Feng doesn’t run a “guesthouse” in the usual sense. Her home was never built for business. The largest room was once for her newborn daughter.
Later, she added a bigger kitchen—iron pots, a wide stove—so she could cook for family, or the occasional traveler passing through.
When I stayed there, I was often her only guest. The house felt quiet but alive: woodsmoke clinging to the rafters, a kettle pouring water into bowls, her daughter’s small footsteps across the clay floor.
Feng herself owns no land.
As a “married-out daughter,” local custom denied her a share. Still, she and her husband returned, because her father was ill and needed care.
She needed to help her elder sister and also took care of her younger daughter.
Her husband’s work is one of those mountain professions that feel almost impossible today. He leads mules up trails where no car can go, carrying pieces of signal towers to high ridges.
Here, you can sometimes lose signal for an entire month. It’s the weight of his mules that brings connection into the mountains.
At home, Feng holds everything together. She raises her children, tends the fields, and works with her sister to look after their father.
There is no drama in her days, only quiet resilience. The kind that doesn’t shout, but keeps a family—and a village—moving forward.
Her strength is not in grand gestures, but in persistence: cooking over the wide stove, carrying water for her father, teaching her child to walk across the clay floor.
Without her, the rhythm of the village would falter. With her, life keeps flowing—steady as the mountains themselves.