#dalifornia

大理生活 Life in Dali

Although I did take a couple of trips, most of my time in Dali fell into comfortable ritual and routine. After the first two weeks of sunshine it rained every day, so outdoor adventures were few and far between. The town is a wild blend of locals, foreign travelers, Chinese travelers (the majority), and young Chinese artists and musicians who move here from the coastal cities for what’s called every my young Chinese the “Dalifornia life.” I tried to find my place in all this with routine. Same lessons, same paths, same restaurants, noodle shops, same people, same tea. I think that routine is where traveling somewhere becomes living somewhere, and it’s a process I’ve really come to value. 

I saw all 3 of the people in these drawings day after day, chatted with them, with their families. Part of it is that I like to talk to people. Part of it is that after 3 hours of Chinese lessons my brain was fried and drawing was soothing. Part of it was hating the feeling of being a tall white Westerner who wanted to take a picture of “local culture!”, although I’m way more interested in images of people than things, and would still like to remember. This was my solution, for better or worse. After a few weeks, I asked if I could sketch Lao Yi, Xin Deng and Jiang Yang, and then I made a copy of the drawing and gave it to them. Here are some of their stories:

The Oil Press: Lao Yi (Old Yi) and his wife run a shop with the green machine, which presses rapeseed flowers brought by local women into rapeseed oil to be used in local restaurants. The machines cost about $4,000, they had two of them, and the 1.5 gallon bottles of oil were sold for about $10. At the end of my time in Dali business dried up for Lao Yi, although I could never totally understand his explanation (he had a thick local Yunnan accent)). It wasn’t a lack of supply, and I wondered if prices were dropping, or if there was a new alternative. Why wouldn’t he just bank the oil for when he could sell? Like many other things in Dali, I felt like even as my language skills improved, my grasp of the local economy and local politics was out of reach. The pressed rapeseed was sold to recycle into plastic, so at least there was some bare income. 

The Snack Cart: Xin Ding ran this cart and another like it next to the Three Pagodas, a popular tourist attraction outside of Dali. It was also right next to my language school, so I usually chatted with her and her cute 8 year old son, who was out for the summer. Unfortunately for our relationship, her wallet and my stomach, the snack food sold there -cold noodles and deep fried everything- was always a little much for me, These kind of carts operate in a legal gray area in China, without proper licenses, but Xin Ding seemed totally non-plussed. “The police are some of my best customers,” she told me.