People's Street is a street in Dali Old Town. Its real name is People's Road. I do not like that. I call it People's Street.

People's Street lies between Cangshan Mountain and Erhai Lake, a limestone-gray umbilical cord. Entering from the Erhai Gate, you can see distant Cangshan draped over the street's tightly packed tiled roofs like the bound breasts of Victorian women, while the red flags of the jianbing stalls are the lace they have deliberately left exposed. I remembered the boys in seventh grade leaning over the window to discuss a distant, half-seen hillside. We called it Tit Mountain because it had two peaks. We still lived in a communal dormitory then, possessed by desires as mysterious as hills in mist. If someone kicked open the door during our late-night talks, we marched outside for punishment with perfect righteousness. In class the next day, remembering the name Tit Mountain always made me laugh aloud.

Like every "ancient street" in contemporary China, People's Street retains nothing ancient beyond its stone paving and crowded old houses. It is like a Hollywood extra in a gorilla costume who, between takes, pulls an iPhone from the fur of his hand. Bars, restaurants, and guesthouses cover the street. All along it, a clamor mixes tourists' chatter, futile cries from vendors, and pop folk songs sung by sad, frustrated, second-rate musicians. I had visited many places like this. By rights, there was nothing remarkable about it. Yet one day, cycling down from the mountain, the lights filling the street and the irrelevant bustle gave me a strange warmth. All at once, I was delighted and at a loss. Had vulgarity resonated with my true nature, or was something more interesting drawing me forward from the dark? I decided to stay.

I arrived in Dali, Yunnan, more than half a month ago, near the end of the National Day holiday. Adults burdened with children and luggage were packing to return to their daily toil, while old people in travel-agency caps were coming out in force.

The man who drove me to People's Street that night was an elderly Bai man, Old Zhao. His three daughters were married with children, the whole family happy. Along the way, he pointed out his two hotels, his three restaurants, and the SUV he was driving. He was not like other Bai people, he said. He worked harder than any of them. Beginning at eighteen, he and his wife—a rare love match—had driven heavy trucks and processed dried fish. He had been striving for thirty-seven years.

As we passed the former military compound, he recalled a day in 1976.

"Chairman Mao died that day. Everyone cried. Without Chairman Mao, how could we have the life we have now?"

Chairman Mao probably never imagined that, many years after his death, his portrait would be printed on T-shirts and his quotations embroidered on wallets; that a new generation would remember him as flamboyant young people in capitalist societies remembered Che Guevara. His impersonators hurried between the battlefields of Hengdian's war dramas, pasting the mole onto their chins in one makeup room after another. The Little Red Book quietly withdrew from the stage of fashion and melted into an inner code.

It was already late at night when I reached People's Street. Cangshan had turned off its lights and gone to sleep. The singers in the bars were tired of singing. After turning left and right through the alleys, I finally found Xiaomi Courtyard, where I would spend the rest of my time in Dali.

Xiaomi Courtyard was a guesthouse. I worked there as an inn hand.

Xiaomi Courtyard belonged to Xiaomi and Sister He. This was how Xiaomi described her relationship with her husband, Guoba:

"In love for eleven years, one from Peking University and one from Zhejiang University; more than a decade living in Beijing; settled in Dali two years ago. One courtyard, one craft, one suite of guest rooms: a new life in Dali begins."

So sweet it made Andersen look like an amateur.

On WeChat Moments, Xiaomi often posted long reflections and uplifting lines that made happiness seem within reach if only you worked hard. I could not be like her. To me, happiness felt undeserved, a debt that would have to be repaid. I often covered my ears and pretended it did not exist, as though I might mislead the mysterious forces of the universe and keep them from taking away the little I had left.

Xiaomi was a gentle woman without a temper. She habitually satisfied every unreasonable demand from a guest—and then had me carry it out—and was deeply content with her present life. Sister He was different. She had the familiar unease and anxiety of a single young woman. However free she appeared, uncertainty followed like a shadow. Where Xiaomi exclaimed, "That's wonderful!" or "So clever!" Sister He's verdict was always "Pretty good" or "Not bad."

