That 7-Hour Drive Up the Mountain Outside Lijiang Changed How I Think About Helping
I went to Yunnan last spring just to get away from my dead-end marketing job in Shanghai. I’d been burnt out for months, all I wanted was to hike Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, eat spicy street tofu, and not check my work Slack for two whole weeks. I never planned to end up wading through mud up a mountain to see an abused 10-year-old. I just met A-Mei at a hostel bar in Dali, she does outreach for a tiny local group that follows up on child abuse reports that big national NGOs don’t have the bandwidth to reach, and she said they needed an extra pair of hands that weekend to carry blankets and formula to a remote village. I had nothing else on my itinerary, so I said yes.
We left at 6 a.m. The beat-up secondhand van their group used smelled like dried tangerine peels the driver kept stuffed under his seat and the unfiltered cigarette he smoked nonstop. My back ached after the first two hours, the roads were so winding I almost threw up the fried youtiao I’d grabbed at a roadside stop. A-Mei told me the basics on the way: Xiao Wei, the kid, his homeroom teacher snuck out of the village to make the report. His stepdad broke his arm back in winter, and everyone in the village knew he beat him regularly for “talking back” or just being in the way, leftover from his first dad who died in a construction accident. His mom was too scared to say anything—she has two younger kids with the stepdad, no other family to take her in, no way to make money on her own.
When we got close to the village, we had to park the van a kilometer out because the last stretch of road washed out in a recent rain. My brand new white sneakers got caked in thick red mud that was so heavy I had to stop every ten minutes to scrape it off on a rock. When we found Xiao Wei, he was hiding behind the village pig pen at the edge of the woods, barefoot even though it was still only 10 degrees Celsius up in the mountains. His long-sleeve shirt had a hole at the elbow, and you could see a bruise that had faded to sickly yellow, like it was only a week or two old. I had a pack of sour plums in my backpack I’d bought that morning, I pulled them out and held them out to him, and he flinched so hard he fell back a step into the mud. I froze. I didn’t know what to do. I’ve never had someone flinch away from me like that, like I was about to hit him. It made my throat tight, and I almost cried right there, which is so stupid—this isn’t about my feelings, I know that. A-Mei just slowly walked over, talked to him soft in the local Nakhi dialect, and eventually he came over and took the plums from me, wouldn’t look me in the eye the whole time.
We had to go see the village chief first, it’s the unwritten rule if you don’t want to get run out of town. He sat us down in his concrete living room, pulled out a big earthen jar of home-brewed rice wine, poured us each a full ceramic cup. Kept saying this is just family discipline, outsiders don’t get how poor we are up here, kids need to be taught to behave. I got so mad I blurted out that breaking a 10-year-old’s arm isn’t discipline, and the chief’s face shut right down immediately. A-Mei kicked my ankle hard under the table, laughed it off for me, and drank three full cups of that harsh, sweet wine straight to smooth things over. After we left, she told me I messed up. “If he decides we’re stirring up trouble, he’ll block us from coming back, and then Xiao Wei has no one,” she said. That’s the first thing I learned that day that no social media fund-raising post ever tells you: being right doesn’t help if you can’t even get in the door.
We couldn’t take Xiao Wei that day, anyway. There’s paperwork, approvals, social worker assessments that have to be done, all that stuff that moves slower than molasses in the mountains. We checked his arm, which had healed a little crooked so he can’t straighten it all the way, took photos for the report, got a written statement from the teacher, left the blankets and milk powder, and promised we’d be back in a week with the official social work team. I was so frustrated on the walk back to the van. I kept saying why can’t we just take him now, why do we have to wait? Then it started pouring rain, the path turned into a slippery slide, and the van got stuck in a mud hole halfway down the mountain. We all had to get out and push, my jeans got soaked all the way up to my hips, I was freezing and my hands were caked in mud, and I just thought: this isn’t how rescue looks in the movies. It’s messy. It’s half boring waiting, half awkward politicking, and you’re wet and angry and you don’t get to fix everything in one afternoon.
That was almost a year ago. Last month A-Mei sent me a photo. Xiao Wei’s living in a small group home outside Lijiang now, he goes to school every day. He’s wearing that blue hoodie I bought him at a Uniqlo in Kunming, it’s still too big for him, and he’s grinning, holding a chipped table tennis paddle. But A-Mei also said he still flinches when any adult raises their hand too fast to wipe a crumb off his face or swat a mosquito. His mom still won’t leave the stepdad, because she has no other way to feed the two little ones, so she only gets to talk to Xiao Wei on the phone once a month. The stepdad only got 10 days of detention and a small fine, no more, because most of the villagers wouldn’t testify against him. It’s not a happy ending, not the kind you put on a poster to raise money.
I still think about that flinch, though. I used to think “rescuing” a kid was a one-time big heroic act, ends with a new home and a group hug. Now I know it’s not. It’s a hundred bad drives up muddy mountains, it’s drinking bad wine to keep people happy, it’s waiting, it’s coming back even when you don’t win the whole thing. We got Xiao Wei out, that’s the part that matters, even if it’s not perfect. I don’t know what’s going to happen to him ten years from now. But that day, he got a pack of sour plums, and a too-big blue hoodie, and he got out of that cold pig pen. That’s enough for now, I think.
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