The first time Georgia Freedman set foot in China while a student at Columbia University, the Santa Barbara-raised writer/editor wanted to leave almost immediately.
“I was a shy person, I liked my alone time, and China is not a culture that respects personal space,” said Freedman. But she was encouraged to stay by her parents as well as Marianne Partridge, the editor in chief of this newspaper and a lifelong mentor. “The longer I was there, the more I felt at home,” she said. “By the end of the summer, I had gotten used to all of the little things that make life hard.”
In fact, she’d fallen in love with the city of Kunming and the surrounding Yunnan province, which is the size of France and arguably the most culturally and naturally diverse area in Asia. Located in the southeast, bordering on Burma, Laos, Vietnam, and Tibet, it’s a somewhat more mellow and bucolic version of China than the log-jammed bustle we often see in media, yet simultaneously more dynamic, with a hurricane of ethnicities existing on top of each other.