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reporter/yan xingyue

editor/yang baolu

yang hao buys a ticket at the station ticket window

buying tickets, taking taxis, staying in hotels, shopping, finding directions and even communicating... in modern society, these series of things are often done on smartphones by default. as digitalization covers all aspects of life, life has become more convenient and more dependent on "signal" and "battery power" than ever before - it is even difficult to tell which one will make you more anxious and crazy, 1 bar of signal or 5% battery power.

but yang hao, a boy from shanxi who was born in 1992, proposed this idea: without the "organ" of mobile phone, can i still travel around the world?

so he started an experiment - throwing away all digital network equipment and spending 134 days traveling to 68 counties and cities in 24 provinces across the country.

the experiment was successful, and his feelings were even more profound: in real life, it is easy to connect to the internet, but it is very difficult to jump out of the internet.

here is his own statement:

when traveling without a mobile phone, yang hao can only rely on map navigation

three days of "preparatory experiment"

the idea of ​​"throwing away the phone" first came to me during the pandemic. in september 2021, i applied for a doctorate in the uk, but due to the pandemic, i spent most of 2021 to 2023 taking online classes at home, and only contacting teachers and classmates online. what i saw every day was not real people but screens, which resulted in me not making new friends for three years.

another emotion is the irritability of being surrounded by online information. every day, my phone will push notifications about what happened in a certain place, what problems have occurred in the lockdown area, and the negative emotions of netizens... and everything is online and digitized. the memory left by the internet seems to be shorter than the memory i have in the real world. what happened on the first day may not be remembered on the third or fourth day.

this state made me feel uncomfortable. i wanted to turn off the notifications on my phone, but i was afraid of missing out on the latest news. i wanted my life to be more real, so i came up with the idea of ​​"throwing away my phone and traveling around china."

in order to test whether this idea is feasible, i first did a "preliminary experiment". on december 28, 2021, i set off from shanghai, without a mobile phone, only a camera, and drove to tiantai mountain in zhejiang. guoqing temple in tiantai mountain has many well-preserved ancient buildings. i like the atmosphere of the temple, so i have always wanted to go there. before the trip, i told my parents that i would go to the temple for three days without my mobile phone. maybe because i have been studying abroad since i was a child and i will only go for three days, they did not show much concern.

i encountered the first difficulty at the highway checkpoint. at that time, the staff asked me to show my health code. i said that i lost my phone and now i have to go back to find it. anyway, i was allowed to pass. at night, accommodation became the biggest problem. after i drove to tiantai mountain, i looked for more than a dozen hotels along the way, but none of them were willing to accept me. i thought, or i can just live in the car. later, a small homestay took me in. the landlord was a kind old lady. i told her that i was a tourist and lost my phone.

i didn't have a gps installed in my car, so after arriving at tiantai mountain, i stopped driving and took a ride instead. i would stop 20 cars on the roadside and about 3 or 4 would stop. i would then explain to the car owner that i didn't have a cell phone, but i had to go somewhere, and there would always be one car that would take me.

i didn't miss my phone at all during these three days. although it was very troublesome, i felt comfortable because i was interacting with real people every day.

i returned to shanghai safely at 9pm three days later. i had just turned on my phone when a call came in. it was from my mother. she estimated that i would be home tonight, so she kept calling me after dinner. i realized that she was still very worried.

this three-day "preparatory experiment" gave me confidence that i could still survive in the world without my cell phone. so i decided to realize my plan of "traveling around china without a cell phone".

a letter yang hao wrote to his family and teachers on the road

travel without your phone

for the next six months, i was trying to persuade my parents and girlfriend. my girlfriend was okay with it. my parents were most worried that without a cell phone, i would have no way to call for help if something happened, and they wouldn't even know about it.

my father said that now is the electronic age, and you can't go anywhere without a mobile phone. in fact, i didn't completely convince my parents until the end, but they knew that i would not change my decision once i made it. they could only compromise.

