The place where I work provides only two meals a day: lunch and dinner. Breakfast is on us. Lunch is usually boxed meals; dinner tends to be noodles or dumplings. The choices do not change much, and the taste is nothing special. For the first few days after I arrived, it felt acceptable. After a while, though, I began to lose my appetite.
So I started looking for ways to improve things a little. For breakfast, I bought a secondhand Joyoung mini soymilk maker on Xianyu and paired it with cake. For dinner, when I could no longer face the usual noodles or dumplings, I relied on instant noodles I had ordered online.
I do not really call them “cup noodles,” because I do not have the habit of simply soaking them in hot water. I always cook them. Cooked instant noodles can be mixed with other ingredients, and the flavor is better that way. As someone from Henan, I still feel a certain ceremony around eating noodles. From years of experience, I know that if you stir in a raw egg while the noodles are boiling, then add some cilantro, the smell becomes especially good.
The problem was that I had no eggs.
So at noon on January 31, I rode my motorcycle to a supermarket four kilometers away. It was near the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Huaibei Town, Huairou District, Beijing. The name was Huimin Fresh Supermarket.
I chose that particular supermarket because the street-view photos on Amap caught my attention. I wanted to see it with my own eyes. Following the navigation, I arrived and found it genuinely interesting, so I took two photos at the entrance.
There are movable prefab structures in my hometown too, sometimes used temporarily to sell vegetables and fruit. But they are usually out toward the edge of town, and even when placed near an intersection, they keep a distance of at least a hundred meters or so. A supermarket built out of a movable prefab room right beside the road was something I had never seen before.
It seems that in northern China, thick cotton curtains hang at the doors of many shops. When I lifted the army-green padded curtain and went in, I noticed a black cat crouching near the entrance. Its belly was a little swollen; its black fur was messy and dull. When I walked past, it did not panic or run away. It only shifted slowly to one side.
On the left side by the door sat a plump man in his twenties, wearing glasses, talking with a customer. From the look of it, the customer, dressed like a construction worker, wanted to exchange some small bills or coins. On the right side of the entrance were boxes of eggs. I picked out fifteen eggs, had them weighed, paid, and put them into the transparent egg container I had brought with me. Then I walked around the supermarket twice.
The place was not large, but it carried quite a lot. Goods were arranged along both walls and down the middle. Daily necessities, snacks, vegetables, and seasonings took up much of the space. The outdoor unit of an air conditioner hummed away, and the room was fairly warm.
While I was wandering around, a middle-aged woman came in through a side door, reached to a shelf for a bottle of soy sauce, walked past me, and disappeared into a side room. Soon there was a clatter of pots and pans from inside. She must have been preparing lunch. I remember one detail clearly: the aisle was narrow, and when she passed by, I had to turn sideways to let her through.
After leaving the supermarket, I stood by the roadside, lit a cigarette, and watched the black cat more closely. Beside a trash bin was a black cat shelter. On top of it, an A4 sheet of paper had been fixed with transparent tape. It said: “For stray cats. Please do not take away for recycling. Thank you!” Next to the shelter were two or three small bowls. In one, the water had frozen into a solid lump of ice; the other two were empty. The black cat was slowly licking at the water.
Just then, a young man arrived on an electric bike. He had brought a small half-bag of cat food. Seeing him crouch down and place handfuls of food into the bowls, I started talking with him. He turned out to be a student at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, and he often came here to feed the cats.
“There are two stray cats here,” he said. “Besides me, other people also leave cat food for them. They’re all students nearby.”
After pouring out the food, he politely said goodbye and hurried away.
I watched the black cat eat for a while, absorbed and unhurried, then got back on my motorcycle and started toward work. The cold wind roared along the road, and my thoughts scattered with it. If I were asked what feeling Beijing has given me most as an outsider, at least up to now, I would say it is this sense of drifting that seems to appear everywhere.
People are busy trying to get by. We rarely look carefully at our surroundings, and we have even less time to attend to our own hearts or to the meaning beneath our days. All I did that day was buy a few eggs. Yet after the roadside prefab supermarket, the construction worker, the stray cat, and the university student studying in Beijing disappeared from my sight, they left behind a faint disorder in my mind. A person adrift finds even his heart carried by the wind.
The phrase “Beijing drifter” really is vivid. Since coming to Huairou, I have often felt that sense of rootlessness because of the things around me.
I still remember when I first arrived at the shared dormitory in the research base. I chatted with security-guard colleagues I had only just met and said the place seemed pretty good, and that I planned to work there for two or three years. Some of them were young; some were around my age. They all widened their eyes and stared at me.
“What? You plan to stay here for two or three years?!”
Their tone was full of disbelief. I was a little puzzled then, but I already had a vague premonition of the instability to come.
That premonition became clearer as colleagues came and went. Only a few days after I arrived, the first colleague I had contact with quietly left. He was not the silent type, but in the dormitory he almost never spoke. I once wrote a diary entry about him called “Partings and Gatherings Are Only Ordinary Things,” yet even now I still do not know his name.
Then a dark-skinned young man moved into the dormitory. I heard he had previously worked under Manager D from the property company. A few days later, LCY, a man from Northeast China who had lived in Beijing for sixteen years, arrived. A few days after that, a security colleague from the central control room moved in. Then came LWG from Chaoyang, Liaoning, tall and thin, seemingly a little hunched. Just a few days ago, a young man in the dormitory named FHW left.
People enter and leave the dormitory all the time. Every few days someone goes, or someone new moves in. In that kind of environment, no one really becomes familiar with anyone else. Most of the time, everyone lies or sits around scrolling on their phones. On the rare occasions when a few words are exchanged, the looks that come with them are often restrained, sometimes faintly guarded.
The New Year is almost here, and I have heard that several more colleagues are going to leave. I also heard that the current security captain, surnamed Xie, will be transferred, and that the security company will send a new captain. Tonight I chatted with a day-shift colleague, and he told me the new captain had already arrived this afternoon.
Before drifting to Beijing, I worked in a factory for ten years. Every day in the factory, I had to communicate with many supervisors and managers. But after coming to Beijing to work as a security guard, there are times when I do not see the captain for several days in a row. The work environment has become more relaxed and idle, but psychologically, I have not been able to adjust right away.
Before I came, I had prepared myself somewhat for the security industry in Beijing. I knew the saying: the barracks remain, but the soldiers keep changing. Security work has a high turnover rate. Even so, now that I am facing the frequent replacement of people around me, the uneasiness in my heart keeps growing stronger.
The research base where I work is in the outskirts of Huaibei Town, Huairou District. Usually, there are few people around. Whenever the setting sun shines over the empty street and groups of three or five construction workers appear on their way off work, I cannot help feeling a kind of loss inside. A line from Wen Tianxiang comes to mind: “The mountains and rivers lie broken, like catkins blown by wind; one’s own life rises and falls, like duckweed beaten by rain.”
To drift means that one day in the future, you will eventually say goodbye to this city. It also means enduring loneliness and homesickness through a long journey. More than that, it means having the courage to face everything unknown. The road ahead is vast and unclear. I have nothing, except a heart still sensing the dust and noise of ordinary life, drifting in the wind.