ABSTRACT
Autumn 2016. After my second and longest stay in the Dulong Valley, it was time to leave. The driver of the mianbaoche headed to Gongshan and that I was sharing with five other people, Jiang He, was a local Drung man whom I had grown to like throughout the previous weeks for his honesty and kindness. A short, hardworking, red-faced fellow, Jiang He always had a smile and a good word for all of the people – mostly construction workers and the occasional shepherd – that we met on the four-hour drive to Gongshan. The sun had yet to rise and the air was crisp as we wound up the western side of the Gaoligong Mountains. We had to stop our car for a few minutes at a little construction site, and most passengers got off for a smoke, shivering in the cold and chatting with the friendly road worker handing out cigarettes to his Sichuanese colleagues. Jiang He did not smoke, but the short stop did not seem to bother him and he joined the rest of the group outside. “This road,” he told me, “was paved only three years ago. Before, it was one pothole after the other, it would take us a day to reach Gongshan, it was very dangerous.” I looked down the steep mountain slope along which the road was built and nodded, grievously. Besides myself, there were two other outsiders making the trip to Gongshan today, two middle-aged men from Taiwan. One of them approached Jiang He with a question: “now that the road is good, why don’t you get into the tourism business? You are smart, you speak good Mandarin, you know people, why don’t you open a hotel? It sure is better than driving a mianbaoche.” Jiang He listened with the attitude of someone who had been thinking through that very question more than once. “I know,” he said. “What I think would be a good business,” he said pointing up-road, towards Gongshan, “is a hotel near the new tunnel. From there you can hike in the Gaoligong Mountains, it’s beautiful. Foreigners like to hike, and now it’s difficult to find someone to go with. I know this place, I could bring people up there (dai ren qu).” For a moment, we all seemed to think that Jiang He had a plan, that he was about to tell us where the hotel will be, how big it should be, how much it would cost him. However, he uttered none of this. Instead, he shrugged and walked off, towards the car. “We can go on now.” A few turns up the road, as we got closer to the tunnel, I returned to the topic. “Why don’t you open such hotel?” I asked. He seemed to think about it for a second, but then replied with the voice of someone who is stating the obvious. Maybe he was just annoyed by the question. “It’s not easy (bu rongyi), you need money, contacts (guanxi), it’s not easy.” “But sure,” I insisted, “the government is investing a lot in Dulong, I am sure they would help.” He nodded, then said: “yes yes that’s correct. But we Drung are not good at business.” Another sentence I had heard a number of times before. It was time for a different conversation.
