I Would Gladly Remain a Haidian Resident for Life

In my 26th year in Beijing, I finally developed a complete sense of belonging to this city and no longer want to return to my hometown. From now on Beijing is my home, while Huanggang, Hubei, is my native place.

In 1998, carrying a worn denim bag and wearing a cheap, wrinkled, and tattered suit, I took the train to Beijing. My older male cousin, who met me at the station, smiled and said, “Little brother, you look exactly like a refugee fleeing famine.”

Back then Beijing was for me both attractive and oppressive. I knew many of my dreams were to be realized here, but the gap between Beijing and my hometown was simply too vast. Skyscrapers and the bustling traffic were so unfamiliar to me; my sense of direction was poor, and in this super-city I could not tell east from west. I did not know whether I would be able to survive here.

But it was not long before I adapted to life in Beijing; the urban-rural fringes of the city took me in. At that time Beijing still had vast areas of single-story housing, suitable for a country bumpkin like me to settle. I lived with my male cousin in Caoqiao, Fengtai; I also lived with another cousin, a civil servant in Beijing, in his single dormitory; and I even squeezed into one bed in my older brother's classmate's university dormitory.

In the end I chose to rent a small single-story room alone in Shucun, Haidian. The room was only five or six square meters, the west wing of a courtyard. In the courtyard lived the landlord's family, the landlord's brother-in-law's family, and a few other tenants like me. Shucun back then had the nickname “musicians' village,” because a group of musicians lived there. Having dropped out of university, I hoped then to realize my dream of becoming a writer in Beijing. Not far from Shucun was Yuanmingyuan Village; in those urban villages lived a group of painters, who later moved to the more remote 798 Art Village, and then to Songzhuang in Tongzhou. Artists' dreams are pursued by generation after generation, so cheap artists' villages will always exist.

Near Shucun was a large farmers' market, where we usually bought groceries. In the market one often saw youngsters with bizarre hairstyles; no guessing was needed—they were Beijing drifters who had come to pursue art. I remember my rent then was 80 yuan a month; today's Beijing drifters can probably no longer find such cheap housing, but that is just how affordable the housing in Beijing's urban villages was back then.

For 50 yuan I bought a very large potted pine at the farmers' market and placed it by my door—50 yuan was nearly half a month's living expenses for me at the time. Even though I was then living from hand to mouth, I was still impractical enough that, for the green plants I loved, I would rather eat cabbage and boiled noodles all month than go without. I also collected some bricks and wooden planks from the village and built a simple bookshelf from them, on which I placed my books and a few small bonsai. Because of these touches, the tiny room unexpectedly took on a whiff of bookish refinement.

My older brother's classmate was studying at Beijing Jiaotong University (then still called Northern Jiaotong University), and I was then always lingering in the National Library. The university and the library were close, and on evenings when he had no class he often came to the library to find me; we would ride bicycles together to my rented room to eat boiled noodles, and occasionally he would even squeeze into that bed with me for the night. I was then reading books on philosophy and psychiatry, fond of Dostoevsky and Freud; he thought what I read was very profound and often borrowed my books. He said that reading such things and putting on depth before female classmates should be quite helpful in picking up girls.

My older brother had been a star student in school, an idol his classmates admired and a favorite of his teachers. Sharing in his reflected glory, I followed in his footsteps through school, and several of the teachers who had taught him later taught me as well. They remembered my older brother so vividly, and my looks are said to be cast in the same mold as his, that when teachers called on me to answer a question, they often used his name instead.

As early as first grade, I had already taken the stage to accept on my older brother's behalf an award he did not want. My brother had always come in first; when he once came in third, he considered it a gross humiliation. When the teacher handed out the certificate, he actually ran home in tears. At the time I usually came in last, and only when going to accept this kind of cast-aside award on my brother's behalf did I have such a chance to preen on stage.

Another person might not have wanted such an opportunity, yet I could smile and voluntarily go up to the stage to receive the award on my brother's behalf. To put it favorably, this shows my psychological fortitude, which my brother's fragile heart could not match; to put it unfavorably, it shows I have been thick-skinned since childhood—in my son's words, “above average, especially thick.” So I did not mind when teachers called me by the wrong name.

