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 in Dali, Yunnan province — and joins them himself in the quest to “lie flat” in “Dalifornia.” 

The Mountains Are High is a reported memoir of a year living in a quiet mountain village in Dali in 2020, after leaving the honk and buzz of Beijing. Originally home to the Bai people, Dali has become a richly diverse community of internal migrants of all ages and backgrounds, disillusioned with China's high-pressure urban life (and authoritarian politics), instead seeking personal freedoms and alternative ways of being, be it in spirituality, environmentalism, psychedelic raves or just the simple life – hiding away from the state, and from modernity, where "the mountains are high, the emperor far away." 

It is into this community that Ash embeds himself, charting his first year of life in Dali among these fascinating neighbors, from hippies to dissidents, lucid dreamers to Buddhist monks. The book delves into the social trends of tangping (lying flat), how life priorities have shifted for so many Chinese post-Covid, and the many meanings of freedom.

Join Ash in conversation with Barbara Demick, award-winning author of Nothing to Envy and Eat the Buddha,  who called the book a "gorgeously written meditation on seeking freedom in an unfree country."

Copies of The Mountains Are High will be available for purchase at the event.

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, 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.

Barbara Demick is author of Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea and Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood and the recently released Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town, published by Random House in July 2020.  She was bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times in Beijing and Seoul, and previously reported from the Middle East and Balkans for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Demick grew up in New Jersey and graduated from Yale College Her work has won many awards including the Samuel Johnson prize (now the Baillie Gifford prize) for non-fiction in the U.K., the Overseas Press Club’s human rights reporting award, the Polk Award and the Robert F. Kennedy award and Stanford University’s Shorenstein Award for Asia coverage. Her North Korea book was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She was a press fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a Bagehot fellow in business journalism at Columbia University and a visiting professor of journalism at Princeton University.  She lives in New York City.