HUNTER COLLEGE — Deep in the vast mountain range of China’s Loess Plateau, Yehui Zhao found herself aboard a small tractor, hitchhiking toward what she hoped would be the remains of her great-grandfather’s now empty village.
It was 2022, and Zhao, a filmmaker, was navigating with information garnered only from word of mouth; relatives and locals had pointed her in the right direction, but she could not identify the exact location of her ancestral home, a place she was warned not to go – because of the distance – by villagers within the mountains.