Both Xiaomi and Sister He were kind and continued tolerating my laziness. Still, Sister He remained deeply suspicious of my claim that I had come here to write something. I can only record her self-description exactly: born in 1998, now forty-five years old, and together with her longest-serving boyfriend for thirty years.

Xiaomi Courtyard was small: one courtyard, two guest rooms. Vines hung from the balcony like children's toes seen from underwater along the bank. The study held books from Haruki Murakami to Susan Sontag, along with curios Xiaomi and Guoba had collected on their travels. It was a place from an urban person's dream: the busy street of a frontier town, then a quiet alley just off the busy street.

Xiaomi and Sister He had many ideas for the courtyard, though neither was in a hurry to realize them. They themselves had no clear reason for building such a place. Perhaps it was an attitude toward life, they said. City life was too uniform. It was a life requiring no imagination: nine to five, two hours of commuting every day, and overhead a sky like a domestic-brand diaper that had not been washed for ten days. Seeing a child urinate on the metro, or meeting someone in a bar after a sleepless night, gave you enough to brood over for an entire week. So people came to Dali. Some stayed. More stayed for one National Day holiday.

At the courtyard, I mopped floors, watered flowers, bought groceries, cooked, washed dishes, laundered and hung sheets, and picked up the women's hair that appeared everywhere in the guest rooms. The work was more personal than factory labor. It involved no interaction but offered a tiny return of accomplishment. Do enough of it and you became accustomed to the monotony.

One warm afternoon, coming down from the roof after collecting the sheets, I suddenly felt like a housewife—or rather, felt I possessed their inner senses. Two weeks seemed to have passed in a blink, full yet stripped of detail. I could remember the instant a vase shattered, the sound of oil leaping from a wok. The rest of the time had been rolled up and stuffed inside a small purple bottle. Then—pop—it vanished. Everything was clean. Only the magician's black cloth and his uncanny smile remained.

I thought of my aunt. She could not read, but she was hardworking and capable. When I was little, she collected me after school: at the school gate at four, cooking at five, washing dishes at seven. Every day we rode over a steep rise on the way home, me sitting on the back of her bicycle. In front, my aunt muttered to herself:

"Plod on, plod on."

I giggled behind her and sometimes stretched a foot down to scuff the ground. I copied her:

"Plod on, plod on."

Plod on, plod on. That is how the days go by.

On my final night at the Dongguan factory, I decided I wanted to be an inn hand. The machines in the factory were still roaring. The moon was full. Become an inn hand. Make coffee instead of capacitors. Wash plates instead of machines. Say "host" instead of "boss."

But why Dali? That too was an accident. An older student from my university was living there and called it "the only hipster city in China." He was building, single-handedly, a startup that would change the way data was transmitted, yet his table was covered in Feynman's physics lectures and Deleuze's postmodern philosophy. This made me trust him more. Perhaps he himself was a hipster. Later, he took me swimming among the cyanobacteria in Erhai Lake. I nearly drowned beside the shore while he almost reached the other side. On the strength of his adjective, I decided to come to Dali and work as an inn hand.

What a hipster actually was remained vague in my mind. I merely thought it sounded cool. The word made me think of the Gegenkultur of 1960s Western Europe, writers cutting open their foreheads on television and composing poetry in the blood that flowed out. It made me think of New York bars at the turn of the century, drunken young people in vintage clothes talking about marijuana, rotting politics, and cultural symbols. But perhaps defining and deconstructing the hipster was precisely what these postmodern drifters opposed. Better for it to remain ambiguous and sparsely attended. Better to be the unclean mud among the lotus blossoms: fit only to be fondled profanely, never admired from afar.

The hairdresser was the first hipster I met. By day he made house calls to cut hair. In the afternoon and evening, he played in a band and made music. I met him in the courtyard after arranging for him to cut my hair there. He was a tall, thin young man in a jacket and tight trousers, his hair striped black and yellow. He entered, looked around, and stamped a foot on the floor.

