When man thinks, God laughs. — A Yiddish proverb
00 Foreword
Two years by the sea, and I hadn’t just thought one thing through — I’d thought a great many things through. I often felt I had seen through this world, that it held no more secrets for me. The consequence of thinking that way is that you easily slide into nothingness, because you understand everything, nobody can teach you anything, nobody can control you, you live only for yourself now, and sometimes you don’t even know what you’re living for. So I decided to write: to record what I’ve learned, to sort out my thoughts, to dig deeper and see what else there is to unearth — and maybe in that I can find the meaning of being alive, and the pleasure of life. This is my foreword. Written at Mafang, Changping, Beijing.
01 What Is Happiness?
What is happiness? Happiness is very simple: it’s not comparing. Three words; no further explanation needed. The greatest Way is the simplest. And so is happiness.
I rented a place by the sea, and the rent was only RMB 4,000 a year. But then someone told me he’d rented a place exactly like mine for only RMB 3,000. Hearing that, I felt a little unhappy. Why should I be paying a thousand more? At the start, RMB 4,000 had seemed so cheap. Only RMB 4,000 a year — really cheap. When I was drifting in Beijing, a month’s rent cost RMB 6,000! But later someone else told me he’d rented a place exactly like mine for RMB 5,000. And then I felt much happier, as if I’d got a bargain and he’d been cheated. I was pleased with myself.
This is the root of happiness and unhappiness. When you feel you’re worse off than others, you easily become unhappy. When you feel you’re better off than others, you get a sense of superiority. Both attitudes are unhealthy; a happy person doesn’t compare.
Pursue your own happiness, or call it your own well-being, rather than measuring yourself against others. It doesn’t matter if you have no money; so long as you don’t starve, like Yan Hui: “With a single bamboo dish of rice, a single gourd dish of drink, and living in his mean narrow lane, while others could not have endured the distress, he did not allow his joy to be affected by it.” No house, no car, no wife, no children, nobody to support you in old age or see you buried — none of these are reasons to be unhappy. So long as you’re rich inside, you don’t need anything from outside to make yourself happy. “Life is a wayside inn, and I too am a traveler.” Houses and cars and such things are outside the body, and you can’t take them down below with you. A wife, children, a decent funeral — these are only the continuation of physical desire; having them is very good, and not having them isn’t a matter for regret — a person can live very happily alone, and more freely and easily besides.
Someone will say: if I don’t compare myself with others, how do I know whether I’m happy? Their happiness is built on comparison with others. Mine isn’t. Standing on a bridge, watching the fish in the river swim lazily to and fro, I’m happy too. Standing at the shore, watching the sun sink slowly and spill a sheet of gold across the sea, I’m happy too. Snow falling thick, the north wind howling, the seawater icing over, and me rolling and romping in the snow — happy too. Reading by lamplight at night, coming on a sentence I love, a story that doubles me over — happy too. Not fretting over the past, not worrying about the future, steeped in the present moment — then I’m very happy.
Of course, there’s another simple truth: happiness is plain, not indulgent. “Happy otaku water” — cola — tastes good, and it’s sweet, but drink too much and it’s bad for your health: it rots your teeth, puts on fat, raises your risk of diabetes. So drink as little as possible, and best not at all. When I was working in Beijing I drank cola often, because being a beast of burden is so bitter that you need something sweet to adjust; but after I went to Rushan Silver Beach to live in seclusion by the sea, I never touched cola — I gave it up completely. The very wind by the sea is sweet. Gorging yourself does no good either; it puts a great strain on the body’s workings. Giving yourself up to pleasure is like boiling a frog in warm water: you think it’s a soft nest, a safe harbor, when in fact it robs you of the power to think, you lose your bearings, and you sink into it and can’t get out. Happiness must be restrained, not frenzied. A binge now and then is fine, but not day and night without pause. I suppose all this is commonplace talk.
02 How Do People Deal with One Another?
I reached Rushan Silver Beach on October 26, 2022, and as everyone knows, that was still the mask era, when people had to keep their distance from each other — which, for someone like me who dislikes socializing, was in fact a good thing. On top of that, Silver Beach had always been called a ghost town, and by the end of October there were very few people there: few residents in the compound, one person to a building, few people on the streets, few cars, and you could walk crosswise down the middle of the road with no trouble at all — the traffic lights were pure decoration. Even fewer people were at the shore; the winter wind off the sea was strong and constant, enough to drive anyone away. So in my first half year at Silver Beach I spoke to almost no one — apart from asking the price when I bought vegetables — and I came to know what calm and quiet and silence and freedom really are. But I paid a price: I nearly lost the ability to speak, I lost my powers of oral expression, which frightened me badly for quite a while.
Still, I soon found a solution. By then the pandemic was over too. I was making videos online, posting things about my life by the sea, and that meant I needed voice-overs for the videos: I not only had to write the scripts but read them aloud, which gave me more chances to speak. It was only talking to myself, but it helped a great deal. Then I’d occasionally do a livestream and chat with viewers. It isn’t the same as talking face to face, but it did some good. And lastly, in real life I tried to chat with people more — the vendor selling vegetables, the cashier at the supermarket, the cleaner in the compound, the agent at the gate, and so on. Later some young people came to Rushan Silver Beach to lie flat because they’d seen my videos, and I got to know a few friends; now and then I’d meet them and talk. In this way my speaking came back bit by bit and my Mandarin held up, which was a great relief.
But I still don’t like socializing. I do these things only to keep my ability to speak, not to get information or exchange feelings. Almost all information can be had online, and I prefer to keep to myself and enjoy solitude and calm.
I think relations between people should be like buying something at the supermarket: the thing has its price marked, I take it, hand it to the cashier, he scans my phone, I’ve paid, and the transaction is done without a word more than necessary — I leave, and neither of us owes the other anything. It’s that simple. If I need any socializing at all, that simple, pure kind is all I need.
At Silver Beach there’s another way of buying things — the country market — but many young people don’t like going, because young people don’t like socializing, and going to market is itself a form of socializing. Say you want to buy something: they won’t have marked a price; you have to ask, and they’ll often quote high, especially once they hear your accent and know you’re not local — and then you have to haggle. You say, that stall back there only wanted this much, why do you want so much more? You wrangle back and forth, you say you won’t buy it, and he’ll drop the price; if it seems fair to you, the deal is made.
So do people need to interact or not? Take buying things again. If you don’t like socializing, you can perfectly well go to the supermarket, or shop online, and avoid all the tug of words and feelings — that’s one of the good things about modern life; it makes the flow of goods efficient. Socializing, besides getting information, has another big function: the exchange of feeling. If you need to exchange feeling, then go and socialize. If you like being alone, there are all sorts of ways to keep your speech: as I said above, talking to yourself, or chatting with people online — both spare you face-to-face dealings and save you from minding anyone’s expression or tone.
Socializing is a two-person business; for every action there’s a reaction. So long as you’re willing to bear the pressure socializing brings, unafraid, unintimidated, not put out by the bother, feeling it’s fair and useful — then go and socialize. As for me, I’d rather cut it down. My ideal socializing is “the friendship of a gentleman is as plain as water” — but in real life gentlemen are too few; everyone is a “petty man,” an ordinary person, and “the friendship of a petty man is as sweet as wine,” and “every man comes for profit and goes for profit.” It’s really rather tedious; such socializing is better left alone.
03 What Is Freedom?
What is freedom? Freedom is simple too: it’s not being afraid. I like to explain a question in the simplest, clearest words.
