Preface: I have recently completed a recent two-week stay in China, my 21st since 2006 and first since September 2023. I wanted to share with you all a series of reflections from this trip, the first being from the Nanyao Village, located about 45 minutes outside of Lijiang in Yunnan province.
“回来了,” the village elder’s wife exclaimed as I walked into her courtyard. “You’ve returned.”
I was 15 years old when I first visited the Nanyao Village, during which I stayed there for two weeks with a homestay family as part of a Where There Be Dragons high school summer program. Since then, I have returned to the village in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2023 and now this year in 2025. Each visit brings new opportunities for learning and growth, as I have been able to witness the confluence of rural change with the preservation of the slower pace of life.
My seventh visit to Nanyao began on a brisk morning in August 2025, and in an unusual twist I had brought some others to see the village with me. I spent the night before at Lily Zhang’s guesthouse in Lijiang; Lily’s parents have helped host American students and instructors for nearly 20 years and her father is considered by many of us to be the village elder. After having dinner with Lily at a new western food restaurant that she wanted to try (I had a very delicious plate of spaghetti with beef) we met four French travelers at the guesthouse next door. There were two couples and I did my best to both converse with them in French and translate their questions to the guesthouse’s staff in Chinese. [I had asked if they were related and they said “no, we are just French.”] At the end of the night, I asked the younger couple, Guillaume and Lise, both engineers from Paris, if they wanted to come with me the next morning to see the village. They accepted, and I noted that it would be a rare experience in their two month trip around China and Southeast Asia.
The DiDi [China’s version of Uber] picked us up in Lijiang to drive the 45 minutes to Nanyao. The driver asked us if we were going to ride horses and take pictures, as for over a decade the area around Lashi Lake (where the village is located) has been overflowing with tourists riding horses through the nearby villages. I explained to him that I had stayed in the village previously. Along the way we stopped at a local market to pick up mangos and grapes for the families we were about to visit.
We arrived in the village just after 9 a.m., the car dropping us off at the bottom of the hill. Like many other villages in the area, Nanyao has not been immune to the rapid commercialization to accommodate growing numbers of tourists. There are now as many as five guesthouses in the village, a hot pot restaurant and a coffee shop in a wealthy family’s mansion which has been turned into a cultural center. As much of China this summer has been incredibly hot, tourists have flocked to Yunnan for its comfortable weather. Additionally, the proliferation of apps like Xiaohongshu, commonly known as Rednote in English, has meant that information on must-visit spots is now much more accessible than before. We first went to see two of the village’s guesthouses. The Guiyin Chama Guesthouse owner enthusiastically welcomed us in to tour the property and have tea in his tearoom, eagerly showing each of the guesthouse’s 12 rooms and the terrace which has incredible views of the sprawling landscape. As our time was short [I had a flight out of Lijiang to another city in China that afternoon], we politely declined the offer to spend time in his guesthouse and continued our walk up the hill to the cultural center and coffee shop. The guesthouse owner noted that as a member he could get us a discount to get an American latte.
Nanyao only has a few roads, with a main artery leading up the hill. On the way up, we passed the cultural center, part of which is still under construction and charges 120 RMB (~$17) to enter. We politely declined and continued our walking tour of the village, passing the elementary school. Students continuing their studies beyond the fifth or sixth grade must travel into Lijiang for school; the school also has a series of rooms for students from villages further afield to stay during the week. Since my last visit two years ago, the school has a brand new running track and soccer field.
On our way up to the village elder’s house, it was clear how much construction was ongoing throughout the village. A number of new courtyards were under construction and the town’s square, home to a weekly market, now has permanent tables for sellers. Another family’s house had new stones at the entrance. Outside one of the older homes, a kid doing her summer homework looked intently at us. After all, a group of three westerners isn’t exactly a daily occurrence.
We arrived at the village elder’s house shortly after 10 a.m, passing the apricots that the family was drying to sell at the market. The village elder’s wife, whom we call nainai, or grandma, welcomed us into her home and prepared for us an extensive breakfast spread of fried eggs, fruit and two kinds of baba — local fried dough. The Zhang family is of the Naxi ethnic minority — one of China’s 55 minorities and one of the last matriarchal societies in the world. Compared with the city, the village was incredibly quiet, with the only noise being the stream in the courtyard. The Zhang family sat down in chairs around the table, and for the next 45 minutes two groups from vastly different cultures engaged in a rare exchange of conversation and memories. During the Cultural Revolution, the village elder (whom we call yeye, or grandpa) screened movies for the village and neighboring towns. He once showed me the rolling projector he used, tucked away in a closet. In Nanyao, they would screen the movies in the town square, and then he would bring the projector to other villages on different days of the week. Yeye and Nainai have incredible memories, as they proceeded to ask about my parents (who visited the village with me in 2016 and with whom we connected via FaceTime in 2023), previous instructors with student groups over the last 10 years. Nainai even remembered when I was quite ill during my first stay in 2015 after developing food poisoning, joining that she thought I was so sick I would not make it.
In the middle of our conversation, the grandson sat down with us at the table, having just finished a morning summer class online in the guestroom upstairs (the house has surprisingly good Wi-Fi for being in a remote village). I first met Zhang Zhenlin when he was around nine or ten years old. At the time, he went to Lijiang for middle school. Now, the grandson of Naxi farmers is studying to be a structural engineer at a university in Yuxi, a city not too far away from the provincial capital of Kunming. He noted that he is currently enrolled in summer classes to study for a higher qualification next spring.
