DC - Book Talk: The Mountains Are High with Alec Ash

 LJoin Young China Watcher DC on Tuesday, April 23 for a book talk with Alec Ash to discuss his recent book – “The Mountains Are High” Join us for a discussion of the book and stay after for drinks and socializing. Drinks will be available for purchase—Please consider buying a drink to keep the cost of our events free!

The Mountains Are High, Alec Ash’s second book, is a literary memoir published in 2024. It narrates the first year of living in Dali, a rural valley in China’s southwestern Yunnan province, centred around a great lake and overlooked by the Cang mountain range. Here, Ash met the Chinese who are ‘reverse migrating’ from the cities to the countryside ― and joins them himself after leaving Beijing, in an inspiring journey of self-discovery. In Dali, bohemian hippies and political dissidents are rejecting the worst parts of modernity and living more simply, in tune with the natural world and away from the nexus of authoritarian power. The Mountains Are High is a reflective, candid memoir about how reevaluating what is really important, and taking a leap of faith to reach it, can genuinely transform your life.

More information about the book can be found here.

About our guest

Alec Ash is a writer and editor focused on China, where he lived from 2008–2022. He is a Senior Fellow at Asia Society in New York, where he edits the China Books Review. He is the author of Wish Lanterns (Picador, 2016) about the lives of young Chinese people, a BBC Book of the Week, and The Mountains Are High (Scribe, 2024) about city escapees moving to rural southwest China. Ash was born in England, and studied English literature at Oxford University, before moving to Beijing. He has written for The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic and elsewhere, and 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.

Web: alecash.net

Twitter: @alecash

Tuesday, April 23, 6:00 – 8:30 | Dacha Shaw Loft (1600 7th St. NW)