When I was small I lived in the countryside — no restraints, free and easy. Before I started middle school, my childhood was the best time of my life. Nobody then talked about “hothousing the kids”; studying was very relaxed. I had to get up early, but it seems I never went to bed late; there were extra lessons, but I don’t remember much homework. After school, or at weekends, I was always out playing — climbing hills, catching fish, exploring; in the summer holidays I swam in the river; at New Year we’d celebrate at least until the fifteenth of the first lunar month; there seemed to be no worries at all. It was only when I got to middle school, with evening study sessions and classes most weekends, that life began to feel a little dull and living really did bring a good deal of pressure — all to get into a good high school. Of middle and high school there isn’t much to remember; the youth of our generation (children of ordinary county towns) was all a blur. Only at university did I get a little release. But in my fourth year I had to sit the graduate entrance exam and find a job, and once I’d found a job and entered society there was even less happiness — and without happiness, freedom even less.
What, really, is freedom? It’s the carefree time in the countryside when I was small. It’s “Enjoyment in Untroubled Ease” in the high-school textbook. It’s falling in love freely at university. Once I left school and started work, freedom was gone. Only after more than ten years of work, when I quit, did I have freedom again.
I worked in Beijing for seven years, and then the mask era came, and every day there were masks to wear, PCR tests to take, health codes to check — one control after another, till you were sick to death of it. And the work was in a state-owned enterprise, where the rules grew more numerous by the day: all sorts of applications, all sorts of approvals, all sorts of things you weren’t allowed to do, all sorts of self-checks and reviews and post-mortems; the office ran less and less efficiently and relations up and down the line got worse and worse, until I really couldn’t bear it. How long I put up with it I no longer remember. I wanted to quit the whole time, but I didn’t dare, or couldn’t bring myself to; I dragged it out, until I could bear it no longer and finally took that step. From the moment I made up my mind, I felt free at last.
In my two years by the sea I was free, no doubt about it. As to how — you can look at the two years of diaries I wrote there. When I first got to the seaside I had an idea, an attitude to the future: if I wasn’t afraid of the future, didn’t worry about what was coming, didn’t even think about it, but lived only in the present and considered only what was in front of me (and there was nothing at all in front of me then), and I only had to enjoy the now — then I was free. And even if I did think about the future: if I couldn’t make a go of it, I’d die; I’m not afraid of death either. “Worst comes to worst, I’ll die — what’s the big deal?” And then I was completely free. I’m not afraid; not in the least afraid; I fear nothing; nothing can frighten me; I don’t give a damn. Then I was free.
If a person isn’t even afraid of death, then he is perfectly, utterly free. Freedom is not being afraid — or you could say it’s daring to take risks. Only someone with a spirit of adventure can win freedom; someone with no spirit of adventure, who only wants to be safe, can never be free. Freedom and security are two opposites. So what do you want to pursue? Freedom, or security? Take your pick.
04 Besides Freedom, What Else Do You Pursue?
My two years by the sea — I was free, no question; you could call them the freest time of my life. The freedom of childhood was given to me by my parents; the freedom of these two years I won for myself. With freedom I’d obtained the most precious thing in the world — so what else was worth striving for? Sometimes I was at a loss, but I soon found the answer: knowledge, the knowledge that lets you understand this world. I want not only to free myself and win personal freedom, but also to understand this world, and even the universe.
Nobody can understand this universe, because the universe is infinite. Zhuangzi said, “There is a limit to our life, but to knowledge there is no limit. With what is limited to pursue after what is unlimited is a perilous thing; and when, knowing this, we still seek the increase of our knowledge, the peril cannot be averted.” But to pursue infinite knowledge — first, it gives me something to do and keeps boredom at bay; second, it lets me understand this world more deeply. Why not? If you understand this world better you’ll love it more — or possibly hate it more. Either way it beats ignorance. And the more you understand the world, the more freely you can live; ignorance leaves you easy to bully and to cheat.
Knowledge is of two kinds: what’s in books and what’s in practice — which is to say, you must unite knowing with doing: read ten thousand books, travel ten thousand li. If you can’t travel ten thousand li, then read more books first: books are cheap, and nowadays there are so many e-books that you can even read them without spending a cent. Read all kinds of books, not just one type. And traveling ten thousand li isn’t only about scenery — you also have to talk more with the people along the way, ask more, hear more, and gain knowledge from other people’s experience; sometimes that knowledge is more precious than what’s in books. Peddlers, porters, men of all trades and callings — every one of them is someone we can learn from, not only schoolteachers and professors.
What use is knowledge once you have it? Confucius said, “My children, why do you not study the Book of Poetry? The Odes serve to stimulate the mind. They may be used for purposes of self-contemplation. They teach the art of sociability. They show how to regulate feelings of resentment. From them you learn the more immediate duty of serving one’s father, and the remoter one of serving one’s prince. From them we become largely acquainted with the names of birds, beasts, and plants.” On the roadside you see a blade of grass, a little flower, and you can name them — isn’t that a happy thing? Someone says, what use is that? Well, even taking the utilitarian view, knowledge can earn money. Why do people go to school and study, sit the college entrance exam, sit the graduate exam, even do a doctorate? To get a bite to eat, first of all. Once you’ve used knowledge to secure food and warmth, you can go on to do something nobler.
I want to understand this world, to do my utmost to grasp how it actually works — things, and people: astronomy and geography, history and economics, AI and chips, men and women. The more I understand, the happier I am. I don’t want to be an ignorant man — not out of fear of being laughed at, but because I genuinely love learning, love seeing through to the essence of things. With that drive I never feel bored, never feel empty; I often have something to do, and often have sudden flashes of understanding.
05 What Is Human Nature?
What is human nature? Human nature is simple too: it’s desire, nothing more. People are always saying — novelists especially — that human nature is very complex, the hardest thing in the world to fathom, that nobody can see through it. When I was young I believed them; now I don’t. I spent two years by the sea thinking about many questions, and I’ve thought this one through as well. I come from a science or engineering background, and I always feel that every question has an answer; even when it doesn’t, study it and you can approach the answer indefinitely. And I suppose Marxist philosophy has influenced me too: I know that “the material base determines the superstructure,” so human nature must be determined by something as well. What determines human nature is human desire; everyone has desires, all kinds of desires. “The desire for food and sex is nature,” as we Chinese say. What is that “nature”? It’s food and sex, the two most basic desires. Fame, profit, power and the rest are extensions of food and sex. See how wise our ancient Chinese were — they had the question clear long ago. This is my answer; the answer is simple.
So why did I arrive at this answer? Because I lived a very low-desire life by the sea for two years. I quit my job; with no work there was no income, or very little, and I could only live off my savings. That meant I had to live very frugally, very thriftily, in order to go on not working, not taking a job, not throwing myself into the rat race. The place I rented was very cheap — RMB 4,000 a year. Water, electricity and gas were cheap too. I ate extremely simply: rice, potatoes, cabbage, eggs were enough for me. I could go a year without meat. I drank no beverages at all, only plain boiled water. I didn’t fuss over clothes either — I simply don’t care what others think of me. My only transport was a bicycle; I loved walking by the sea. I didn’t even have heating in winter, and I didn’t find it very cold. I had no social life, no need to treat anyone to dinner. As for marrying, buying a house, having children, raising children — those needn’t even be considered. After two years of practicing this very-low-desire life, I found that a low-desire life is a healthier, freer life.
A person can throw away a great many things; the more you throw away, the richer you are, the freer you are. The more things you want — the more desires you have — the tighter you’re bound. Of course, when a person is young he has more desires; by middle and old age desire fades and he has learned restraint, and he takes many things lightly. And this society keeps encouraging consumption, stimulating consumption, promoting consumption (the economy nowadays is really terrible); consumerism is everywhere, and it’s very hard to control your own desires. But once you do control them and live a low-desire life, a life unlike other people’s, you’ll be freer.
Food and sex are both physical desires, part of our nature, and genuinely hard to control — but not impossible; you only have to learn restraint. Or else: when you’re in a certain situation — like me, with no job and no income — you have no choice but to live a low-desire life. Why did I fall into that situation? You could call it chosen, or forced — like lying flat, which is both passive and active. The passive side I won’t go into; that’s the social factor. The active side is that I wanted freedom, and I didn’t want to be bound by rules and regulations. To get freedom you must pay a price: the price is an unusual life, giving up a great many things, lowering your material desires.
