We met Xiaoyu, a 24-year-old 24-year-old student in Douban's "Retreat" group of more than 50,000 members, who lives on an island in the Zhoushan archipelago with fewer than 100 permanent residents.
How small the island is, you'll have to zoom in and out until the scale shows 1:5000. There are no couriers, takeaways, supermarkets on the island, almost everything about modern life. Boats to the city will be suspended at 3 p.m., and in the event of a typhoon, there will be no departures for several days.
*It was half past five in the afternoon when I dialed in, and Xiaoyu had just gotten off work, and was sitting on the beach watching the sun dip into the horizon little by little. On the saddest day, the little prince watched the sunset 44 times on his planet. And Xiaoyu has been repeating this action every day since he came to the island, and has watched it alone nearly 100 times.
Loneliness and inconvenience are palpable. She was the only young man on the island, and often couldn't speak three sentences a day, only talking to herself. I have also experienced the dilemma of a sudden suspension of sailings and no food to eat.
In recent years, many young people have moved to Hegang and lived in Zhongnan Mountain, and Xiaoyu also came to this "desert island" with the desire to live in seclusion. We asked her to write her own story, wanting to know what kind of life it means when young people choose to live in seclusion and escape from the world.
one
Island bookstore
Just over the halfway point of this month, the weather forecast has issued a yellow warning for gale force forces of 9-10 for the ninth time. Looking in the direction of the city in the distance, there was only a misty white fog, no ships coming, and sailing was suspended. There is not a trace of life in the sky and the earth, and even the dozen or so egrets, which are the most lively on weekdays, are nowhere to be seen. I sat in the bookstore, feeling like I was in a forgotten ruin.
On the eve of the typhoon, fog rose over the sea, and seabirds flew away.
This is my second year of graduating from college. Before July this year, I worked for a new ** company in Zhoushan. Earlier, I worked as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant.
I majored in tourism management, and in my sophomore year, the pandemic broke out and the whole industry came to a halt. After graduating, I thought about going to graduate school first, but I didn't get in, so I gave up on myself to do manual labor. After working for 5 months, I went to the office building again, and I was forced to work overtime every day, and the content of my work was to listen to the boss have small meetings, and I felt very bored when I opened and closed my mouth to "contact high-latitude people and obtain high-energy magnetic fields".
Late one night in June, I had insomnia every day. My heart and eyelids raced together, and any sound was thunder to me. I've changed 2 of the 3m earmuffs, and they are so heavy and pinched that I can't turn over at all after wearing them, but for years I have had to rely on them every night to barely sleep.
During that time, I often set my address to some remote areas such as Xinjiang and Qinghai on my recruitment software, trying to catch my breath in this way. Continuing to scroll through the recruitment software, a local recommended position will pop up in a strange way: bookstore manager, located on a small and unknown island.
Outside the bookstore at five o'clock in the morning, the moon was still hanging high.
This bookstore is a local brand in Zhoushan, which has opened 14 stores, and now has settled on the island at the invitation of **. In the recruitment details, its requirements are the same as those of bookstores in the city, and it is responsible for the operation and product launch, promotion, etc. The salary is four thousand five thousand, which is one-third less than my current job, but at the end it is specially marked as providing room and board allowance.
After chatting with HR, I learned that the former clerk of the bookstore was a local young man on the island, who couldn't stand the desolation and didn't want to live on the island, so he always closed the store early in the afternoon and left the island without permission, which gave the boss a headache. By the time I delivered, they had been recruiting for several months, but no one had applied, HR couldn't recruit anyone, and they applied to their superiors for subsidized food and lodging.
The position that others avoid is perfectly in line with my idea of escapism. However, a girl from other places went to a remote island where dozens of elderly people lived, and she could not receive letters and couriers, there were no supermarkets, and even the mobile phone signal was often unstable, and there was panic.
Before I joined the company, I found a weekend to visit the island, which is about 5 miles away from the city2 nautical miles, the only way to get there is a 15-minute ferry with only 3 daily departures. Two-wheelers and tricycles can also be boarded, and the round-trip ticket price is 8 yuan, and only cash is charged. Sitting on a dilapidated ferry with green paint, there are only a few old people around him. The boat slowly broke through the yellow waters of the city pier and swayed towards the isolated island at the other end.
The ferry was very old, there were few people, and most of the chairs were empty.
Being in such an old container gives me the illusion that I have been temporarily forgotten by the whole world. Or maybe I can forget the world for a while. The island was pretty much the same as I imagined, deserted but quiet. I greeted the many seagulls on the beach, as if I had already thought of myself as a new islander waiting to be determined.