for this trip, i prepared in advance a 40-liter backpack, a few pieces of clothing, slippers, toiletries, two small cameras, two maps, two brushes, several stacks of rice paper, a bottle of ink, three books, a notebook, a fountain pen, id and bank cards, and a stack of cash.

on november 27, 2023, i had breakfast with my parents, put my phone and computer in the study, and officially started my journey. my parents took me to the ticket hall of the station. my mother wanted to go through the security check to see me off, but i told her to leave quickly. when i got on the train, i didn't feel worried at all. instead, i felt excited that "this great journey has finally begun."

my plan was to go south from taiyuan, shanxi, and linfen was my first stop. it was already evening when i arrived in linfen. i found a large chain hotel along the street and showed my id card and cash to the front desk, but the front desk staff worked frantically for a long time but still couldn't complete the reservation on the computer, as if they had never encountered such a situation in their careers - someone just walked in with cash to stay in the hotel.

then going further south is yuncheng. i went directly to the window of linfen station to buy train tickets. the ticket window was quite crowded, but almost all the people buying tickets at the window were elderly people or migrant workers dragging snakeskin bags. occasionally there were some young people who had lost their id cards or went to the temporary window to refund their tickets.

before leaving, i promised my parents that i would send them registered letters wherever i went. this is the only way for me to keep in touch with them. letters provide a sense of reality, and they can see the real marks left by my handwriting. letters make the receiving process longer, and my parents will look forward to receiving letters even more.

however, i was not able to send letters to every city. in linfen, i was too embarrassed to ask for directions, and i could not find china post. i sent the first letter after arriving in yuncheng. i sent a total of 20 letters during the entire journey, but they only received a dozen.

i brought a lot of books with me on this trip, so i didn’t miss my phone at first. it was not until the 9th day after departure that i fell ill in sanmenxia city. i had a fever, couldn’t sleep all night, and was sweating. at that time, i couldn’t buy medicine online, and i couldn’t get up to go to the hospital or clinic. for the first time, i missed my phone very much, and i missed buying medicine on meituan.

finally, i called the hotel front desk and explained my situation. the front desk staff bought medicine for me and delivered it to the door. after taking the medicine, i lay down and looked at the phone on the bedside. that phone can not only make internal calls, but also make external calls. i was weak and depressed at the time, and i really wanted to call my mother and girlfriend. but after struggling for a long time, i still didn't call. i thought that since i decided to do this project, i should do it thoroughly, so i started writing letters one by one, to my parents, to my girlfriend, to my friends, to my grandparents, and wrote as soon as i had a little strength. when i was tired, i lay on the bed to rest. three days passed like this.

there were only two maps to guide me. i bought them before i set out. they were the latest maps printed by china map publishing house this year, but they were drawn in 2015. all cities and national highways were accurate, but the embarrassing thing was that some newly built high-speed rail lines or newly cancelled railways, as well as village buses, were not shown on the map. i needed these two maps to take me from taiyuan to fujian, then west to xinjiang, then to the northeast, and finally back to taiyuan from the northeast.

the map misled me a lot. the first time was when i was in meizhou, guangdong, and i was going to ganzhou, jiangxi. the two cities are next to each other, and the map showed that there was a railway, but when i went to the station to ask, the conductor said that there was no train from meizhou to ganzhou, and i had to go back to chaozhou to take the train to ganzhou.

so later i usually continued my journey by asking for directions. i usually said, "sorry, i don't have a cell phone. how do i get from here to ......?" some people would be shocked when i asked for directions. they thought it was very novel. some thought i was deliberately chatting them up. some said it was too strange. it was the first time they heard of people who didn't use cell phones. in this era, there are still people who don't use cell phones. some suspected that i was doing a live broadcast to create a gimmick. some thought i was an investigative reporter or even a foreign spy. but after i explained, many people would still take out their cell phones to help me find directions.

