds come back and how they leave…
I woke to smog, moderate pollution, a gray hazy sky that presses on your spirits just to look at it — plus muggy heat — enough to make you want to die. First I took the bus to the subway station. Outside the Shahe station a long queue had already formed, over a hundred meters, spilling out to the intersection; luckily it moved at a decent pace and I got in after six or seven minutes. But inside the station there was another queue at the boarding point, and I had to wait for the third train; at morning rush hour the trains run about every three minutes. I finally squeezed on — packed to the brim, like a tin of compressed fish, and the air stank so badly that I couldn’t help sneezing; before I could cover it the person beside me turned sharply away, and I felt quite embarrassed — but soon others were sneezing too, and my embarrassment eased. It stayed jammed till Xierqi, where people finally thinned out and there was some space. Beijing’s subway at morning rush hour is truly terrifying. I knew it long ago, so in my seven years in Beijing I lived in a compound close to the office — no need for the bus, no need to cram onto the subway. But the rent was deadly expensive: one month’s rent equaled two years’ rent at Rushan Silver Beach. Live far out and you have to endure the long commute.
Today I had nothing planned, nowhere to go, no one to see, so I decided to go see a movie. I bought two tickets: Oppenheimer in the morning, RMB 33, three hours; Creation of the Gods I in the afternoon, RMB 43, two and a half hours. So I concluded that the preconditions for seeing a movie are: one, money; two, leisure; three, a great deal of leisure. Country farmers don’t go to the movies (there are no cinemas in the countryside either), and my parents don’t either — to spend all that money (RMB 76 is a week’s food money for me at Silver Beach) and sit there unable to move is no comfortable experience. I don’t want to say a word about how good these two films are; I only want to say that for most of the audience, going to the cinema is like going to a restaurant — some food is good and some isn’t. Film is an art, and it’s also an ordinary consumer product: the director is the chef, the stars are the ingredients, the script is the recipe, and making films is done to make money. I’ve seen no small number of films, and now I’m certain that no film is as beautiful as the sea, as beautiful as a sunset and its afterglow.
2023.9.6 — Shaoyaoju
I lived at Shaoyaoju for seven years, yet I never knew why it’s called Shaoyaoju — “Peony Dwelling” — and I never saw a peony there either. It’s a place with very convenient transport: Lines 10 and 13 meet here, and you can get anywhere quickly. Above all it’s fairly close to my former company, so I could walk to work each day in just twenty minutes. For the first four years I shared with another person, in a small north-facing bedroom where the sun never came in all year; the last three years I lived alone, with a small east-facing balcony, and the rent was very expensive. Shaoyaoju sits next to two universities, the University of International Business and Economics and the Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology. For the first four years you could go into the business university freely, but because of the pandemic it was closed for three years; the girls at the fashion institute were tall, pretty, confident, all like supermodels. The Yuan Dynasty City Wall Relics Park is nearby too, with a little stream; I often went walking in the park — in spring you could see flowers of every color, little fish in the stream, children netting them at the bank, and a flock of ducks midstream that I guessed the park kept. The National Museum of Modern Chinese Literature (that is, the Lu Xun Literary Institute) is here too, though I never once went in. I remember when I first came to Beijing there were still many people peddling on the ground on both sides of the road, and the street-facing rooms on the ground floor of the apartment buildings had been knocked through with holes and turned into shops and barbershops; later, when they cleared out the “low-end population,” they put up fences along both sides of the road, drove away the street vendors, and walled up all the doorways too.
This time I came to see a former colleague who also lives at Shaoyaoju, so I was back here again. First I took the Changping Line to Xitucheng (since I left Beijing the Changping Line has been extended to Xitucheng, and Line 19 has opened too — the subway has changed quite a lot), then changed to Line 10 to Shaoyaoju. Inside the station you have to wind through many turns to find Exit A, and out you come right at the various Shaoyaoju compounds. The restaurants along the road are still the same ones, and the takeout I used to order often should still be orderable, though some new restaurants have opened too. The east gate of the business university is open again, only now there’s a facial-recognition machine, so you can’t come and go freely the way you used to. At the gate of the Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology (its Shaoyaoju campus) I saw a few girls in camouflage uniforms, brimming with youth — the freshmen have begun their military training again. Walking up to the Future Plaza at the far north, you can eat, you can see a movie, and you no longer have to scan a health code to get into the mall.
I asked my former colleague what had changed at the company, and she said not much — still the same as ever. I asked whether anything interesting had happened in her own life, and it seemed not — still all kinds of anxiety. In the end it came back to her listening to me tell my story, which I’d already told many times to other friends. I said, I now live entirely for myself, for no one else, my parents included. She said she’s an only child and can’t help caring what her parents feel. Luckily I have an older sister and an older brother, so I can live calmly and without a care. Most people are “kidnapped” by their parents, but I can “abandon” mine, because I live only for myself. I don’t care what others think of me either — call me selfish, call me cold, it doesn’t matter, I don’t live with anyone anyway. By the sea I have zero social life, in contact with no one; I only do what I like — look at mountains and water, listen to wind and rain.
I said, at Rushan Silver Beach I’ve read only two books, Walden and Zhuangzi (she said, laughing, both very unworldly books). Thoreau told me, “Water is my only drink.” So I don’t eat meat, I eat vegetarian, I drink only plain water, and I live a very frugal, simple life — and I’m proud of it. Zhuangzi said, “Death and life are ordained.” So now I don’t care at all about life and death; even to die today would be nothing, because I’ve already seen the loveliest thing in the world — nature; I’ve been through the loveliest stretch of time; I have nothing at all to worry about; I now have only happiness and freedom; I’ve forgotten time; I’m infinitely relaxed. She said, with feeling, I know you’re not just being stubborn when you say this; I can see it — you really are happy, happier than any of us.
After dinner I took the subway back to Changping. I watched the young people in the car, all staring at their phones, not looking at anyone else, not looking anywhere else — some texting, some playing games, some reading novels, some scrolling videos, some on the phone, and what they said on the phone was work too. They seemed all kidnapped by their phones, living only inside them. Only I, a man of leisure, looked all around, observing them — watching the girls’ legs, watching the pimples on the boys’ faces, watching their clothes and shoes, watching people get on, watching people get off. I don’t know what they’re thinking inside; or maybe only by thinking nothing can you be happy.
Because no one else in Beijing was willing to treat me to a meal, and I had no money to treat anyone either — and it happened to fall on days when Beijing was too hot and the air quality was very poor — I decided to end this trip to Beijing, and this miscellany of notes draws its full stop here.
September 6, 2023, at Pokuan’s home, Changping, Beijing.