Seagulls flying up on the tidal flats.
That's when I decided to follow my heart and quit and join the company in one go.
Because of the inconvenient transportation and the fact that the bookstore basically has no revenue, there is no commission, and the clerks of other stores are quite reluctant to come to the island to work on their behalf. As a result, my days off were always compressed to one day a week, after all, I had to go out of the island once a week to replenish supplies for the next week.
My life has since been divided between the island and the outside of the island, and the part of the island is almost for the sake of the island. On the day off, I got up at 7 o'clock, took the 8 o'clock ferry out of the island with an empty box, and arrived in Zhoushan city. Most of the time is spent on transportation and purchasing, and the first requirement for food is that it has a long shelf life. Rest for the night, and then take the ferry back to the island the next morning with a heavy load of supplies.
Islanders waiting for the ferry at the pier.
Life on the island is simple and fixed, after all, what else is there to do on a desert island? Arrive at the bookstore at 8 a.m. to open the door, then turn on the coffee machine, clean the store, water the flowers and plants, count the materials at the bar...When I close for work at 5 p.m., I ride my bike to the beach to watch the sunset. The island is not big, and it takes half an hour to ride a bicycle around the island.
II. II. II
Food is the most precious blessing
It's been a long time since an outsider has been on the island. Like a peach blossom paradise, I am the fisherman who accidentally broke in, and I am under scrutiny. At the beginning of July, several elderly people who are quite authoritative on the island will open the door of the bookstore every once in a while, and their daughters are Uncle Zhang, who is a village cadre, Grandpa Xia, who has made a lot of trouble in the street community, Grandma Dong's son, who owns the most luxurious house on the island, and Master Luo, who manages the key to the post station.
They pieced together my information through conversations, and even the workers who went to work on the island in August went to the bookstore to cool off, and they all knew my identity well: "I heard that you came last month, and you graduated last year. 24 years old this year, no object, Quzhou people, right? ”
The seaside of Beiao.
The old islanders here go back several generations, and most of them fled and drifted. They are a batch of seeds that fall into the soil of a desert island to take root. From generation to generation, it has evolved into a group of people living with the surname and blood relationship, occupying the four directions of the small island of Dongao, Beiao, Xiao, and Nanao, forming a small "Jianghu". Even if the population is smaller, there are now only fifty or sixty people in total; Even though each Ao is only more than ten minutes apart, each Ao is still quite xenophobic to the people of the other Ao.
I may be the exception. After all, I am the only young man living on the whole island, and I have become the first choice for solving their problems. Since July, a total of 2 times have been helped to repair TVs for the elderly, 3 times for printing, 1 time for fever incidents, 2 times for phone bills, 6 times for mobile phone problems, and many times for teaching literacy. Thanks to these skills, which are not worth mentioning in the city, I was able to integrate into the island's human society.
In addition to people, there are many small animals on the island, the most of which are kittens and dogs, and once even met a lamb.
There are few materials on the island, and there are only two ready-made food**s: one is the family shop in Dong'ao, which sells some instant noodles and ham sausages. The second is the vending machine in the waiting room that has been removed, containing some cola, mineral water, and expired sandwiches. Nothing else.
Dozens of old islanders are self-sufficient, fishing for crabs and fish in the sea in front of them, and cultivating vegetables under the mountains behind. In order to be able to preserve it for a long time, they are Xi drying fish in trees or by the dock, drying vegetables at the door, so there is still some fireworks on the island. If you want to change the taste or buy daily necessities, you will ride a battery or tricycle and take an early morning ferry out of the island.
The islanders dried the fish on the trees, and "the fish grew on the trees".
The old people Xi take it for granted, but it makes it difficult for me. As an urban youth, I know neither fishing nor growing vegetables. After coming to the island, I started to cook by myself, and the cooking was not very delicious.
Before coming to the island, I rarely felt the amount of food. Restaurants, supermarkets and takeaways at your fingertips make hunger seem less than worth mentioning: moving a finger on your phone, going downstairs, and that's it. But on such an isolated island, food is especially precious. In months, the most common thing I've heard is, "Have you eaten?" "This is by no means a polite inquiry, but a serious inquiry from the islanders. Several close grandparents often worried that I would starve to death without anything to eat. Starvation is no exaggeration.