many places no longer accept cash. when i buy things with cash, they sometimes can't make change. in meizhou, i got on a long-distance bus. the fare was 9 yuan. i didn't have change at the time. the smallest denomination was a 20-yuan note. the driver and i stood at the door for a long time. an aunt on the bus probably couldn't stand it anymore and paid 9 yuan for me using alipay.

things that i used to solve through digital networks, i moved offline to rely on strangers during my travels, and i met a lot of kind people. for example, once in ruicheng, i wanted to go to a place called "yongle palace" to see murals. the place was in the suburbs and was not marked on the map. i asked everyone on the bus, and there was a high school student among the passengers. he said, "i'll take you there. i'll ask my dad to come over. don't look for it here by yourself. you may not find it." he really called his dad to drive over and take me there.

strangers have given me a lot of help, and i was able to complete this project largely because of the kindness of strangers. i think people always think that there are many bad people out there, and the internet amplifies or spreads some malice, causing people's anxiety. when you really get in touch with the world, you will find that the vast majority of people are kind.

the old scavenger whom yang hao met on the way

touch the real social

during the whole trip, i was always on the move, so i only received one letter from my father. he wrote it with a fountain pen, covering four pages of a4 paper. the content was nothing more than his and my mother's daily life, but i read every word several times and brought it to the uk. the dozen letters i sent to my parents were also kept by them. i think after this trip, my relationship with my parents has become closer. they trust me more now. i don't need to contact them every day, and they believe that i am safe.

this journey was not as lonely as i imagined. instead, i met many friends. because i didn't bring my mobile phone and there was nothing else to do for entertainment, i had to interact with strangers. this was my adventure on this trip. they were of different identities, including travel friends, scholars, small business vendors, and a special old man.

i met the old man at a scrap collection station near a mosque in mangya city. he was from henan province. in the 1960s and 1970s, he fled to mangya city to escape famine. to the west of mangya was lop nur, and there was no road. so he stopped in mangya and made a living by picking up scraps. he also found a child in the garbage dump, and the child became his child. now the child is in his 20s and follows him to pick up scraps. although he grew up in mangya, he speaks henan dialect.

we got along really well, and we chatted from the afternoon until dark. he asked me to go home with him for dinner and to have a drink in the evening. so i went to his house, which was actually a shed made of waste. at the time, my first feeling was, would it be unhygienic to eat here? i had some physical resistance, but i soon realized my hypocrisy and felt ashamed of it.

during the trip, i wrote my mobile phone number to people with whom i had in-depth communication, from old people who pick up garbage to geographers. after i got home, i opened my phone and found that more than 20 people had added me on wechat. i also met an yi teenager in daliangshan. he often sent me photos of their ethnic life, such as the torch festival in their hometown, or their yi specialties. he would take pictures and send them to me, and i would also send him some photos of life in the uk.

these 134 days seemed much longer than any other 134 days i had traveled before, both in terms of time and space. i often had to take a train during my trip. i went to the ticket window to buy tickets on the spot, but i often couldn't buy the high-speed train tickets closest to the departure time. most of the tickets were slow train tickets, so i often took the slow train. it took more than 5 hours from linfen to yuncheng. i took that train. the time i used to spend on my phone turned into looking out the window, watching the forest turn into grassland, and the grassland turn into a river. it felt like the earth had become bigger. time also became very long. i bought and read books along the way. i finished reading no less than 40 books and traveled to 68 counties and cities in 24 provinces across the country.

there are places on the trip that i have visited before, but the buildings, streets, and urban landscapes are completely different from what i saw then. most of my childhood friends are international students like me. every time they come back, they will sigh, "hey, why is this place like this? why is there an overpass on this road? that old community has become an office building." this kind of material and infrastructure development has improved our quality of life, but the internet digitalization is developing so fast that sometimes i feel a little scared. it has increased the speed at which people obtain information, but it has made people become autistic and numb, falling into the digital vortex.

i remember watching an interview with chen danqing, and there was one sentence that i agreed with very much, which was that in today's streaming media era, a person may very quickly go through his entire life, and he may not even realize it, his life is over in an instant.