"This is Xiaomi Courtyard?"

At odds with his appearance were his frail voice and gentle fingers. The scissors danced over my head as I watched the hair fall: windblown willow catkins might almost do, though salt scattered through the air would be better.

He had been born in 1982, the hairdresser said. This year—this year he was thirty-three. He came from Dalian, went to Beijing in his early twenties, and arrived in Dali ten years later. He was introverted and delicate, like a girl, but in music he loved crowds and noise. He was self-taught, driven to learn purely by love. Last year his band played post-punk. This year they had moved into dance music.

"Dance music? The kind in clubs?"

He knew at once that I was an outsider, but patiently explained that they made electronic dance music. It was different from club music.

"Why don't you play in bars?"

Even for bars, their music was too noisy, he said. When they rehearsed and composed each day, the landlord came upstairs to complain. In the end they had to pay him off. Bars needed to make a living. They could not chase away customers for the sake of music, and customers wanted pop songs.

He had busked with his band on People's Street once. Before the performance, he put on heavy makeup, powder and lipstick. But the tourists could not appreciate it. They found the band strange and crossed the street to avoid them. He became too poor even to pay the rent, so he returned to his old Beijing trade and cut hair.

The world was declining, he said. Chinese music was becoming more bombastic and less musical. I remembered Mr. Dong in the Xi'an underpass. Music was dead, Mr. Dong had said. Unless a war flattened everything and returned us to the beginning, there was no hope. I nodded, half believing.

The more excited the hairdresser became, the gentler his voice and fingers remained. Creativity had disappeared, he said, replaced by bids for attention. Artists were self-important and trapped in their own ways. Even many of the singers on People's Street had fallen. They sang the songs tourists liked and hoped to take a pretty girl to bed that night.

"The same. The same everywhere," I told him. "Whatever happens, we can blame the age. Rocket boys worth billions. A post-nineties financial leader who ranked first in his history department. People like imaginary stories and decadent music."

But not everyone willingly fell, he said. Everywhere, people persisted in making work of their own. In Beijing, he had a large circle of musical friends who shared the same ideals. They wanted neither fame nor money. Even those who became known stayed remarkably quiet. More of them never became known. They made a living cutting hair or selling paintings, scattered silently through every trade, but each night music brought them together—in a bar, a ruined house, or a basement. Since coming to Dali, he had met far fewer people like that. Everyone was too young. Before their music matured, temptation took their hearts.

"Aren't you tempted?"

"Of course. How could a person not be? But I tell myself I can't go on that way."

He came to Dali because he had already formed an independent self in music and knew he would not lose his direction. Now he was happy. Every day, he did what he loved.

The hairdresser made me think of Montaigne in Stefan Zweig's telling. They built high walls around the mind and asked only to be free and unrestrained within them. Fame was a trivial matter. Whether the world was chaotic or calm, noble or vulgar, it could not intrude. They were wild people dancing beside a bonfire in the dark, sharing their wine only with friends.

When the hairdresser left, he left the place immaculate. He arranged his scissors and cables methodically in his bag, lifted it, and said a soft goodbye. He reminded me of the girl who sat beside me in primary school. She did not like to talk, but the compartment beneath her desk was spotless. I remembered her opening her pencil case: the pencils lay in a row, the eraser pressed against the far edge.

Dolphin Ade Bookshop was the place I visited most often.

It stood midway along People's Street, marked by an inconspicuous blue sign. I went for an hour during my midday break, then returned after work and stayed until closing. Every book was literature. There was an entire Booker Prize section, one shelf of Naipaul, one of Banville, and good writers like Hilary Mantel among the rest. For the first time in my life, I voluntarily began reading faster because time was limited.

Few people bought books there. Most bought The Little Prince dolls and postcards. A fat girl went in and out several times before she finally surrendered fifty yuan for the little fox. She pressed her lips together, tormented as though she carried a sack of love letters, while the little fox looked innocent and untouched by mortal cares.

