Xueling

““Life in the mountains is still very hard.”

Xueling is a Yi woman who married into Shitou Township. She came from Chuxiong and gradually moved from being an outsider by marriage to becoming part of the social fabric of this high-mountain village. Today, she runs the guesthouse restaurant and the village shop, one of the few remaining commercial spaces in the community.

“There used to be eight shops. Mine is the only one left, and villagers can still buy on credit here.”

When she first arrived, she remembers eight small shops lining the short street outside her home. Villagers bought everyday goods there, talked, and exchanged news. As younger residents left for work and ways of life changed, those eight shops dwindled to one: hers.

The shop is small, but it still preserves an older form of social trust—credit. When villagers are short of cash, they can take what they need and settle the account later. At a time when commercial transactions are becoming increasingly formalized, this trust-based exchange continues to hold together part of the village’s familiar social world.

Xueling also buys mountain products gathered by villagers and serves them to guests in the restaurant. Many of her customers are trekkers and nature enthusiasts, including visitors from abroad. Through a hot meal, she offers people arriving from far away a glimpse of everyday life in a mountain village.

Becoming part of this place, however, was not easy. Of the women from elsewhere who married into the village around the same time, only two remain; several others eventually left because they could not adapt to mountain life. “Life in the mountains is still very hard,” she says.

Her story is therefore more than the story of a guesthouse owner. It traces a woman’s life through rural–urban mobility, marriage migration, and village change. In a mountain community gradually losing population, what she keeps open is not only a shop, but a space where relationships still endure.