What is it like to radically change your life? Writer Alec Ash meets the Chinese who are doing just this, “reverse migrating” from the bustling cities to the countryside of southwest China — and joins them himself. The Mountains Are High (Scribe, February 2024) is a reported memoir of a year living in a quiet mountain village in Dali in 2020. Join Alec Ash for a conversation on the social trends of "lying flat," the shifting priorities of life post-Covid, and the many meanings of freedom.
Alec Ash is a writer and editor focused on China, where he lived from 2008–2022. He is the author of Wish Lanterns (Picador, 2016), a BBC Book of the Week about the lives of young Chinese people, and the newly published The Mountains Are High (Scribe, 2024), about city escapees moving to the rural area of Dali, southwest China. Ash was born in England, and studied English literature at Oxford University. He has written for The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic and elsewhere, and in Beijing was a stringer for The Economist and The Sunday Times. He was editor of the China Channel at the Los Angeles Review of Books, contributing author to the book of reportage Chinese Characters, and co-editor of the anthology While We’re Here. Currently he is editor of the China Books Review at Asia Society in New York.
Copies of the book will be available for purchase.
Lunch will be provided
Sponsoring Organization(s)
Paul Tsai China Center