In short, I think human nature is desire, and not so complex. Many questions can be answered by desire; personal problems and social problems alike all arise from desire (desire produces interest). Even setting aside material pursuits, spiritual pursuits are desire too: pursuing freedom, pursuing ideals — isn’t that a kind of desire? Of course, material pursuits and spiritual pursuits are neither higher nor lower; I don’t want to be attacked for thinking myself superior. Pursue whatever you want to pursue. But it’s all driven by desire. Human nature is desire; food and sex are basic; knowledge, fame, profit, power, freedom, love and the rest are extensions of it. Having thought this question through, I finally breathed a sigh of relief — and I thank these two years of not working by the sea and living a materially low-desire life.
06 What Is Success?
What is success? Success is very simple too: success is to spend your life in the way you like. That sentence isn’t mine — it’s the closing line of Dangnian Mingyue’s Those Things of the Ming Dynasty. At the end of that book he wrote about Xu Xiake, not about any emperor or general or minister. He said that an emperor’s or general’s century of supremacy and ten thousand ages of glory all come in the end to dung, and that worldly success is often not chosen of one’s own free will but a matter of having no choice — whereas Xu Xiake’s life is the most enviable of all, because that was the way of living he loved. Reading that line, I too had a flash of understanding: success, like happiness, is your own, not other people’s expectation.
Is having ten billion in savings success? Is buying a big house success? Is buying a luxury car success? Is marrying a beautiful woman (or a handsome man) success? Is a house full of children and grandchildren, a thriving family, success? Is being a top official with a retinue success? Is dominating your field success? ... In Dangnian Mingyue’s words: whatever it is, so long as it’s the way you yourself like, you’re a success.
But many people don’t know what kind of life they like — lost young people especially, like me when I first started university: very lost, not knowing what I was supposed to do at university or afterward, mostly just following the crowd, because everyone else was doing it, so I had to do it too — sit the graduate exam, make money, buy a house, marry, have children, send the children to university, and the children make money, buy houses, marry, have children, send their children to university... Is that the way of living you like? Have you ever asked yourself? To make money you work 996; to buy a house you take on a crushing mortgage; for your parents’ expectations you marry someone you don’t love... Is that success? What do you actually want in your heart, what do you want to do — do you know? Very often you don’t; and even when you do, you’ll helplessly choose a way of living you don’t like. Most people can’t choose the life they like; they can only drift with the current, only cut off what they love, only swallow it down and say nothing, only regret it for life.
For example, these past few days I’ve just come to Beijing from the seaside, and I ran into a spell of severe smog, the kind Beijing rarely sees. The smog was so thick it made you gasp: a vast whiteness, utterly gloomy, blotting out the view, so you couldn’t see the pretty scenery, leaving you filthy — dust stuck in your eyelashes, grime on your face, black in your nose, a dull ache in your throat, and of course your mood dropped to the bottom of the pit. This scene is utterly unlike the seaside at Rushan Silver Beach. By the sea the air is clean, even sweet; the wind is pure and blows away all the dirt; the view is wide — you see the far horizon, the far little hills, the red ball of the setting sun, the gorgeous afterglow — and all around is a deep hush, no noise of crowds, no clamor of traffic, and in that kind of place you are calm and free. The contrast was so sharp that I knew what way of living I liked.
You have to find the way of living you like before you can live it. The finding will certainly take a very long time; it doesn’t happen all at once, nor like a sudden enlightenment in Zen, understood in an instant. You’ll surely have to spend a lot of effort, go through a lot, suffer some hardship, think it over many times, before you find the road you want to take in life. And once you’ve found it, you still have to have the courage to walk that road, and not regret it while you walk, and walk on bravely to the end, to the end of your life. And then you can say: I have realized my ideal.
07 Must a Person Hold a Job?
Two years ago I quit my job in Beijing — a true bare-faced quit: once I’d quit I had no work, no income, nobody paying the five statutory insurances and the housing fund for me, and I stopped paying health insurance and the pension myself, so if I fell ill I’d have to pay out of my own pocket with nobody to claim it back from — luckily, in two years I never once went to a hospital. My plan was “freedom forever” (not) — a gap year, rest for a year, and a year later go back to Beijing to look for work, the same kind of work I’d done before. I just wanted to rest; I was far too tired, I simply couldn’t bear the work pressure and the social climate of that time any longer, it squeezed the breath out of me; and at the same time I felt that my work and my life then were far too dull — a person shouldn’t have to keep working and working until retirement before he can do what he likes, or simply rest for a year. Resting for a year is not too much to ask.
Of course, the precondition for quitting and not working — even if it’s only for a year — is that you must have some savings. Not to work for a year, you at least must not starve for a year. Not to work for a lifetime, you at least must not starve for a lifetime. As for how much money you need, that varies from person to person. Some people spend only RMB 10,000 a year, some spend RMB 100,000 a year, and some may spend a million. For me, at the time I didn’t know how much I’d spend in a year, but I had a million in savings, and I’m a thrifty sort, so I didn’t believe I could spend too much in a year: even at RMB 50,000 a year, I could live twenty years without working. If I could live free and easy for twenty years, what was there to worry about? Worrying about things twenty years off — I’m not that kind of alarmist. And later, as it turned out, my pared-down life at Rushan Silver Beach, the “ghost town,” cost at most RMB 15,000 a year.
Once I’d quit, of course I couldn’t go on living in Beijing — the cost of living there is too high, mainly housing. My place then cost RMB 6,500 a month in rent, and with upkeep, a full RMB 7,000 a month. I had no choice but to leave Beijing — and I wanted to escape Beijing. I’d lived there a full seven years, and it had probably reached the seven-year itch; I loathed the place. I’m an inland man, and I’d always longed for the sea; I wanted to live by the sea and feel its vastness and calm. At first I thought of Qingdao, then considered Weihai, then Rongcheng, and finally Rushan: Rushan had the cheapest rent, only three or four thousand a year. In the end I set my heart on a big two-bedroom flat, full of sunlight, for only RMB 4,000 a year. I rented it.
At Rushan Silver Beach I lived a pared-down, extremely low-desire life; as I said before, at most RMB 15,000 a year. Rent RMB 4,000; agency fee RMB 200 (not needed the second year); property fee RMB 500; water, electricity and gas together RMB 1,000 a year (local utilities are all very cheap — water at RMB 3 a ton, electricity at RMB 0.5 a kilowatt-hour, gas at RMB 2.8 a cubic meter); purified water RMB 100; food at most RMB 5,000 a year (I’ve said I don’t eat meat and drink no beverages; two meals a day is enough, one dish at a time); plus the household things I bought the first year (clothes, tableware, small appliances, a bicycle and so on, not needed the second year), call it RMB 1,000; internet for phone and computer RMB 500; the occasional outing RMB 500. That comes to only RMB 12,800 a year. Maybe I’ve forgotten some costs, or run into some extra expense in the course of living; call it RMB 15,000 a year. And the longer you live there, the more expertly you save, so the second year’s expenses are even lower: RMB 15,000 is an upper limit. So even if you have only RMB 150,000 in savings, you can live without a care for ten years. Of course, some will say, what about inflation, prices will rise — and I can only say, since you worry so much, then don’t lie flat; go and work properly.
Besides, if a person doesn’t work, doesn’t hold a job, and does nothing at all, he’ll feel bored; and being bored he’ll go and find something to do, and so long as he can find something to do, he can earn a little money or save a little money. By the sea, for instance, you can go foraging the shallows, you can go fishing; the clams, razor clams, crabs and mantis shrimp you dig, the bass, mullet, bottom-clinging fish, carp and crucian carp you catch can all be eaten, saving a lot of money. Make some videos, do a few livestreams, talk about the free and happy life by the sea, and you might even become an internet celebrity — that too can earn you a living. If you can take hardship, you can also deliver takeout, deliver parcels, clean, do housework for other people, run a stall, do barbecue or open a small shop. In short, don’t be afraid first, and don’t fret over things that haven’t happened.