This classmate of my brother's at Northern Jiaotong University (I always called him Brother Tao) knew nothing of this dark history of mine and had no idea I was only a half-baked sort. He probably assumed I was as brilliant as my brother, and so he especially enjoyed discussing all kinds of philosophical questions with me. But in truth neither of us could claim to understand philosophy back then, so when the two of us sat feet-to-feet through the night in long conversation, we were purely talking nonsense. He then used the half-baked bits he picked up from our nonsense to try to pick up girls, with the result that he not only failed but was laughed at.

I was much luckier in this regard: before even finishing high school I had a girlfriend, and my first sweetheart later became the mother of my child and is still the one who holds my purse strings. This shows that when it comes to finding a partner, putting on airs of depth is useless; you have to be thick-skinned and glib. That dull bird Brother Tao could not even tell that I was a fraud, yet he continued to admire me to the soles of his feet, so he deserved his long delay in finding a girlfriend. Had he gone to Peking University to audit a few proper philosophy lectures, he would not have been so wretched.

Of course, my older brother also bore considerable responsibility for misleading his classmate: when I was still in junior high, my brother had already boasted to his classmates that my writing talent was extraordinary, and jokingly said, “All the best writing under heaven belongs to my hometown; the best writing in my hometown belongs to my younger brother; and I edit my younger brother's essays.”

Later, when I earned a little income from writing, I moved to Wuta Temple Village, opposite the National Library, where the single-story rooms were considerably more expensive than in Shucun. Quite a few Ⅰfolk scholars” like me, doing academic research in Beijing, had lived in Wuta Temple Village; at the time the Unirule Institute of Economics, founded by the economist Mao Yushi, was also there. The staff of the institute, probably to guide visitors looking for it, printed the three large characters “Tianze Suo” on A4 paper and pasted them on the wall. For a long time my brother and I could not make out those three characters, always suspecting they were a typo for the restroom.

In Wuta Temple Village I lived in rooms at 500 yuan and at 700 yuan. Later, when I was better off, I moved into an apartment building. I lived for a while in the dormitory of the Beijing Zoo, near Wuta Temple Village, but few of us impoverished folk scholars who haunted the National Library could afford the buildings there. While living in the zoo dormitory, every day the smell of animal dung drifted in through the window—quite an experience.

Later I moved to the faculty dormitory of Peking University, living for a while in Zhongguanyuan near the east gate of PKU, because I then liked to drop by PKU and audit a few courses whether I had reason or not. Listening and listening, I became disenchanted with PKU's teachers, feeling they were not as good at teaching as my high-school teachers. To be factual, PKU's renowned professors were indeed not as patiently instructive as my beloved teachers from high school, so they held no attraction for someone like me, who did not grow up by the book.

After the mother of my child graduated from university, we had a “bare marriage” in Beijing. When we got our marriage certificate, we were living in the rented room in Zhongguanyuan. After collecting the certificate, I moved with her to rent a place near her workplace. Unlike me, who goes with the flow, she worked hard to “water” herself a master's degree at Tsinghua; in this way the gap in our educational credentials was unilaterally widened by her by a full two levels, which left me looking rather bad in front of her.

I love Beijing, but for more than twenty years after coming I kept thinking only of leaving Beijing as soon as possible and returning to my native place. Even after I bought a home and settled in Beijing, this remained so. What I longed for were the farmlands back home; I wanted to return to a farming life, and between tilling and reading, to practice medicine to help people. But twenty-five or six years bit by bit transformed me. In recent years my urge to return home gradually faded, and imperceptibly I came to regard Beijing as my home; when I do go back to my native place, I can no longer adapt to life there.

To be exact, I have come to regard Haidian as my home. Now, let alone leaving Beijing for another city, I have not even the desire to leave Haidian District. My life, work, and study all unfold along the line from the National Library to Fragrant Hills; riding a bicycle from the library to Fragrant Hills takes less than an hour. With my home as the center, I no longer want to go anywhere farther than an hour by bike.

To this day I have never owned my first four-wheeled vehicle; I have always measured the land of Beijing on my two-wheeled bicycle and my own two feet, which is of course far less efficient than a motor vehicle. So over the more than twenty years since coming to Beijing, I have spent most of my time wandering around Haidian, apart from a short spell living in Changping.

