US man finds calling in Yunnan

Matt Hartzell is many things: A historian and geographer, an adventurer who has led tours off the beaten track in Southwest China, and a popular blogger who writes about U.S.-China issues in Mandarin.

The 32-year-old returned to his native Bay Area to embark on a new career at home in April, but for the previous six years he has been enjoying an unconventional life abroad. "China, with her size, diversity and ties to my native San Francisco, beckoned," he said.

Hartzell first visited China after graduating with a bachelor's in history from Harvard University in 2005. After a short stay, he returned to the U.S. for a graduate program in human geography at Pennsylvania State University and got his master's in 2008.

"I came out of college and grad school radicalized in my antipathy toward our normalized economic system, actively avoiding the rat race, a 9 to 5 job, a life revolving around consumption and all that," he wrote in a post on his blog. "China gave me the freedom and flexibility to live the highly unconventional life of an explorer."

When he arrived in China the second time, in 2009, Beijing had just pulled off the Olympic Games and Shanghai was gearing up to host the World Expo. He said he was like a "wide-eyed, fresh-off-the-boat expat, as my country tried to douse the flames of the financial crisis.

"I was in the midst of it all, soaking up everything Chinese - the language, the food, the people, the environment, the vibe."

He explored Shanghai by bicycle, foot and subway whenever he wasn't in Chinese class, and after just three months of formal language study he relocated to Kunming, in southwestern Yunnan province, in search of "a different side of China."

There, he taught himself how to read and write Chinese while working as a teacher of English language and social studies, and later as a tour guide leading small, cultural and experiential tours.

He regarded his life as "enviable," as it was easy to make friends, both among Chinese and foreigners from around the world drawn to Yunnan for similar reasons.

Hartzell said one of the first things he did in Kunming was to go to the long-distance bus station, copy down every city on the schedule, study the characters, and find the cities on the map. As a result, he managed to visit most of the cities and many other places around China on more than 90 separate trips.

He explored nearly every county as well as thousands of Yunnan's back roads by bicycle and local transport over six years. In the rural villages of Ximeng Wa autonomous county, he learned about the Wa ethnic group's life and history by working with the villagers, herding cattle and transplanting rice seedlings.

He also created a digital atlas of Yunnan in 50 thematic maps illustrating the province's topography, frequency of daily buses, ethnic groups, foreign brands' penetration and many other aspects.

"What I did in China actually gave me a stronger claim to the title of 'geographer' than my graduate degree in that subject," he said.

In his last six months in China, Hartzell accidentally became a celebrity on a Chinese Q&A website called Zhihu. His answer to the question "How do foreigners in China ride the bus if they can't read Chinese?" went viral.

"My guidebook had instructions for taking the bus and had the name of the bus stop written in both Chinese and English," he recalled. "I didn't speak or read any Chinese at the time, but I used my guidebook and the Chinese characters in it to try to read the bus stop schedule looking for the ones that matched. It worked, and I found the bus stop."

His blog has accumulated more than 110,000 followers, and his answers in Chinese to more serious questions have been viewed tens of millions of times.

As a cultural "influencer" uniquely positioned between the U.S. and China, Hartzell realized the importance of keeping one's mind open to different perspectives.

"Those Americans who fear China are those who don't really understand China," he said. "Meeting Chinese people and communicating with them would probably change their ideas, because most of the Chinese I know are very intelligent and warmhearted people."

liazhu@chinadaily.com.cn