Every time I visit Nanyao, this being my seventh visit, it is easy to spend hours at the Zhang family’s courtyard. Their welcoming attitude and endless plates of food make it hard to leave. However, as I had a flight that afternoon, we took a picture of me with the whole family before we left — a ritual I have practiced every visit since 2016. This year, two of the grandchildren joined for the photo, the youngest of which is now in middle school and was held in his grandmother’s arms in the 2017 photo. It is quite common in many of these village families for three generations to live together in one courtyard. I also presented them with some printed photos of us from past visits and Zhenlin with a Brown University tote bag. While Yeye and Nainai are shorter in recent years, most likely due to many days working in the fields, they are still full of energy and tend to their pigs and chickens each day.
We bid farewell to our gracious hosts and walked down the hill to visit the Li family, who welcomed me to stay on the second floor of their home for two weeks in 2015. On the day that I arrived at their house ten years ago, the youngest grandchild, Li Zihan, turned one month old. In Chinese culture, this milestone, known as manyue and similar to a baby shower, is regarded as an important celebration, and the Li family had invited hundreds of their neighbors (essentially half the village) to commemorate the occasion. I previously wrote about this ten years ago in a previous blog post. Now, Li Zihan is 10 years old and has a younger brother, Li Minshuo, who was born in 2020. Li Axia, Li Zihan’s mother and my former homestay sister, said that she attends two hours of supplementary English classes in Lijiang every afternoon this summer. Axia offered us tea as I presented the family with photos and a Brown University apron for Axia, as well as a small Brown bear for Zihan. Minshuo asked why he didn’t get a bear (to be quite frank I don’t believe I had met him before as he was not there during my last visit in 2023) but then brought out a giant teddy bear and tossed it at his sister. “Her brother is very naughty,” Axia remarked.
Our visit was brief as our DiDi car had arrived (yes, it is possible to take a taxi to this village) to take us back to Lijiang. I told the Li family I would be back in the not so distant future and they waved to us as the car drove down the hill. On the way back, as newly reunited Oasis’ song “Wonderwall” played on the cab’s radio, the French couple and I shared our impressions of this unique experience (they have also written about it on their travel blog here). For them, this was a rare opportunity to see authentic village life in one of China’s most ethnically diverse regions. And for me, it was like returning home again.
Often known to travelers as one of China’s frontier areas, bordering Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam, Yunnan’s unique topography has made infrastructure development rather difficult. However, in the last 10 years, high-speed rail construction has accelerated, and a once nine-hour train journey from Kunming to Lijiang can be done in just over three. Pylons dotting the landscape have brought power to villages that until very recently did not have electricity. And with all of this development, it appears that the economic condition of many villagers has improved. Lily Zhang noted that when she was growing up many of her village’s families used to go to Lijiang or other places for part-time jobs in addition to farming. Now, many farm less and less as they are able to sell a surplus of their goods in Lijiang, while also doing some work as DiDi drivers, cleaners or in other fields in the city. Some investors have been trying to get villagers to sell their houses to make more courtyard developments to support an ever-growing tourism sector; many villagers appear to have vehemently declined this offer. I myself have mixed feelings about this ongoing commercialization. Like many areas around China that have benefitted from the central government’s anti-poverty campaign, many of the villagers’ lives have improved over the last decade. An article from February 2025 shares the story of the village’s Party Secretary celebrating the village’s collective income reaching 500,000 yuan (~$70,000). And yet, as Lily noted, many villagers still have no need for additional health insurance beyond the basic coverage villagers have unless they are very ill. However, the rapid development in my mind poses a threat to the traditionally slow pace of life in Nanyao, with a burgeoning tourism sector bringing throngs of tour buses to villages further down the hill.
In the 1990s, when Lily Zhang attended middle and high school in Lijiang, the village had no paved roads. She would walk through the village in boots and then switch to school shoes once she got to the bottom of the hill and on the bus to school. On the weekends, she would bike to nearby towns. China’s rapid development, particularly in this region, has meant that traveling to Lijiang was once an all-day affair and now can be done in under an hour. The Li family, in whose house I first stayed in 2015, sells peaches in Lijiang most days and their daughter attends English classes in the city. On the way to the village, I saw the railroad viaduct that was under construction in 2018 and now carries the high-speed train from Lijiang to Shangri-La, which opened for service in 2023. The once uninterrupted view of the lake from the hills now features a shimmering sliver of grey concrete, the bullet train rushing through the tunnels and bridges 10 times per day. The once three- to four-hour drive (which was shortened when the new highway opened in 2016) can now be completed in just over an hour by train.
Student groups still visit Nanyao. In fact, there were two summer high school groups from Where There Be Dragons a few weeks prior. Chinese classes around the Zhang family courtyard for some have now moved to the guesthouse, as many of the Chinese teachers now stay there with their families. For me, the story of Nanyao is one of growth, transformation and development. In the last ten years, I have witnessed great change in the area as I have grown myself, but many things still remain the same. I can still expect to see Nainai’s smiling face every time I walk into her courtyard. And while Lijiang’s Old Town is a zoo full of tourists, the relative oasis in Nanyao harkens back to an earlier China, one from the latter half of the 20th century. As my plane took off from Lijiang later that day, with the ground crew waving to our plane and a new series of gates that are under construction coming into view, I reflected on this visit and my visits over the years. At the end of the day, the Zhang family, Li family and all the 300-or-so families in the village are just people. They may live very different lives from ours in the United States, but I believe that if more people truly understood those whose experiences differ vastly from their own, we might—just might—be able to build a better future for the generations to come.
