Yu's Mother

““I cannot understand Lisu, so I stopped attending worship.”

Yu’s mother is a Han woman from Dongchuan, Kunming, who married into Liju Village in Shitou Township, Yulong County, Lijiang. When she was young, she attended theological classes in Kunming, where she met her husband. Their shared Christian faith brought them together, and marriage took her from the outskirts of Kunming into a predominantly Lisu village deep in the mountains of northwestern Yunnan.

Becoming part of the village was not straightforward. Church life in Liju has long been conducted in Lisu: worship, hymn singing, and Bible reading all operate within a language system she does not speak. Unable to understand Lisu, she found it difficult to participate fully and eventually stopped attending collective worship.

Faith, however, did not disappear from her life. Instead, it became more private, expressed in practices such as prayer before meals. For her, faith does not have to be performed through church ritual; it can remain a spiritual relationship sustained within everyday family life.

Years after arriving in Liju, she has become central to the household. Her husband works as a driver in Lijiang so that he can support their children’s education, while she remains in the village to care for family members, elders, and the land. The household grows medicinal crops including Polygonatum and “bingqiuzi.” Because labor is limited, they favor crops with long growing cycles and relatively lower day-to-day management requirements. Bingqiuzi may take around three years before harvest, while Polygonatum can take eight or nine years from propagation to harvest. Those long waits also expose the household to major uncertainty in market prices.

Yu’s mother occupies a distinctive position in the village: she is from Dongchuan and Han, but lives in a Lisu community; she has experience outside the village, yet remains in the mountains; she shares a Christian background with the local church, but language has shaped a different form of religious practice.

“With limited labor, I chose medicinal plants with longer growing cycles because they require less intensive management.”

Her story shows how an incoming woman negotiates belonging through migration, marriage, language, labor, and culture—and how multiple identities become entangled in the everyday life of a diverse mountain community.