In the first year my expenses at Rushan Silver Beach were RMB 15,000 (in fact much less. Also I went traveling — to Tibet, Xinjiang, Qingdao, Xiamen, Beijing and Jiagedaqi — which doesn’t count as expenses at Rushan Silver Beach; as to how much it cost, I never kept track). And the interest on my savings alone came to RMB 20,000, plus RMB 6,000 from my videos, so subtracting expenses from income I was still RMB 11,000 to the good (part of that money went on travel, so in a year of not working my savings didn’t fall, they actually rose). In the second year the expenses were lower still, only about RMB 12,000, while the interest was RMB 18,000, the video income RMB 5,000, and on top of that I put out an e-book and got a fee of RMB 2,500. Without even reckoning closely, you can tell my savings rose again. Though the interest on savings is sliding because the state has cut rates several times, and the income from videos is hard to grow, I believe that even without a job a person won’t starve. And you can still do what you like doing — and what you like doing may even earn you money: videos and writing a diary.
08 What If You Fall Ill? What About Old Age?
In a full two years at Rushan Silver Beach I fell ill exactly once: in August 2023 I caught Covid for the first time. Early that year the restrictions were lifted fast — no more of this, no more of that — and the crowds at Silver Beach began to come back; you couldn’t call it bustling, but at least people could come and go freely, especially in August, Silver Beach’s busiest month, when the shore was already thick with people. Precisely because there were so many people, and because I like to wander about outside and drift through the crowds having a look at pretty women, I got hit with Covid too. The earlier waves of infection I’d dodged, but this time I couldn’t escape my fate. My head was heavy, my throat hoarse, my legs wouldn’t carry me, I slept all the time, and I had no choice but to rest at home for a few days and stop going out to wander. I had no medicine, only Banlangen and plenty of hot water, and after just four or five days I was completely well. I could go to the shore in my slippers again, though I tried to have as little contact with crowds as possible.
This illness cost me almost nothing — Banlangen was enough to save me. Having no health insurance, I couldn’t go to hospital, and I didn’t want to spend money on medicine; I’ve always been confident in my own constitution, and from childhood I’ve very rarely fallen ill. The only injection I can remember was as a child of five or six; from primary school through university I hardly ever went to a hospital. I wouldn’t say I never had a cold or a fever, but generally a sleep would fix it. In more than ten years of work I remember only one time, a very hot summer, when I’d skipped breakfast and took the subway with the air conditioning too cold; the abrupt change from heat to cold gave me a sudden attack of acute gastroenteritis. That one did frighten me, and luckily a colleague got me to a nearby hospital in time. Apart from that I’ve had no illness, no hospital stays. I often feel that all the health-insurance money I paid in was wasted, and it would have been better paid into my wages.
Now that I have no job, I have to be even more careful not to fall ill. But for me, not working is the best health insurance and the best cosmetic surgery: so long as I don’t work, I won’t fall ill. Confidence comes first. Don’t we Chinese have a superstition — the more you dread something, the more likely it is to happen? It’s a superstition, but there’s something in it: your state of mind really does determine your physical state. As the saying goes, a calm heart can cure three thousand ailments. I’m sure Chinese medicine has theories of this kind too, though some people don’t believe in Chinese medicine. Then there’s a plain diet and healthy habits: keep the food light, don’t always eat things oily and spicy and cloyingly sweet, eat less, don’t overeat, no alcohol, no smoking, don’t stay up late all the time, exercise more — but not too hard, walking and swinging your arms will do. Add to that Silver Beach’s clean air, sanitary surroundings, summers not too hot, winters not too cold, few people and quiet, and a good mood, and living here long-term you could reach a hundred. All of this convinces me that at Silver Beach I won’t fall ill, or very seldom.
Someone will say, but what if you do fall ill, or meet with an accident? Storms gather without warning, and a man’s fortunes turn overnight. Accidents have nothing to do with whether you work: not working you can meet with an accident, working you can meet with an accident (more of them, surely, if you work). And if you meet with an accident? Go to hospital, of course. Someone without work and without health insurance may have to pay more; someone living in the countryside may have less chance than someone in the city of timely, thorough treatment. Country people do live a good deal shorter than city people — that’s an undeniable fact. But I think it still comes down to what kind of life you like. I said the same in the chapter on freedom: if you want a safe life, you must put up with boredom; if you want freedom, you must take risks. You can’t have both.
Then what about when you’re old? Old age is still a long way off — why fret about something so far away? If you marry and have children, will you be happy, will someone look after you? Of a married couple, one always goes first. Children and grandchildren have their own lives; they’ll rarely find time to keep you company, and there’s a good chance you’ll get unfilial ones. Besides, the old-age system is improving now; there’ll only be more old people in future, and it’ll be normal to still be working at sixty or seventy. Widowed, childless, alone will all grow commoner — but so will canteens for the elderly, homes and nursing homes, care-worker agencies and old people’s mutual-aid associations, and new kinds of institutions nobody’s thought of yet will pop up. Society has its own self-correcting, self-healing function; AI is racing ahead, and by then it’ll be robots looking after the old. You have to believe in the power of technology.
09 How Do You Deal with Physical Desire?
I make videos online, posting things that show my lying-flat life at Rushan Silver Beach; it’s won me some followers, some traffic, and a little money. People are always asking me this and that — what the “ghost town” Rushan Silver Beach is really like, how much rent costs, how much a house costs, is it hot in summer, is it cold in winter, what’s the transport like — and I do my best to answer. But Rushan Silver Beach is only so big, and there’s only so much of life there to talk about; there’s not much room to expand. Later I discovered that supplying information gets less traffic than supplying emotional value, and little by little the traffic dragged me along — for instance, talking about the harms of working and the benefits of not working, that lying flat is justice, that a person shouldn’t be bound by worldly values, that you can be free without money, that only by not buying a house and not marrying and not having children can you be free, and so on. The views and the arguments on such topics soared. And traffic means money.
Among these topics one came up again and again, because everyone likes hearing that kind of story — the sexual one: you don’t socialize, you don’t have a girlfriend, you don’t marry, you don’t have children; but everyone has physical desire, so how is physical desire to be resolved? At first I didn’t want to talk about it; it’s a bit embarrassing, and everyone knows about such things without needing them put on the table. But more and more people asked, and I realized such a topic has traffic, so I might as well ride it. I did one installment, and sure enough the traffic exploded. In fact I didn’t say much: either you hold it in, or you use your hand. But the number of people arguing in the comments was enormous — noisy, squabbling, and plenty of flame wars besides — while I sat on the mountain watching the tigers fight and quietly harvested the traffic.
In fact I’m not interested in such topics. I care only about nature: the sea, the blue sky, white clouds, rain, snow, wind, sun moon and stars, flowers and trees, birdsong, frogs, the rasp of cicadas. As for people, I only watch them from a distance — the ones foraging the shallows, the ones fishing, the ones at the market, the ones in the supermarket, the ones on the street — but I don’t go near them. To me, other people aren’t hell, but they are a great deal of trouble. I have physical desire for the opposite sex, but I don’t go near them either. Getting a girlfriend means spending money (I have none) and spending thought; marrying adds a whole heap of relatives; having a child is even more momentous — and so I cut off contact with other people at the source. As for physical desire, technology is so advanced now that a man can take care of it on his own; unsatisfactory as it is, at least it won’t put me on the road to crime, or drag me into the trivia of family life and endless unwilling socializing.