There was also a couple from Xi'an. The woman was beautiful. She reminded me of Dai Wangshu's lilac-like girl. Neruda was her favorite poet, she said, but his poems were always published alongside other people's. Here, at last, she had found a volume of his alone. Her words came quickly, as though she had to empty the entire inventory of her heart. She and her husband had bought matching cloth outfits, presumably a Yunnan specialty. Her bag was cloth too. It had cost seven hundred yuan, she said. Behind her, the man pretended to read.

He looked up.

"Do you have the book called XX? Page 423. My name is in it. Page 423—my name appears three times."

He held up three fingers.

Most of the time, the shop was quiet, with quiet music playing. A corner of a poster from 2012 had peeled away from the wall, like hair left unwashed overnight and standing upright the next morning. It made you feel time: the hairs lifted by damp and those whitened by age. You knew that one day the poster would yellow, all four corners would curl, and at last it would fall. The paint would crumble to the floor. The house would collapse. The entire street would stand deserted, with only the wind from Cangshan.

For now, a man across the road was hawking sunglasses.

"Ten yuan a pair! Everything in the middle box, ten yuan!"

People's Street was bursting with life.

I met the poet in the bookshop.

To everyone who entered, the poet said, "Hello. Good evening."

The first night, I stood reading for an hour. The book was Naipaul's essay collection Conrad's Darkness and Mine. The book moved me, though it was not entirely excellent. I had not finished when the shop closed, so I hardened my heart and bought it.

"If you want to read, come here and read," the poet told me. "You don't have to buy anything. I've always thought it a pity that so many people buy books and no one reads them."

From then on, every day I carried a small stool over and sat beside him to read. The poet was only a few years older than I was, yet he seemed an elder: Alfredo, the projectionist in Cinema Paradiso, secretly giving me mellow wine in an age of poverty.

Later, the poet told me he was a friend of Ade, the owner, and looked after the shop for him. He spent half of every year in Dali. For the other half, he took his savings and wandered wherever he pleased.

"You write?"

"Yes. Poetry."

The poet wrote only on kraft paper. Even when he bound poems into booklets, he used nothing else. One night, I went out for yogurt and passed the shop. He was sitting outside writing poems, his stall set up.

"So you're still here after the shop closes."

"Yes. Every day has time for five poems."

"You sell them?"

"Share them," he said.

He began writing poetry at twenty-four. Before that, he had been at university. Just entering university took him three attempts. He was admitted after the first exam but decided the school was not good enough and did not go. The second time, he did badly and tore up his application form. He was accepted on the third. He studied Chinese language and literature, which had nothing at all to do with what he wrote now. He had been the worst student, the poet said. All day, he thought only of basketball. He did not begin writing until after graduation.

"Why?"

"Loneliness."

He had taken many wrong turns, he said. At first, he wrote for popular taste. The prose was ornate and showy, and he was proud of it. A Taiwanese girl told him then that no matter how much work he wrote that way, it would pass like a meteor and leave nothing lasting. Only words with a soul could settle and remain. At that moment, he said, something leapt out inside him.

He had long since lost the Taiwanese girl's contact details, but her voice and face remained vivid. Because of her, the poet's life had been different ever since.

In 2010, the poet went to Hangzhou on a thirty-hour slow train with eleven yuan in his pocket. He was so poor he did not dare buy water. Arriving in Hangzhou, he felt inferior. At a café interview, his first question was:

"Are meals included?"

"Yes."

"Accommodation?"

"Yes."

When they asked his desired wage, he said, "Whatever you think."

The terms were poor then: 950 yuan a month. But there he learned a waiter's disposition, he said—to be gentle and humble with people—and it had served him ever since.

Three years ago, he came to Dali. He had planned to stay only three days. On People's Street, he saw people with stalls selling postcards and T-shirts they had painted themselves, as casually as doodles. They said they lived on ten yuan a day, yet the freedom in their eyes made it seem, the poet said, as though they lived the lives of multimillionaires. They were an amusing group. Sometimes, after a good conversation, they gave their work to a customer for nothing. If a fussy customer tried to bargain, they put on airs.

