Dali

City in Yunnan, China.

At a glance

Source	Author	Role	In one line
Breakneck	Dan Wang	setting	They live among the Bai people with lakeside white-walled houses.
Breakneck	Dan Wang	turning point	After graduating, Wang’s parents were sent to Dali as middle school teachers in a corps of three dozen youths, became a couple and married there, handing guests milk candy.

Breakneck — Dan Wang (2025)

Source: Readwise highlight

Silvia and I spent several months in the city of Dali, which has a lake on one side and a mountain range on the other.

• Role: setting
• In the book: They live among the Bai people with lakeside white-walled houses. Dali, nicknamed Dalifornia, draws organic farmers, parents seeking nature education, foreigners running bakeries and techno clubs, and a crypto community. Silvia does fieldwork while he works remotely.
• Why it matters: It is the author’s refuge and the place where he sees the ‘rùn’ type of young people who later appear in Chiang Mai.

Breakneck — Dan Wang (2025)

Source: Breakneck · Readwise highlight

The state dispatched the two of them to the Yunnan city of Dali—which also happens to be where Silvia and I fled in 2022 to escape the Covid lockdowns.

• Role: turning point
• In the book: After graduating, Wang’s parents were sent to Dali as middle school teachers in a corps of three dozen youths, became a couple and married there, handing guests milk candy. Decades later Wang fled to the same city to escape Covid lockdowns.
• Why it matters: It links the parents’ youth to the author’s own flight, a quiet echo within the family story, though the text spends little time describing Dali itself.