semi-networked living conditions

my parents actually thought this plan was ridiculous. they kept opposing me, saying it was impossible, that people couldn't live without their phones in a strange place. i asked them in return, "didn't you guys not have phones in the early days?" they said things are different now, and they wanted me to adapt to modern digital life.

my father is a scholar who studies archaeology in our local cultural relics institute. the thing that impressed me most about my father was that he always read books in bed before going to bed. he would read for several hours before going to bed, until the book "slapped" on his face, and he fell asleep. my mother would take the book away. but later it was not like this. short videos became popular, and my father always watched short videos with the volume turned up before going to bed.

he and i had a dispute over this matter. he said that he only watched short videos related to history and culture, which were his professional fields. i refuted him, saying that if you really want to understand history and culture, reading a book and watching 100 short videos are completely different. he thinks that short videos can extract some of the more essential things and quickly let you learn a lot of information. for example, it takes one minute to show you the silk road, and three minutes to understand the ancient city of loulan. in short, he and i still have different opinions on his love for short videos.

i thought my parents didn’t use their phones very often, but mobile apps have completely invaded our family life. i am my father’s emergency contact on the taxi app, because every time he goes on a business trip, i receive a reminder message on my phone every day. my mother used to be more averse to online shopping, but in recent years she has bought some daily necessities on pinduoduo. at first, she would often send me links to “kan yi dao”, but later she gradually stopped sending them after my protest.

i am a person whose attention is easily distracted. for example, if someone sends me a message while i am writing or thinking, the notification sound will interrupt my emotions. even if i don’t reply at the moment, i will remember in my mind that someone sent me a message and i have to reply quickly. this leads to less and less time for me to have a whole period of time that is completely my own.

one day, my phone showed the screen time report for the previous week. i used the phone screen for an average of 6 hours and 57 minutes a day. this scared me. what did i do during these 7 hours? was i dealing with work messages? or reading meaningful articles? i seemed to only use wechat, weibo, instagram and youtube every day. i didn't know how a quarter of my day was eaten up by this screen.

of course, after i got home from the trip, i quickly adapted to the internet. i started shopping online again, hailing taxis online, and checking my moments and facebook. a few days later, i was on the high-speed train from nanjing to shanghai, and i spent almost the entire hour and a half choosing a hotel. after choosing one, i compared prices on two different apps, and then found a new hotel with more attractive pictures on the new app, and i was caught up in another round of choices.

my feeling is that it is difficult to jump out of the internet, but it is easy to enter it. personally, i don’t think this is necessarily a good thing. i keep in touch with my former middle school and university teachers. i have asked different teachers the same question: you have experienced students of different generations such as the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. what do you think are the significant differences between students of different generations? their answer is that students born after 2000 and 2010 have a narrower curiosity about the world, for example, they ask fewer questions in class. there are many reasons for these phenomena, but i think one of them is related to the digital network that is everywhere at all times.

after returning to the uk, i stopped using my home wifi and mobile internet packages. every day when i came to school, i would go online to deal with messages, including wechat messages from my parents. when i left school and returned home, i would focus on reading, watching movies, and living with my girlfriend. occasionally, my parents would call my girlfriend when they had urgent matters. compared with my previous life, i am more energetic, more focused, more efficient at work, and i love the people around me more. i have begun to get used to this semi-online life, and i think i will continue to do so in the future.

i agree that mobile phones and digital life are inevitable trends. even if i don't want to be trapped by it, i can't avoid it. these days, my new book "shut down" is about to be published. i returned to china to deal with related matters. i found that i can't do without my mobile phone when i get up in the morning. i use my mobile phone to check where i want to go today and navigate. then i go downstairs of the hotel to scan the code to ride a bicycle, scan the code to see the menu in the coffee shop, and pay by scanning the code... this process is very fast and convenient. i don't resist this process. i accept modern life with the internet and mobile phones because it is a rule of modern life, but i think i should stay calm and think within this rule, instead of being swept away by the rule.