After Twenty Days of Hard Work, the Balcony Garden Takes Shape

On April 18, sensing trouble, I gave up the shared community garden I had been renting. On April 19, I ordered online all kinds of balcony-gadgets and fertilizer. On April 20, I bought some vegetable seedlings suited to balcony growing and planted them on the balcony. When I gave up the garden out of worry that an outbreak would erupt in Beijing, some people wondered whether I was over-anxious. Barely a week after I gave it up, this outbreak erupted in Beijing. As a calm observer, my judgment of the situation is rarely wrong, and this particular strength has helped me dodge no small amount of trouble.

In the blink of an eye, twenty days have passed; the number of new cases in Beijing has not fallen noticeably, and today it even reached a small peak. But universal nucleic acid testing over this period has also played an important role; without this spell of quarantine and isolation, Beijing by now would have become a second Shanghai.

With seedlings planted, there is no worry about growth; twenty days on, my little balcony garden has taken shape. With no official post to hold, I do not have to toil day and night over epidemic work, nor commute nine-to-five; I only have to look after myself—something many friends inside the system cannot match. Having surveyed the history of plagues across the world, I know full well that all this is humanity's unavoidable fate, and my heart stays calm: neither angry nor afraid.

Confined at home, I cannot go to the Beidaihe shore, to West Lake in Hangzhou, or to Jade Dragon Snow Mountain; I cannot see the beauty of Huangshan or feel the thrills of Mount Hua, nor can I return to my hometown. I can only, now and then, relive past joys in my digital photo album. Under such circumstances, being able to touch soil on my own balcony, breathe the scent of nature, and watch the vegetables grow day by day fills me with considerable comfort.

I live on the first floor; outside the window are a few ginkgo trees. In the evening, the setting sun filters through the ginkgo leaves onto my balcony, and the boxwood statue of Guanyin there looks as if gilded. The solemn Buddha takes on a soul in the golden sunset, accompanying me as I gallop through the boundless world of thought and leaving my heart utterly at peace.

Pots of vegetables line the windowsill outside the balcony, and hanging from the ceiling is a string of wind chimes I brought back from a trip to Lijiang before the epidemic. When the wind blows, the chimes give out clear, crisp notes. The scene is much like a mountain temple near my old home.

May is the plum-rain season; my Hubei hometown must be under continuous rain. I once stayed in that mountain temple during the rainy season, sitting with a few monks and a stray dog under the eaves listening to the rain and gazing at the yellow rapeseed flowers at the foot of the hill, idly passing the time.

The epidemic has made life slow. “Free-falling blossoms are light as a dream; the boundless fine rain is fine as sorrow.” That inexplicable, faint melancholy of Qin Guan's now and then wells up in me. There are many people far away whom I miss; I also want to go home, to my mother's grave, and gently touch her headstone; I want to climb to the top of a high mountain and sing my heart out. But all this is now something longed for yet out of reach.

Freedom is so precious, and we have lost it. Precisely because of this, I do not want to lose what little happiness I can still hold onto. In an age when we must often stay indoors, it matters to tend one's own few-dozen-square-meter independent kingdom into something full of life.

On the days I cannot ride, I bought a home spin bike, and the three of us take turns pedaling to recapture the dripping, exhilarating sweat of outdoor cycling.

My snug dwelling now serves as garden, shrine, garden, and gym all at once—more than enough for self-amusement. Living in the age of plagues, this is probably all there is to it.