I’m a man who prefers an independent life, going my own way, rather than living with other people; I prefer to solve my own problems rather than need others’ help. Physical desire I can solve myself, without asking anyone’s help. I know that asking for help often makes things simpler — but only if the help is one-way rather than two-way. I ask a favor of you, then I must return the favor, back and forth, endless, and I find it a great bother, more than I can handle; better to solve it myself. I have neither the ability nor the wish to manage that kind of relationship. I want to be a little freer, and so I’m not afraid to live alone.
Physical desire really is human nature. It’s a question of whether you can bear the consequences of pursuing those desires, or whether you’re willing to pay the price for them. It’s a personal choice, with no right or wrong. You can’t say that pursuing the pleasures of the flesh is vulgar and pursuing the pleasures of the spirit is refined — pleasure has no high or low. I have desires too, but I choose to solve them myself rather than seek out others. As for what others should do, I can’t advise, and I don’t want to set myself up as a master; I can only be myself. Argument is meaningless. Of course, if arguing can win me some traffic and earn me a little money, I can also pretend to be interested and talk about it — after all, the desire for food and sex is nature, and food comes first, sex second; food matters most; only when you’re fed can you think of sex. Let me eat my fill first.
10 Do You Believe in Love?
Another question asked a lot online is whether you can find a girlfriend at Rushan Silver Beach. My answer: no. Rushan Silver Beach is a place where the elderly make up ninety percent, and the other ten percent is young people (under forty, in their twenties and thirties). Among the young, men make up the great majority and girls are very few, and girls, for their own safety, don’t like to socialize or only keep company with other girls — so even if you want to find a girlfriend, the chance is slim; I call it Mission: Impossible. If you want a girlfriend, go to a big city; there are more girls there, more than boys even, so the chances are better. Rushan Silver Beach is not a place for romance, for moonlight and flowers; it’s a place for retired old people to rest quietly, and for lying-flat young people to give up.
If you ask whether I believe in love, you first have to establish what love is. The Bible says, “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” Such love is too noble; I’ve never seen it, and a thing I’ve never seen — I don’t quite believe it exists. And the love in the Bible isn’t necessarily romantic love: it can be God’s love for mankind, a universal love, a love beyond sex and age and race. But what we usually call love is the love between a man and a woman (now also between people of any sex), love in the narrow sense, worldly love.
I like to explain love in the simplest words: to me, love is a kind of human relationship, and if you can draw pleasant encouragement from that relationship, then it’s love. Love is beautiful, and rare. I don’t believe love is selfless devotion; love definitely carries possessiveness, a mutual possessiveness, but in the possessing there’s a mutual delight. Without delight it isn’t love either; a painful feeling isn’t love, it’s hatred, jealousy, ugliness. Unrequited longing isn’t love either. Love also goes by “a match of equal standing,” a mutual fit: flowers stuck in cow dung aren’t love, a toad dreaming of swan meat isn’t love, and Pan Jinlian and Wu Dalang weren’t love either. Maybe there’s love at the very start, when both are delighted — but before long the ardor fades, delight turns to boredom, quarrels, hostility, and the love is gone too. Relations between people are complex and changeable, and so is love.
My idea of love is too idealistic. In love, each person has to be himself. That’s very hard. Love is a two-person business; so long as you’re tangled up with someone else you have to yield to each other, rub along, adapt, change yourself. In this world nobody can accommodate you with complete sincerity. If there is such a person, point them out to me — I’ve never seen one. Someone said to me, I like you exactly as you are; be yourself. But later she said, why won’t you accommodate me, why won’t you sweet-talk me, why won’t you change for me. In the end I had nothing left but to love myself. Loving others is too exhausting. If you feel tired in a relationship of two, then break up!
In short, in my two years at Rushan Silver Beach I never once spoke to a girl, let alone had any love. It isn’t that I’ve no interest in girls. First, there simply are no girls at Silver Beach — in that sort of place, whom would I fall in love with? Second, falling in love means treating someone to meals, not just talking and never acting; I have no job and no income, so who’d be willing to take the initiative to fall in love with me? Third, I’m too clever (my own assessment): the wise don’t fall into the river of love. I’ve seen through the essence of all human relationships (the need for interest; emotional comfort is a kind of interest too), and I prefer to stay alone. The carefree youth I once was believed in love; but I, now stranded in the world, don’t much believe in it. You’ll say I’m too realistic, unromantic. I won’t argue. I can only congratulate you: you have something to believe in — that’s very good.
11 How Do Your Parents See You?
I didn’t tell my parents when I quit my job in Beijing; I told only a few friends who could understand me. I felt that people who couldn’t understand what I’d done had no need to know about it, and I wouldn’t explain to them either. When I make a decision, I only want others’ support and approval; I don’t want to hear objections, mockery, jeers. If you can’t understand my decision, then please respect it. I’m an adult now, thirty-six years old; I can make my own decisions, and whether the decision is right or wrong, I’ll take responsibility for it. I’m a completely independent person: financially independent, spiritually independent. Please, no one interfere with me. I knew my parents wouldn’t understand my decision and wouldn’t support it, so I didn’t tell them. It was only half a year after I quit, after half a year of lying flat by the sea, when it could no longer be hidden, that I told them: I’m not in Beijing anymore, I’m in Weihai. They asked what I was doing now; I didn’t tell them. There was no way I could tell them I was lying flat — I only said I wasn’t working. Even not working, they couldn’t understand. They think a person ought to work, to find a job, and wait until sixty to retire.
The reasons I didn’t tell them: first, they can’t understand, and telling them would do no good; second, telling them would only bring more suspicion, interrogation, quarrels, and estrangement. To avoid all that I kept silent — for the sake of my own peace, and for theirs too. I bear all the consequences myself, sharing my daily life only with a few friends who understand me, and anonymously online. Someone may mock me and say your relationship with your parents is worse than with strangers. I remember that many social apps these days have a feature: “recommend your activity to people you know.” And most people turn it off — they don’t want people they know to see them running wild online, or being their true selves. I won’t explain the reasoning.
And someone will say: if you don’t explain, if you don’t talk to them, how do you know your parents can’t understand? Of course I know. Don’t I know my own parents? Don’t I know what sort of people they are? Don’t I know how they’d react? It’s precisely because I know all this that I don’t explain to them and don’t talk with them. Why do we often say “report only the good news, not the bad”? This is exactly why. Even though I feel that my lying flat and not working is a piece of good news, a happy thing, in their eyes it’s a worrying, upsetting thing. First, they really can’t understand it. Second, even if they could, I’d have to spend a great deal of language and skill explaining my behavior, and to me that isn’t worth it. You say I don’t love my parents — I don’t admit it, and I won’t argue. And I don’t need your understanding either. This is the advantage of being a completely independent person: I don’t care in the least how you see me!
Trump said: you love me, I love you; you support me, I support you; you hate me — I don’t care in the least; I have more important things to do. I have important things to do too — for instance, enjoying life, enjoying the sea and the sunset, enjoying freedom, enjoying the fresh air, enjoying the peaceful surroundings, being alone, reading, writing, meditating, sleeping well, eating well... As for how others see me — including my parents, relatives, friends, acquaintances, strangers — I don’t give any of them a thought.
Of course, I wouldn’t advise everyone to go their own way and do as they please like me. Not everyone has the means, or the wish, to do that. Some people just like living with others, marrying and having children, building a family, being a father or mother, a grandfather or grandmother; they feel family relations are very harmonious, that father and son, mother and son, father and daughter, mother and daughter can understand and support one another. I don’t deny such families exist; just do what you believe is right. Take me: I’m not an only child, so I don’t have an only child’s many troubles; I have two older sisters and an older brother. My parents aren’t farmers either; they have pensions, a retirement fund, health insurance — and so I can live for myself easily, without having to live for my parents, without having to live at their feet. I go wherever I want, and no one can stop me. Though my parents don’t understand me and don’t support me, though they nag and question, they don’t forcibly interfere with me or make demands of me. Finally, you must have a solid economic foundation: money isn’t everything, but without money you can do nothing at all.
