Yunnan Stories - Little Yi Girl 小彝族女孩子

Wow. What a trip. We traveled for a total of 21 days, stayed in five villages (all inhabited by ethnic minorities. One Yi village, two Akha villages, and two Dai villages), visited four markets, and attended a local high school for three days. It was an amazing trip made even better by Yunnan’s tropical climate (yeah, I am still sore about coming back to Beijing to find snow on the ground. Clearly global warming hasn’t been living up to expectations). So where do I start? Instead of giving a day by day account of the trip, which would be massive and most likely lacking in depth, I am going to pick some of my favorite experiences from the trip and go into detail about them. First, let me get you acquainted with Yunnan. Here is the introduction I was given by our resident director Mr. Bissel:

"Yunnan is a border region; Vietnam and Laos lie to the south and Myanmar borders Yunnan on the south and west. To the northwest is Tibet - formerly an independent country - and to the east are the provinces of Guizhou and Guangxi, both of which have significant non Han Chinese populations. China has 55 ethnic minority groups who compromise about seven percent of the total population. Seven percent of 1.3-plus billion (the total population of China) is 91 million. About a third of those minority ethnic groups, or 30 million (roughly the population of Canada) live in Yunnan province, and they comprise about half of Yunnan’s population. The geography Yunnan is as diverse as its people, with the Tibetan plateau in the north, rain forests in the south, and elaborately terraced rice paddies in the east"



In China, nearly everyone knows at least three words of English “Hello”, “OK”, and “Bye-bye”. As a foreigner, being greeted in chinglish is just a part of life. Cab drivers will acknowledge a destination with “ok” and with send you off with a “Bye-bye”. Riding down the street on a bike, street vendors well yell “hellloooo” to grab your attention. So when my friend and I heard a little village girl greet us with “hello”, we were not entirely surprised. Usually it is just a friendly attempt at English. This time it led to a bit more. My friend and I (switching to Chinese) asked if she lived in Mushan, the Yi minority village we were spending the night in. She said yes, and then told us to follow her. Not an invitation you get every day; we eagerly started behind her.



She first took us to her grandmother’s house. We walked along a dirt path and ducked into a small, dark room with a patch of sun shining in, illuminating the smoke drifting off the stove. Her grandma was wearing a Yi headdress and was crouching next to a baby blue basin washing greens for dinner. She only spoke the Yi language, so our new friend (who learned mandarin in school) has to translate for us. We said “hi”, but the grandmother was not very talkative so we just talked to the girl. We found out that she was 12 years old and that her mandarin name was Li . She learned mandarin in school and speaks Yi at home, meaning that her speech was free from thick dialects like we ran into in our Fujian trip. She decided to become our tour guide for the afternoon, and beckoned for us to follow as we emerged from the dark house blinded by the low afternoon sun.



We first went to visit one of her friend’s houses, but upon entering the guard dog on the second floor (which looked down on the first floor, they were courtyard style houses) threw a fit. It barked, howled, and pawed the roof until finally we just decided it might be easier to skip the house.



Next, we were taken to a long one story building which we were told was newly constructed. She told us its name in Chinese, but we did not recognize the word. Our first guess was a school. We walked closer and saw iron doors lining the wall of the building every 20 feet. Maybe it was a very intense school….We walked further down and asked if it was a storehouse of some sort, but she said it was not. Then we rounded the corner to the back side of the building. Pipes stuck out of the wall with black soot coating the pipe and the wall surrounding it. We figured that must be where they burn the bad students. Ok, so maybe it wasn’t a school. Luckily there were characters spray painted on the wall of the building that quickly cleared things up. “烟草” – it was a tobacco smokehouse.



Yunnan well known for its tobacco and the crop constitutes a large part of the local economy in Mushan. Immediately after arriving, we all got a kick out of watching old men smoke their gigantic elephant esque pipes. We realized that the plants lining the side of the road was tobacco being dried out in the sun.



Moving away from the smoke houses, we followed the little girl up the side of a terrace. At the top, she pulled out two radishes and a scythe and started to peel them for us. While she peeled we watched as a little girl played on an old blue pickup truck, crawling above the cabin and scaring us half to death when she tried to get down. When she was done peeling the radishes, she gave them to us to eat bugs-bunny style. They tasted good, crunchy with a light flavor. “好吃!” (delicious!) we exclaimed; the little girl was pleased and she skipped off to our next destination.



As we ate, she took us through her family’s fields. She eagerly pointed out the various crops they grew; cabbage, plums, radishes, and probably more we didn’t see. She seemed very proud of all of it. We finished through the fields only to look at our watch and realize we had to be back at the town center for dinner soon. Our friend took us back to the main road and we said goodbyes. We decided to meet again after dinner, with the promise of more exploration to come.

Thats all for this post, I have another one in the works and hopefully it will be up soon. Don't forget to look at the pictures from the trip in my post below.