Zhengyang Wang in Nautilus:
In eastern Tibet, high in the Himalaya, Tenzin stopped at a cliff edge. He lit another cigarette. In front of us, Mt. Gongga dazzled in spring’s morning light, a dizzying 24,800 feet above sea level. Tenzin is not his real name. His perilous occupation—collecting and selling caterpillar fungus—is fraught with competition and secrecy, and I didn’t want to put him in jeopardy with the local authorities.
Tenzin (a common local name meaning “holder of Dharma”) had reluctantly agreed to show me how to find the treasured fungus. He was in his mid-30s and generally taciturn. But his growing dissatisfaction with my ability to keep up on the trek began to show in his furrowing eyebrows. It was 2016, and I was a first-year doctoral student in search of a thesis. I, too, grew up in this part of the world—my hometown in the Sichuan lowland was only a day’s drive away. But I was naive enough to think that training on an elliptical machine was adequate preparation to hunt caterpillar fungus in person. Whenever I fell too far behind, Tenzin sat down and smoked a cigarette in ostensible boredom.
More here.