"Fifteen?"

"Thirty."

"Fifteen!"

"Forty."

He had never seen anyone sell that way, raising the price with every shift of the mood. He decided then to join them.

They helped him. He chose their most evocative landscape photographs and wrote his own poems on the back. Then he set up a stall too. When a tourist came, he said:

"Read the poem first. Then give me however much you think it is worth."

Some gave two yuan, some five, some ten. Some gave fifty. One person gave a hundred.

The poet asked, "Why do you think it is worth a hundred?"

"I hope that when I return next year, you'll still be here."

The poet accepted the money.

The customer never came back, but they stayed in touch and became good friends.

Later still, the poet began a fund of his own. He put a little in every day. One person transferred two yuan every day. Another was moved and sent a thousand yuan through WeChat all at once.

"I don't want you to donate," the poet said. "I want you to join."

He did not like the word charity. What he did was simply help some people. As he continued, he suddenly understood what it meant for great love to have no boundaries. Before, the words had always been hazy. Only when you believed in something, he said, did a wider feeling become possible. Like a star in the night sky: you knew many people were looking at it at that very moment.

Was that true? Did belief have to come first for the world to widen? The poet's faith was nonreligious, wholly earthly, passed from one human hand to another. Still, it could not persuade me.

"I don't have the ability to believe," I said.

When had that begun? I remembered playing hopscotch as I walked in childhood, careful never to step on the seams between paving stones, as though such care were a secret prayer no one knew and the bodhisattva would keep everyone around me safe and well. I remembered Descartes's circle, Kant looking up, Hesse's river. They urged me: Jump. Faith needs only one leap.

If only it were so simple. Like someone reigning in a horse at the cliff's edge, I imagined my body shattered below, then turned and walked back into the dust.

"Your story is a warm one," I told the poet.

In our literature of the Enlightenment class, Professor Love said that novels had only two perspectives, both descended from Homer. One was "a traveler sets out"—The Odyssey. The other was "a stranger comes to town"—The Iliad. If Dongguan had been the traveler's perspective, on People's Street I sat still and watched people arrive and leave.

On my first night there, I ate a stuffed flatbread beside the road. The young man who sold it came from Tai'an, Shandong. His whole life, he said, was about going to different places and having fun. He had left home very young. Before Dali, he spent three years in Lhasa selling barbecue. Whenever he earned money, he and his friends spent it. Now he had come to Dali, liked the place, and planned to settle.

That night I asked him to add two eggs. I also said I would come back and buy him a beer.

Three days later, the shop was empty. Two characters on the flatbread cart said: For transfer. After a little longer, the place became a flower-cake shop.

One day, I heard shouting. A curly-haired woman in sunglasses stood outside the shop, cursing at the top of her voice. A white silk shawl draped around her like a tourist.

"I have never been humiliated like this in my life!"

"Two children—and what kind of thieving, sneaking life are you living out here?"

The man she faced did not look at her. He looked toward the street, chin propped in one hand. People around them rustled, wanting to watch and unwilling to speak. At the center, the two held their positions: the man still as a maiden, the woman swift as a fleeing hare. They were two actors with exaggerated expressions, reminding the audience at every moment that this was a play.

Two days later, I passed again. Both man and woman had vanished. A girl watched the shop now. Her hair was tied in a ponytail, her skin dark. She was probably local. The flower-cake sign remained, white characters on red, and the fragrance filled the air, as though every day before had been bright with sun and roses had competed to bloom in love.

They all left, but I could see only as far as the end of People's Street. Sometimes I remembered them in separate frames, and inside the images I alone could move freely. Perhaps one day, when I looked back, they would flash past like a projector gone mad.

It reminded me of the instant I submerged myself beside Erhai Lake. Shoals of green cyanobacteria rushed upward like bubbles, too impatient to wait. I could see nothing clearly. Like hot, thick soup boiling in a witch's flask. Like a bottle of Coke the moment the cap twists free.

Like a crowd.