I really faced the dilemma of having no rice to cook and no vegetables to cook. There are many typhoons on the island, and if it is summer, the news can be broadcast earlier, and the days of suspension and resumption of flights are also clear, and I can eat according to the day without hurry. But when the weather gets colder, the sea breeze will dance unexpectedly, and even the boss of the ship who has been begging for most of his life cannot predict it, and the suspension of sailing is always unprepared.
I almost starved to death because of the suspension of sailing, so I had no choice but to find my grandparents to "turn into a relationship", and I got a pot of rice, a handful of wild onions, and three persimmons.
On a Saturday in early November, the wind began at 8 p.m. and lasted for three days. A week later, at 7:45 a.m., I was about to leave the island when the sailing was cancelled without warning, without even a minute's notice.
In those days, Grandpa Xia came to the bookstore four times to move things: quick-frozen dumplings and wontons, home-pickled spicy cabbage roots, dried pomfret fish, and freshly picked vegetables from several fields. He said proudly, "If there is a war tomorrow, I will not starve to death for a month with the food hidden in my house." "Uncle Fool's house is surrounded by walls, and he has also run to the bookstore several times against the strong wind and asked me: Do you want white radishes and noodles? I don't understand the dialect here, but the grandmothers always greet me on the road, "Do you want vegetables?" "I did.
Grandpa Xia brought frozen dumplings and Chinese cabbage from the bookstore.
Probably on the island, food is the most simple gesture of favor and blessing.
I am not good at cooking, but I gradually began to be serious about one meter and one dish, and every time I have a full stomach, I will subconsciously sigh: How happy! I also have a lot of serious looks at nature, and often look at my grandparents' small vegetable fields with affection: If there is a small piece of land, it is really a good thing.
Three
I am the youngest old man on the island
Of all the archipelago in Zhoushan, this island is perhaps the least visited island. Loneliness is very concrete and unavoidable here: most of the days when there are no civil servants inspecting, the bookstore is hardly crowded. During the National Day, thanks to the publicity, there were some camping travelers, but seventy or eighty people, but it was the day I have seen the most people and said the most.
I work alone in the bookstore.
I'm staying here for the fifth month. During the time stretched by the sea and the wind, I was mostly alone.
Especially in the first month, three or four typhoons with different names arrived one after another, and the old islanders who usually come to the bookstore to sit are also trapped at home, and there is no figure inside and outside the store, and only the wind keeps knocking on the window door. It was the first time in my life that I faced such a lonely moment, I couldn't hear any sound of life, and there was only a difference between light and night.
The reeds and empty rooms outside the bookstore, before the typhoon, were pressed by darkness.
I was in the most extreme silence for more than 20 years, but loneliness was like boiling water, boiling endlessly. I turned on my phone, switched between short platforms, and aimlessly slid my finger up and down in an attempt to fill the deathly silence with exaggerated noise, which made me even more irritated.
A few days in mid-August, I even ran to the pier outside the bookstore in the wee hours of the morning and cried out loud at the sea. It was a time when I rarely made a sound in a few days, and the thought of it made me feel a little funny, and I laughed.
An island at night.
In the past, in the city, there were bustling shopping mall streets when you went out; Send a message, you can get together with three or two friends, freedom is precious, and silence is scarce. But on the island, loneliness is not a matter of choice.
I'm not the only one alone, either. Dongao's Grandpa Xia or Foolish Uncle, their relatives died, leaving them alone. There are many dilapidated and vacant houses on the island, and it is no longer possible to contact the owner who should have inherited the house.
In the evening, my grandfather rode home on a tricycle alone.
I often meet an elderly couple walking together every day in Bei'ao. From midsummer to winter, I always ride my bicycle from east to north after work, and go west to watch the sunset, and they usually start from the north and take a slow walk in the east direction of sunrise. As a result, I met them and had more than a dozen identical conversations
Have you eaten it? ”
Grandma, I've eaten it. ”
Are you out on a tour? But now there's no boat back, I know, you're from Dong'ao? ”
Grandma, I'm from the bookstore in Dong'ao. You can come to the bookstore and play with me. ”
My granddaughter is in Wenzhou, and she came back to see me for the Chinese New Year with a lot of things. She's very good, she's studying in a medical university, do you know a medical university? ”
Yes, grandma, I know. ”
Grandma is old and can't remember people and things. In her opinion, every time I met her, it was the first time. So she asked me again and again about the big things about dinner, and introduced me to her granddaughter who she was most concerned about and proud of.
Grandparents walking together.
Their children have started families outside the island or in other places and rarely return. I don't want to burden my children, so I stay here, wait for myself or my other half to die first, and silently pray that I won't become a burden to anyone.