12 Don’t You Feel Lonely?
Rushan Silver Beach is often called a ghost town, but I like the ghost town very much, and I like the name too. So you’ll have gathered that I don’t feel lonely here. From childhood I’ve loved nature and disliked crowds; in nature I find peace, and in crowds I only find noise. Mix less with people, look more at nature. People who love nature don’t feel lonely in nature; it’s only in crowds that they feel lonely. Loneliness is one person’s carnival, and a carnival is a crowd’s loneliness. In my two years at Silver Beach I hardly interacted with anyone (apart from a few questions when buying things), but I can take good care of myself, body and spirit alike — healthy in body, and rich in spirit. Everything in nature is my friend and my teacher; I’m not lonely.
People keep asking me, are you a social-phobe? And I explain: I’m not afraid of socializing; I just don’t want to socialize — I’m tired of it. In the big city I did have friends, I did like socializing, my work was mainly dealing with people; but the truth is I don’t like big cities, and I don’t like dealing with people, so I left the city and stopped working, and wanted only to be alone, quiet. To me, a big city is a place with people everywhere. I grew up in the countryside; at bottom I’m a countryman, and I like the countryside, like its nature, like its quiet. The city can’t give me quiet; the city makes people restless, makes them lose themselves. And because I grew up in a family with many children, I never learned to be lonely as a child — I found home too noisy and preferred to be alone.
When you’re alone you can do more things, and do them better. Alone, you don’t have to mind others’ feelings, only your own. Perhaps I’m too sensitive and too kind: when I’m with others I’m always thinking of looking after their moods, of not disappointing them, and that often makes me so tired when I’m with people that I’d rather be alone. How this character of mine was formed I can’t yet explain; I can only say it’s the result of upbringing. If I too, when with others, always thought only of myself and my own pleasure, then I could live more simply and easily. But I can never manage it. It’s as if I always see myself as the parent and others as children, afraid the children will go hungry, afraid they’ll feel wronged. Being the parent is too tiring; I don’t want to be the parent.
Is there anything bad about being alone? People are social animals, and of course they need to socialize. Someone who loves solitude is either a beast or a god. I’m neither beast nor god. As I mentioned before, if a person doesn’t speak for a long time he loses his language, so a person must speak — not only to himself but with real people, to keep his speech. Of course, that has nothing to do with loneliness; it can be trained by technique — for instance, chatting with the vendors at the vegetable market. I’m only saying that being alone doesn’t mean being by yourself forever, never touching anyone. When you want solitude, be alone; when you want to move through crowds, don’t fear the world’s flood either. Comfortable in your own company, and detached and free amid the noise of the crowd.
Of course, it also has a lot to do with technology: the growth of technology spares people a great deal of unnecessary socializing. Some people say: so long as I have the internet and a phone, I won’t feel lonely. And me? So long as I have nature, I won’t feel lonely. It’s only in big cities — big cities have no nature — that I feel lonely. In a big city I always want to get back to nature, because only in nature am I natural. I can talk with everything in nature, and then I’m at my fullest, happiest, freest. And when I do want to communicate with people, I hope the communication carries no burden at all, is utterly natural, with no scheming or jockeying, no shy awkwardness, no false feeling — the more of that kind of socializing the better; I don’t turn it down.
13 Don’t You Get Bored?
Before I’d even gone to Rushan Silver Beach, someone warned me: “Stay by the sea a month and you’ll be bored.” I scoffed, of course — and in fact that’s how it was. The first month I wasn’t bored; the second month I wasn’t either; nor the third; nor after half a year; nor after a year — I stayed by the sea a full two years. Nor did I stay at Rushan Silver Beach and never go out; every few months I’d take a trip — to Tibet, to Qingdao, to Xiamen and Quanzhou, to Beijing, to Jiagedaqi, to Xinjiang, and twice back to my hometown. Traveling wasn’t because I thought Rushan Silver Beach was bad, or because I was bored there; it was just to change my mood. Wherever you live, you always need to get out and travel. For me, so long as I’m not made to go to work, I won’t be bored — I can always find something to fill my time. Working is the boring thing.
Won’t you get bored looking at the sea every day? No. You don’t tire of the sea, or of the sunset, or of the clouds in the sky, or of the stars; they always hold my gaze, because they’re different every day — the sea has its tides, and the sun, moon and stars turn with the seasons. The land has its four seasons, and the sea has seasons too: on land the trees and grasses bloom and wither with the seasons; in the sea the fish and shrimp and crabs and clams migrate or dwindle with the seasons — a fishing moratorium in May, the sea opened in September. Everything is flowing and changing, and with change there’s no boredom. So it is with people: in summer the crowds at Silver Beach come like fish crossing a river, and in winter it withers to not a soul; the restaurant trade and the market crowds ebb and flow like the tide. As an observer of the world, I have endless material here — how could I tire of it.
You can also fish and forage the shallows; the catch is different in each season, and you needn’t buy vegetables, saving a lot of money. What hobbies do you have? Walking, running, cycling, driving, gaming, swimming, surfing, hill-climbing, kite-flying, singing, dancing, chess, the erhu, photography, calligraphy, writing novels — there’s plenty to do. If you like socializing, you can make friends and hang out with them. Some lying-flat young people don’t have much money, so they deliver takeout, deliver parcels, run stalls, work as property agents, go into catering, or like me make videos; some write web novels, run online shops, or livestream. So long as a person can find something to do, he won’t be bored. Only someone who can’t find anything to do is at a loss.
There’s another kind of boredom: nothingness. Schopenhauer said life is like a pendulum, swinging back and forth between pain and boredom: when desire is unsatisfied a man feels pain, and when desire is satisfied he falls into boredom. So what’s to be done? My suggestion: a person must find something he loves doing, something worth pursuing for a lifetime, something he’ll do better and better with no end to it. I studied science; the universe is infinite, knowledge is boundless, and there’s always virgin territory worth opening up — life is the same: so long as conditions allow, you should strive to explore the limits of life. I lived by the sea so long, watching the sea every day; the sea stretches boundless with no end — life, too, should be as wide as the sea, instead of always feeling that this life is really pointless, boring to death, which only makes you unhappy — and why, and to what end? The Analects has: “The Master said, 'Hard is it to deal with him, who will stuff himself with food the whole day, without applying his mind to anything good! Are there not gamesters and chess players? To be one of these would still be better than doing nothing at all.'”
Of course, all this boredom is premised on having food and clothing, or on not having much money but not worrying about a living; only then does my advice hold. If a person hasn’t eaten his fill and is still struggling at the poverty line, he won’t be bored — he’ll only feel pain. But our country declared the elimination of poverty long ago; there can’t be any poor people. People poor in spirit certainly exist, though — like those bored people. The philosopher Russell said long ago that a person with wide interests won’t be bored. So widen your interests, broaden your horizons; don’t always fix on your own inner world — open your eyes to the world outside. If you really don’t like people (like me), you can look more at plants and animals, and study politics, history, economics, geography; if you’re good at math you can do higher algebra, and listen to Zhang Chaoyang’s physics lectures. To do that, too, is better than doing nothing.
14 How Not to Be Anxious
People often ask me online how much you need saved to lie flat. This question is much discussed — it’s a traffic topic; talk about it casually and you get tens of thousands of views and can earn a fair amount. I could go on about it endlessly, and it would be no problem — see, isn’t that a way to make money? But I don’t like to talk about it much; talk too much and it’s meaningless, just pandering to traffic. Every question varies from person to person. Some dare to lie flat with only RMB 10,000 saved; some wait until they’ve saved a million (like me); some wouldn’t dare even with several hundred million. No question has an absolute answer. But on this one, at least one thing is right: the more the better. The more savings you have, the bolder you are, the easier you feel, the more you dare to stop working.