When I was thirty I bought a house in Haidian; at the time we were renting in Changping, and on moving day I could not bear to part with my bicycle, so I rode it from Changping to Haidian, humming all the way. After ten years of renting, finally having a home of my own, my mood was of course elated. In those years I was doing international business with great success; had it not been for my mother's stomach disease, contracted from hunger during the great famine, finally developing into stomach cancer, I would probably have achieved complete financial freedom before the age of 35, retired early, and withdrawn to the countryside to enjoy a free life of tilling and reading.

My mother's death from illness completely changed the direction of my life. In the past, although I had always liked medicine, I missed out on medical school in the college entrance exam, and with my father unable to support me in retaking it, I thought I would never walk the medical path again. Little did I know that an unforeseen event would make me utterly renounce the meaning of my previous life. From the birth of my son until now, I have spent most of my time studying medicine on my own: at first to care for my mother, later to help her fellow patients with small problems, and then, once again, back to the ideal path I had dreamed of before the college entrance exam. The parabola of life is truly wondrous: it whirled all the way around and finally returned to the origin.

More than ten years ago I began studying medicine while writing medical popular-science articles; writing on and on, imperceptibly I have kept at it for over a decade. In a flash, my official account and blog both have a ten-year history. Nearly ten million words of articles have been accumulated; if published as books, they would run to dozens of volumes. Daily steady effort and perseverance really do accumulate something. And my life has at last solidified into its present form: the medical dream, the writer's dream, and the rural dream fused together, and Haidian's rich cultural resources and pleasant natural scenery perfectly satisfy all my needs.

In Haidian I am increasingly taking on the air of a Beijing old gentleman. Year-round I wear a pair of cloth shoes; in summer shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, in winter jeans and a cotton-padded jacket; I ride my bicycle into Haidian's dense streams of people, hidden in the vast crowd, perfectly comfortable. The human relations of Beijing are far simpler than those of my hometown; ordinary Beijingers rarely keep up with the Joneses, nor fawn on the powerful, and they do not make a fuss at seeing important people. Beijing girls, known as “Beijing daniers,’ have a casual, unobsequious bearing that is very pleasing.

Lin Yutang said that native Beijingers carry a Daoist air; in his novel Moment in Peking, those unworldly Beijing natives possess a calm composure that people elsewhere lack. Because, living beneath the imperial walls, they have grown used to seeing important people, buying groceries in the same market and using the same public restrooms and coming and going along the same streets—and seeing that these people have grown no extra heads or arms—ordinary Beijingers naturally neither look up to the powerful nor are full of their own self-importance. So, having lived in Beijing long, we grow accustomed to the equality of all beings.

The writer Yu Hua also says he likes staying in Beijing. Back in his hometown he is something of a celebrity, always with people around him; in Beijing, no one makes much of him, and he can easily be an ordinary person—and he likes that feeling. In Beijing, as in my hometown, I am no great figure, so I do not have Yu Hua's concern, but I too love Beijing, and Haidian in particular. In the past I liked Haidian's urban-rural fringe because the rent was affordable; now I love Haidian's mountains and waters, its rich cultural resources, and its way of life.

I think that when I am old, I shall probably be one of the folk artists lingering in Zizhuyuan Park, playing the electronic wind instrument with a group of old companions, singing and dancing, and enjoying my later years. Of course, most of the time I will still use my remaining energy to continue writing popular-science articles and to help familiar patients solve their problems, because this life has already fused into my blood.

After middle age, I like a rich and varied life within stability; I like the small daily stirrings but not too much commotion; I like a simple, frugal life that costs little. In Haidian, as long as one owns one's home, such dreams are not hard to realize. Apart from housing prices, prices in Beijing are cheap, even cheaper than in the small county town of my hometown.

A shared bicycle for commuting costs only ten yuan a month. If one cooks for oneself and eats plainly, the cost of living per person per day can be kept under ten yuan. A cheap set meal at Nanchengxiang fills and satisfies you for under twenty yuan. The greatest benefit of a frugal life is that it lets a person take things calmly; without the pressure of making money, there is more leisure to grow flowers and vegetables and tinker with musical instruments.

Human beings have two innate natures: seeking advantage and avoiding harm, and loving ease and hating toil. I have both. Heavy work pressure gives me a headache too, and I know how to seek advantage and avoid harm. So I am both diligent and good at slacking off: I do less of the high-pressure things and a bit more of the pleasant, low-pressure ones; in this way I balance work and life. When work and life are balanced, a person is less prone to anxiety and depression, does not go bald prematurely, and never feels that life is dull and pointless.