Fei Xiaotong wrote that people's present is the accumulation of the entire "past" preserved by memory. Time is a thing that needs to be proven by memories here, and the old people chatter with me about their past lives, and I listen patiently, after all, this is the only communication that can be carried out with people other than receiving scattered travelers. It also has to be good weather and they are willing to go out. At these times, I feel like the youngest old man on the island.
Four
A place of seclusion
I had thoughts of seclusion when I was very young. When I was a child, I lived in the mountains with my grandmother, and when I grew up, I was picked up by my mother, and I traveled to many places, and every time I came to a strange new environment, I thought: It would be good if I could go back to the mountains and live peacefully with my grandmother.
Later, my grandmother died. I thought it would be nice if I hid in a strange and remote place that no one knew.
In this way, at the age of 24, I have already counted the life I dreamed of when I was 16.
The people around me were not very supportive of my choice. My mother wanted me to go home and take the public exam, or find any job I wanted, as long as I stayed with her. Some of my friends of the same generation are studying in graduate school, some are admitted to the system or have other "serious" jobs, and some are even married and have families. They described me as "self-exile", and a friend who had already started a family began to ask bitterly when I arrived on the island: What if a train derails for too long and will be eliminated by the main track, and you can't find it yourself? What are you going to do in the future?
After coming to the island, I saw the most magnificent sunset.
Before I quit my job and came to the island, I couldn't sleep every day. The university didn't teach me any job skills, and the shutdown and recovery of the industry couldn't help me; The months when I served the plates made me realize the huge cost of physical and emotional labor, and I finally found a job in an office building, but it was not much better. Is it because I'm too pessimistic, but after graduation, the squad leader who entered the factory and screwed day and night, and the roommate who was forced to go on a blind date by his family, everyone seemed to be pushed by a pair of big hands, dazed and frightened, and didn't know where to go**.
The night I decided to apply, I remembered the classmate who had a sudden panic attack in the last row of the classroom at the end of 2021 and collapsed backwards. I think of my girlfriend who has a bright smile every day, but has a scar on her wrist. Go to the scene in the work group where a man in the city jumped off a building in the community because he couldn't find a job**. And then there's the drunken young man who no one cares about, and it took a week to fish up his floating body in the nearby waters.
Your generation is living so well, why is this happening? "The grandfather who witnessed the fishing seemed to be puzzled.
yes, why are we like this? It seems that there are only two choices left in life, either to move forward according to the established life track of society, or to be reduced to "exile" like me.
Ride a bike to see the sea.
In the early hours of the morning a few months ago, I broke down and cried at the docks, crying and crying, and I hiccuped with fear when I heard the shouts of men behind me. Turning his head, Uncle Fool shouted in the distance, let me go back. In the fall, Uncle Fool and I were already familiar with each other. One day he was singing after me, and when he saw me picking up fallen leaves and shells, he suddenly smiled and said, "I thought you wanted to jump into the sea." ”
His voice coincides with the scene in "Dark Glory", next to the Han River in winter, the protagonist Moon Dong-eun, who was originally preparing to commit suicide, also dragged the landlady grandmother who was walking towards the river step by step, and the grandmother said, "The water is too cold, let's wait until spring to die." ”
Uncle Fool. Later, I still used to go to the pier often. On the days after the typhoon, the sky is rich in color, reflecting on the surface of the sea like an impressionist painting. I lay alone on the rough reef, the clouds scattered wide open, flowing from one end to my eyes, and then drifting away lightly. A crab crawled past my elbow. The black wildcat, perhaps very old, croaked softly, jumped up the steps next to the reef and lay motionless.
It's really strange, it's hard to describe that moment, only to find that the boiling water in my heart doesn't seem to be boiling anymore. The magnificent nature is big, and I am small, and as a living being, I live silently on the island on an equal footing with crabs, egrets, and even reeds everywhere.
There is a kind of aquatic grass outside the island bookstore, which grows well all year round, and is harvested at low tide, and a large area falls down quite like a mountain and a sea. My uncle on the island told me that the aquatic weed is called "Spartina alterniflora", which cannot die in the sun, freeze, drown, or spray, and as long as a seed floats to the tidal flat, it will take root to the bottom of the sea for 20 centimeters within a month, spreading like a blood vessel, and enveloping the entire tidal flat.
Spartina alterniflora outside the bookstore.
The new year is coming, and I have been asked by many people what I will do in the future, distant family members, close friends, and netizens found through Douban posts. Frankly, I never figured it out. The only thing that is certain is that I decided to stay, like a Spartina alterniflora seed that fell on an island.