Savings can make you feel at ease, unanxious, free to do what you like without having to do what you dislike. This is also the first point: the material base determines the superstructure. Someone may say, why do you always talk about money, so vulgar. People who don’t talk about money are generally people who aren’t short of it — and most people aren’t rich. Making money is for improving your life; what’s wrong with that? Only the way differs: some earn by brawn, some by brain, some by sharp practice, some by solid work, some by skating close to the line, some honestly — so long as it’s not illegal, there’s no high or low in earning. Often when you look down on people who talk about money, it’s simply that you look down on how they earn it, and disdain to earn it the way they do. However that may be, you must save more, as much as you can — that’s the first condition for removing anxiety: you no longer worry about money, you won’t starve.
If you’re working and don’t worry about money, and only the work worries you, it’s simply that you don’t like your job, your job makes you anxious, but you don’t dare quit. In the end you haven’t saved much, so you lack the courage to give up your present job and go and do what you like. If you’ve saved enough (how much differs from person to person), then you dare to quit, dare to tell your boss to his face, “I’m done,” and walk off on the spot. Then whether you don’t work, lie flat, retire early, or change to a job you want — with a new job and a new environment you’ll be happy; maybe not for long, and you’ll find it tiresome again — no matter: change again, until you find the thing you want to keep doing.
If you’re anxious only about feelings — you can’t find a girlfriend or boyfriend, or the man or woman you’re with makes you unhappy; or your parents and relatives nag you every day and wear you down; or someone else looks down on you, despises you, and you’re hurt and angry; or you have no friend and feel lonely, lost at not finding one — sorry, I’ve no advice, because I’m not a love expert, not a family mediator, and not a dating platform. But I’ll say this much: if you’re economically independent and spiritually independent, you can live on this lonely planet without depending on anyone. To my mind, being alone is the happiest thing. Of course, people differ; some need socializing, need to exchange feelings — and then I can only say: I wish you happiness when you’re with others; and if you’re unhappy, then leave bravely, don’t hesitate.
Anxiety really is a very bad emotion; I hope no one will be anxious anymore. Often anxiety is unavoidable — like illness and accidents. Anxiety is a mental state, and mental states are produced by the body, and the body is made of flesh, not stone. People will always have bad moods; when you have them, learn to adjust, find an outlet, don’t keep them bottled up. A good shout helps; telling someone helps; if you can’t find anyone to tell, tell a stranger — it’s better out than in. And everyone’s situation differs, so the methods of adjustment can’t be lumped together: find the root of the illness and treat it accordingly.
15 Why Don’t You Buy a House?
I lived at Rushan Silver Beach for two years, and both years I rented. The first year’s rent was RMB 4,000, the second year’s RMB 4,500 (after the masks were lifted the flow of people rose, and I couldn’t be bothered to move, feeling the rent was acceptable too). The second year the flow of people fell, the economy went into decline, and the rent began to come down again; the landlord said that if I wanted to renew, he could let me have it for RMB 3,500. But I’d spent a full two years at Silver Beach and wanted a change of surroundings, a change of direction, so I didn’t take it. What I’m sure of, though, is that rents at Silver Beach will only get cheaper. For RMB 4,000 you can rent a very good flat, and RMB 3,000 ones are everywhere. As a friend said, rather than spend RMB 80,000 on a flat, you might as well rent for twenty years — much better value. Who knows where I’ll be later on.
If you mean to settle down, or you have money and think a hundred or two hundred thousand is no great sum, then yes, you can buy a flat. House prices at Rushan Silver Beach (secondhand) are also very cheap. A small flat — a combined living-and-bedroom, or one bedroom and a living room — can be had for under RMB 100,000, and a two-bedroom living room can be got for RMB 150,000 to 200,000, and these flats are all kept in fairly good condition, so you needn’t worry about defects. If you want one in excellent condition and especially large, that too costs only RMB 200,000 to 300,000. To a rich man such prices really aren’t expensive. And settling at Rushan Silver Beach has many advantages indeed: good air, a sea to look at, not especially hot in summer, not especially cold in winter, and quiet. Having come to Beijing and lived here a while, I want all the more to go back to the seaside — life in Beijing is really too awful: smog again and again, too many people and too much noise, no sea to look at, and the big city is boring to death.
But why don’t I go back and buy a flat? First, of course, is the financial consideration. I’m not especially rich; though I have a million in savings, that is my entire fortune, and I live by eating into it, with no great source of income; to have me spend ten percent of my whole fortune on a small flat still gives me pause — I think it’s too expensive. House prices at Rushan Silver Beach haven’t yet fallen to a range I can accept; I’m willing to wait another two years, to see how things go, before going back to buy. Who are the people who buy houses at Rushan Silver Beach? Retired or nearly retired old people. They’re not short of money, and they have houses back in their hometowns too, so that even if they don’t live at Silver Beach they can go back home. Not like me — I have no home to go back to; I’m used to drifting and wandering about, and my native place is a place I can’t return to. For me to buy a house at Rushan Silver Beach, I think I’d have to wait till 2026, when prices at Silver Beach will have sunk to the very bottom and there’ll be bargains to be had.
Then again, I like to wander about outside — “to experience life,” as the saying goes — and so long as my body and mind, every indicator allowing, permit it, I’m willing to drift until I’m seventy and then stop, settle in some place, and no longer move around. Up to now, I think Rushan Silver Beach suits me best of all: a sea to look at, big snows to look at, good air, many clear days, quiet, and daily life more or less convenient — a cherished place to pass my old age in reclusion. But for now I still want to look around everywhere; so long as my finances allow, I’m willing to travel all over the country and taste the customs and the natural scenery of each place. To come into this world once is to experience life. So for the time being I don’t consider buying a house, don’t want to settle down; I’d use the money for a house to live on the road, doing the things I love to do.
Rushan Silver Beach has many virtues, and of course its faults too. For young people it’s that there’s too little to do for fun, and by the sea you feel lonely, bored, desolate. For old people, Silver Beach counts as a backwater; transport and medical care, for instance, aren’t very convenient. I wouldn’t dare conceal it and say Silver Beach has no faults at all — but if you like Silver Beach you see more of its virtues; if you don’t, you see more of its faults. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If you don’t like it, don’t come here to buy a house. If you do like it, you should still choose carefully — weigh it up well for price, for the quality of the flat, the compound’s surroundings, and every aspect of Silver Beach as a whole — and then buy in one determined stroke.
16 Is Living for Yourself Selfish?
A person need not live “correctly,” because “correct” is defined by others, not by you — or by successful people. The winner is king and the loser a bandit; history is written by the winning side, and the rules are set by them too. Are you a person who lives by the rules, or do you live by your own heart? To my mind, if you want happiness, if you want freedom, you still have to live by your own heart, rather than in others’ eyes, in others’ rules. My happiness, my freedom — so long as I break no law, all is permitted. As for morality, it too is customary propriety (not law); it doesn’t necessarily keep pace with the times, and much of it is backward, restricting human nature and holding back society’s progress — the old demands once made of women, for instance: the “three obediences and four virtues”; the demand on a filial son, that “to have no heir is the worst unfiliality”; or needing your parents’ consent to court someone. Take the past, when this was an agricultural society; but now urbanization has developed greatly and technology advances at a furious pace — many things are not what they were. In the past country people lived in groups, but in the city everyone lives alone; living in groups and living alone are two entirely different ways of life. In a society of living alone — even an age of living alone (it will gradually become the fashion) — we ought to have our own principles and logic for living.
Is living for yourself selfish? It’s the people who point the finger who are selfish! We ought to build a tolerant society and respect diversity. A person can live for himself, and he can also live for others — so long as he lives for himself and breaks no law, all is well. Of course, the law isn’t necessarily comprehensive either; the law too must keep pace with the times. Why do cities hold such great attraction, why do more and more people live in them? One reason matters a great deal: in the city, however unusual you may be, however much you march to your own drum, living only for yourself, no one will point the finger at you, gossip about you, spit on you, throw you into prison, or stone you to death. City life has its limits too — too little nature, for instance — but compared with the countryside the city really is more tolerant, and no one will meddle in your difference.
