{"id":14799,"date":"2024-10-24T06:30:00","date_gmt":"2024-10-24T06:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/focus.cbbc.org\/?p=14799"},"modified":"2024-10-25T03:53:46","modified_gmt":"2024-10-25T03:53:46","slug":"alec-ash-on-the-young-chinese-leaving-the-cities-for-the-mountains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/focus.cbbc.org\/alec-ash-on-the-young-chinese-leaving-the-cities-for-the-mountains\/","title":{"rendered":"Alec Ash on the young Chinese leaving the cities for the mountains"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Originally from Oxford, Alec Ash is a writer and editor focused on China, where he lived from 2008-2022. His first book, Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China<\/em>, was published in 2017. Feeling burnt out, he decided to move to the more peaceful province of Dali in Yunnan to experience life there. And it was where he found himself living through the Covid-19 pandemic, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ash now lives in New York, where he is the editor of the China Books Review,<\/em> a digital magazine (and podcast) project of the Asia Society and The Wire China. Following the publishing of Alec\u2019s memoir of his Dali life, The Mountains\u00a0are High<\/em> (Scribe, 2024), Paul French talked to him about life in Dali, the rather relaxed pandemic experience there, whether burnt out professionals are really forsaking city life for the mountains, what it takes to \u201cdrop out\u201d in China, and who exactly is \u201clying flat\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Launchpad<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

In 2020, you\u2019re living in Beijing, and you decide to quit big city life and head to Dali. Of all the alternatives to the capital you could have chosen, what attracted you to Dali?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

By the beginning of 2020, Dali felt like what I needed at that time in my life \u2013 rural seclusion, a new part of China to explore, and alternative communities that interested me, having lived in bigger cities all my life. I was burnt out in Beijing, and Chinese cities can be so smoggy and unlivable at times that they can exacerbate all the negative tendencies of city living, where you don\u2019t talk to your neighbours and are caught up in the rat race. Dali looked like the opposite of that, with more close-knit communities of city escapees living in shared courtyards and pursuing their passions, given the lower cost of living for city transplants out there. Think of it like Londoners moving to a village in Tuscany or a New Yorker\u2019s place upstate, only with escaping Chinese middle class instead. There are other places in China where city folk flee too, many of them in the west of the nation such as the outskirts of Chengdu in Sichuan province, but Dali became an especially popular destination for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n