My Last Day in the Countryside
It rained hard in the small hours. The rain was so heavy, and the house so poorly soundproofed, that it woke me. Lying awake, I thought that if it rained like this all day, I might not be able to leave as planned. But by six or seven o'clock the sun came out, and it looked like another bright day. I took out my phone and snapped several photos of the hometown sunrise. When I lived at home, I saw the rural sunrise every day and did not value it. Now that I have lived in Beijing for a long time, I miss it.
I do not know when I will be back next. After breakfast I would head for the county town; tonight I would stay at my sister's place there, and tomorrow set off for Beijing. On the way back I would pass through Wuhan, where I had arranged to meet a few long-standing patients. After seeing them, I would buy a ticket and return to Beijing.
My father had been up early packing local specialties for me to take away—sweet potato starch. This has been the longest stretch I have spent alone with my father in recent years. Previously every trip home was a rush to and fro, and even when I was home, patients kept coming to see me; father could hardly catch a glimpse of me. This time I turned down all the visits and stayed at home with the old man, who is alone most of the time.
On previous trips home, father always begged me to stay a few more days, but I could never spare the time. This time I stayed a week with him, and he was finally content. The old ask for nothing else but moderate company from their children and grandchildren. This week, watching my living habits, the father who raised me to be so frugal began to feel that my life was too austere. Each day he asked what I wanted to eat, and I said homegrown vegetables were enough; whatever he ordinarily ate, I would eat too.
One day father was invited to a banquet and I was home alone: a steamed bun for breakfast, a steamed bun for dinner, a bowl of egg noodles for lunch. Roughly calculated, my living expenses for the week in my hometown came to less than a hundred yuan—about the same as my standard of living in Beijing. Father sighed for a long while, feeling my life was truly too bare, even more frugal than his. When I changed out of dirty clothes, I washed them in under five minutes; when the floor got dirty, I swept it up quickly. Each day I still ensured more than four hours of reading, taking careful notes as I read.
These habits were instilled in me by my parents when I was young. Now father hopes I will be a little lazier, eat and dress a little better, and improve my life. Given my current income, I could live far better than this. But I have grown used to this plain, simple life; I enjoy the freedom and ease that come with few desires, and I no longer wish to follow anyone else in changing it.
Fear and worry are rare in me. Because I am used to low consumption, I feel that survival is easy; I never worry about the future. Economic crises and swings in the property and stock markets do not affect my mood, and I pay little attention to the news. However hard life gets, someone like me will always survive, and survive healthily; I may even live much longer than most people. I can always freely pursue the work I love and live the life I want. Given all this, what is there to be unsatisfied about?
I would not call this a hard life, and I dislike even more calling it an ascetic life. The most fitting term, I think, is low-cost survival: a biological strategy for coping with existence. The greatest benefit of low-cost survival is that it lets us adapt to harsh conditions without limit; no matter how great the difficulties life throws at us, we are not easily broken.
Moreover, once we are used to low-cost survival, we can savor its quiet joys at every moment. We detach from materialism and free up more time to be close to nature and cultivate our inner spiritual home. When a person's inner home is rich, the outside world holds little attraction; he needs little stimulation to be happy on his own. From a biological standpoint, such a person has a survival-competitive advantage and is not easily eliminated by nature.
The waves of life have beaten on me again and again, until at last I have been reduced to the simplest, most original human being. I refuse nothing that comes naturally, and I fear no loss. I have come to see the line between life and death as not so important; I live according to natural law, and I will die according to natural law.
The world is always changing; the only thing that never changes is change itself. Only by accepting change can we adapt to the world.