flâneur

2022 letter | Dan Wang

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Becoming a barbarian; an ideological revelry; lockdown; sweetgrass and banana leafs; crankiness; delightful animals; to the mountains

(This piece is my year in review, this year a bit late; here’s my letter from 2021 ) Mountains offer the best hiding places from the state. There were a lot of state controls to escape from in 2022. Two days before Shanghai locked down in April, I was on the final flight from the city to Yunnan, the province in China’s farthest southwest. Yunnan’s landmass — slightly smaller than that of California’s — features greater geographic variation than most countries. Its north is historic Tibet, while the south feels much like Thailand. People visit the province for its spectacular nature views: rain

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