In China nothing can be done without personal contact. A friend in the provincial capital, Kunming, introduced me to a guide, who then introduced me to his friend, who spent a month going to villages and making contacts before I came. All in all, I was lucky to have found the Wu family. They are exceptionally good-natured people always telling jokes that I couldn't understand because of the dialect. Good nature is a necessity--life for the Wus means exploiting every scrap of opportunity that comes their way.
The Big Picture was hard. The Chinese are packrats and we had three families' worth of stuff, so more and more things kept coming out. They balked at moving the father's closet down from the second floor, but I insisted and they took the thing apart to get it down. In addition, we had to cut down a tree, which gave me a twinge of regret.
Still, the Wus enjoyed the video I made while it was all happening. And I realized things had gone well when Ba Jiu, the father, urged me to settle in the village. He promised to find me a good house and a bride who would "cook, look after me, and give me children." A 17-year-old, no less. I declined, with regret.
