From January 15th to January 29th, I travelled through China’s southernmost province: Yunnan. Yunnan borders Laos, Vietnam, and Myanmar (formerly Burma). I travelled all over the province, racking up more than 60 hours of bus time. We started in the provincial capital of Kunming, drove south to the border of China and Myanmar, drove north to the Tibetan autonomous region, and finished the trip with an overnight train back to Kunming.
Yunnan is incredibly diverse in terms of ecology, landscape, climate, and people. Over 17,000 plant species call Yunnan their home. Tropical rainforests and volcanic plains cover the south; at the center are plains and hills met by some of Asia’s great rivers—the Yangzi, Salween, and Mekong. To the north lie the cold mountains of the Tibetan region.
A third of Yunnan’s population consists of ethnic minorities (China recognizes 55 official minority groups). During our trip we did five village stays—with the Yi people, Hani people, Dai people, Tibetans, and Naxi people, respectively. Poverty is widespread among China’s ethnic minorities and the issue of tourism both helps and hinders them. Tourism can be helpful—the most affluent village we visited was of the Dai people; a village that entertains tourists throughout the year.
But tourism can also be harmful: in order to attract tourists ethnic minorities must put on a show, exaggerating their culture by performing songs and dances at times of the year or day in which they would usually never perform them. Sometimes Han Chinese tourists can be disrespectful and not pay attention to them while they are performing.
Women in the village also become more sexualized—in one village we visited, the only performances were of women and they were wearing clothing that showed off their midriffs. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the freedom to wear what you want, but it was freezing outside and they were obviously wearing these more revealing outfits as a way to amplify the entertainment. I’ve heard that some Han Chinese men harbor fantasies for the exoticness of ethnic minority women, and I saw that clothing was meant to take advantage of that stereotype.
Tourism can bring a host of problems—and this is one of the reasons the issue of tourism is an endlessly fascinating topic to study. I suppose this is what happens when two different cultures collide, whether it’s the Han Chinese visiting the ethnic minorities of China, or it’s us foreigners in China.
My Yunnan experience was all about coming to understand a seemingly completely alien culture, living briefly in a world that appears impossible to exist on the same planet as one’s own. It was about finding the commonality, not the differences, a moment of understanding between two different sets of eyes that have witnessed different worlds.
My best moments of the trip were the quiet ones—it was standing on the narrow edge of a rice terrace, looking at the sun reflect in the water of the paddies and trying not to think about falling down 12 feet into the next terrace. It was in the Yi village with my host grandma, huddling around a tin bowl filled with glowing embers, looking through the open roof at the bright stars of the clearest sky in China.
It was these moments that you bring back with you to your world. You try to reconcile that Yunnan and Beijing can exist in the same country, just as you try to reconcile that China and the U.S. can exist on the same Earth.
I went back to my life of routine, but never forgot that somewhere in a distant land, a small group of people is living entirely different lives. I will never forget the humanity in their eyes—the shining stars and bright embers reflected in the smiling eyes of my host grandmother.