Of course, I myself don’t like city life — I only like country life. But living in the countryside as I do, I hope that countryside can tolerate me; if it can’t tolerate my “oddity,” then I don’t want to live there either. At Rushan Silver Beach there are many “odd” young people. Some have cut off relations with their families; some quit their jobs long ago and still haven’t told their families; some can go months without going out; some go their own way and never meet anyone; some may be gay; some are straight but won’t marry or have children. These people are odd, but does that make them selfish? They simply live for themselves; they simply want to live each day happily, don’t want to be swept up in the world’s torrent, don’t want to be borne along by so-called morality, or duty, or the greater good. Just as the “lying flat” of a minority is often blamed — why can’t we tolerate them, understand them? If you think lying flat is no good, you can simply not lie flat yourself. If you want to do away with lying flat, you have to go about it lawfully, not by scolding.
In China, or in the whole world, the most complicated relationship of all is that between parents and children. I’ve already written the piece “How Do Your Parents See You” — you can scroll back. For my part, I now want to live simply, and not make my relationship with my parents over-complicated: treat my parents as ordinary people (they were ordinary people to begin with), not as special people; treat everyone as ordinary people, equally, with no special relationships — once you make them special, it’s hard to keep things straight, and you easily fall into an emotional moral blackmail. Don’t let your parents PUA you, and don’t PUA your parents. Parents and children are both independent individuals. So how do you keep the parent-child relationship straight? Like anyone else: mutual respect. If your parents don’t respect you, you needn’t respect them either — that’s equality, not parents having a privilege or children having a privilege. You respect me, I respect you; everyone equal.
I know it’s easier said than done. Equality, equality — for hundreds of years how many noble souls have run about crying it aloud without achieving it. But I say the same as before: be your own good self, make yourself strong, and others will respect you; or if you’re not strong enough, if you have the courage to be yourself and don’t care whether others respect you — so long as you respect yourself and love yourself, you too will have a beautiful life. Often when others call you selfish, it’s because their interests have been hurt by your “selfishness” — they’re simply jealous of you, they hate you. Ugly people, that’s all. Some people just like to wag their tongues and pass judgment on others; those people deserve the hell of the pulled-out tongue.
17 What on Earth Does a Person Live For?
A person’s whole life seems to be spent in trying to figure out the question of what a person lives for. Of course, as a child he doesn’t know it; only as he slowly grows up does he become aware of the question. And his understanding of the question keeps changing as he grows older — it isn’t fixed and hidebound. When he is young he lives for this; in middle age he lives for that; when he is old he lives for something else again. Often he doesn’t think of the question at all; he just lives. Only in his leisure does he consider it. Thinking of this question, everyone becomes a philosopher. “When man thinks, God laughs.”
As a child, the first time he learned that people die, he began to be afraid — afraid that after death he’d never again eat anything good, never see any good cartoons, never go out to play, only stay in a dark box, unable to move a muscle, miserable to death, and then be sent to the crematorium to be burned, like an ant on a hot pan — which hurt even more. He didn’t know that when people are dead they have no feeling at all. What did he live for then? For not dying, of course — he thought death too terrible. It was in order not to die, in order to live forever, that he lived in earnest. Eat well, sleep well, obey his mother, obey his teacher, obey the people on television. To live is not to die.
When he was at school, he lived in order to take exams. In primary school for the exam to get into middle school, in middle school for the exam to get into high school, in high school for the exam to get into university, at university for the exam to get into graduate school… endless exams, all the exams — that was the purpose of his living. What were the exams for? For what others called a better life. What a better life was, he didn’t know. He just went on taking exams — a small-town swot, an exam machine, in the end a “985 reject” (a graduate of an elite university who has come to nothing). Once he entered society, what did he live for then? For work, for money, for buying a house in the big city, for finding a pretty girlfriend, for marrying, for having children, for earning milk money for the children, for sending the children to university, for when they marry — then retiring, then he can rest. That was his plan.
When he had worked many years, he found this way of living really too pointless: one glance and you see the end of it, you know what your life’s track will look like — and it’s a life appointed by others; he is nothing but a marionette. Such a life has no surprises, no reversals. He is not resigned to living so; he begins to awaken, like Neo in The Matrix. He feels a person shouldn’t only work, only toil for his daily bread, only bow the waist for five pecks of rice — there should be higher pursuits, namely not working. And then what do you do when you don’t work? The things you love to do. Whether roaming the hills and waters, or creating art, or changing the world — so long as you’re not muddle-headed, so long as you’re not living for others, not for your parents, not for your children, living for yourself is enough.
He quit his job, no longer works, and begins to live for himself. He feels life is an experience, that a person lives to experience all kinds of life — some active, some passive: country life, city life, life in the mountains, life by the sea — he wants to experience them all. And in the course of experiencing life, using his own experience, he can support himself too. That’s the state I’m in now. As for the future, no one is a sage; most people can’t predict the future either; so live fully, experience fully — when the enemy comes there’ll be a general to meet him, when the flood comes there’ll be earth to dam it; cut a road through every mountain, build a bridge over every river; when a problem arises there’ll always be some way to solve it.
Perhaps in a few years my thinking will change again — who knows. When I’m old I’ll feel that living has yet another meaning. Perhaps there really is a God; perhaps there really are aliens; perhaps AI really will rule the world; the world keeps changing, people’s thinking keeps changing too, and the meaning of living changes with it. What a person lives for is an eternal question. Everyone lives for different things: you for love, he for hate; you for money, he for power; you for freedom, he for security; you for your parents, he for his children; you for literature and art, he for science and technology; you for the high mountains, he for the wide sea — each going his own way is enough. All right — don’t think too much; thinking too much does no good either; sometimes thinking of nothing at all is the happiness; every once in a while a little thought is enough. Even God needs a rest.
18 When Will You Go Back to Silver Beach?
Lately I’ve been staying in Beijing again for a while, and I find I simply can’t come to like it. When I was young I wanted to come and see the big city, and I stayed in Beijing more than seven years; what big-city life is really like I know very well now — it isn’t the least bit new, I no longer long for it, I only want to leave. Having left for two years and lived hidden away by the sea for two years, this return to Beijing lets me compare the two ways of living in some depth, and I find I still like the leisure of the seaside and not the rush of Beijing; in Beijing I’m good for nothing. By the sea I am free, I am happy, I am a real person. Someone saw that I’d left Silver Beach and asked me when I’d go back; I do want to go back, and later on I may perhaps buy a house and settle down at Silver Beach — but for now I still have some things to do. For instance, I haven’t yet experienced life in Yunnan; Yunnan is another place I want to go, and I have to go and experience it and know what Yunnan life is like before I decide. If Yunnan life appeals to me more, I’ll stay in Yunnan and not go to Silver Beach. If Yunnan life is nothing special either, then I’ll go back to Rushan Silver Beach, wander about no more, and spend the rest of my life there with the sea.
Tao Yuanming’s “The Return” has a final passage written very well, and it suits being the closing words of this piece of mine. “How long yet shall I this mortal shape keep? Why not take life as it comes, and why hustle and bustle like one on an errand bound? Wealth and power are not my ambitions, and unattainable is the abode of the gods! I would go forth alone on a bright morning, or perhaps, planting my cane, begin to pluck the weeds and till the ground. Or I would compose a poem beside a clear stream, or perhaps go up to Donggao and make a long-drawn call on top of the hill. So would I be content to live and die, and without questionings of the heart, gladly accept Heaven’s will.” Ah, homeward bound I go!
November 12, 2024, at Mafang village, Changping, Beijing.