Mountains, Plastic, and the Weight of Stories
“ […] care itself is plural. That what feels like harm to me, may feel like relief to someone else."
I step stiffly off the back of the scooter, shaking the numbness from my legs. Two hours ago, I met my guide, Lee; for ninety of those minutes I had been perched behind him, clinging lightly as we zigzagged through the mountains of Ha Giang. Each bump in the dirt road had set my body on alert, muscles tensed to avoid pressing against his back. We had only just met. I didn’t yet want that kind of closeness.
Stretching, I look out. The view is overwhelming: jagged mountains stretch like a never-ending wall, carved into terraces of rice. Down in the valleys, silver threads of rivers glint in the shifting light. Villages lie scattered like tiny knots in the folds of the earth. The air smells of wet grass and damp soil. My body, exhausted from the bumpy ride, slowly unclenches. It feels as if the land itself is forcing my senses wide open, every sound, every scent sharper than usual. Ha Giang is not just mountains and valleys; it is stories etched into stone, whispered in rice stalks, and carried by travelers who all feel small before this chaos of green and gray.
I glance at Lee. His face is serious. “It is hard to live here,” he says. “The conditions are difficult.”
Lee now works as a guide on the famous Ha Giang Loop, escorting groups of tourists, often without motorbike licenses, through landscapes he knows like the back of his hand. But guiding was not always his life. He used to be a farmer, and as we ride he points constantly to the rice paddies, explaining what stage of growth they are in, whether they’re ready to harvest or still waiting. “The weather has changed in recent years,” he says quietly. “It is unpredictable now. Harvests shift. Everything depends on the sky.”
His words hang heavy. For him, climate change is not a statistic or a graph but the steady erosion of reliability: entire villages held hostage by the caprice of seasons.
We wander together into a Dao village. I carry a notebook; he shoulders a giant sack of candy. This, he explains, is his way of approaching people: first ask about their customs, their rituals, their ties to the land, and then, afterwards, scatter sweets among the children.
At first the plan unsettles me. Handing out sugar as a kind of social entry fee feels crude. My reflex is to imagine alternatives: fruit, nuts, something “healthier.” But walking through the narrow paths, I watch the children rush forward, eyes sparkling, palms outstretched. The moment is not about vitamins or sustainability. It is about joy, a brief release from daily weight. I realize my discomfort isn’t about the candy at all. It is my Western lens; the frame that insists everything must be evaluated in terms of health, responsibility, future consequences. Here, the metric is simpler: sweetness is welcome.
The village is quiet. A few women shuffle past with children in tow or baskets on their backs. Life hums mostly behind wooden doors or in the paddies. My eyes fall repeatedly to the ground. Plastic everywhere: candy wrappers, trash bags, empty bottles scattered casually along paths and walls, as if they belonged to the landscape itself.
I ask Lee. He shrugs. “That is normal here.”
To prove his point, or perhaps to test me, he unwraps a sweet, lets the paper flutter from his fingers, and pops it into his mouth. For a split second, his eyes flick toward mine. He is gauging me. There is defiance, yes, but also a question: will you judge?
He doesn’t need to explain further, but he does. “Mostly it is Westerners who say this is wrong. But for us, plastic is normal. We use it for everything: water in bottles, food in bags, even on the fields. It is cheap, easy. People don’t have money for other things. And many don’t know it is bad for the environment.” His words unsettle me. My reflex is pain, for the rivers, the soil, the mountains I just admired. But for Lee and his neighbors, plastic is not the enemy. It is a solution: affordable, accessible, woven into survival. My grief does not erase their need.
In that flicker of eye contact, something becomes clear. He knows what I think, or what I might think. He also knows the luxury I carry: to see plastic first as problem rather than as lifeline.
In Europe, plastic has become a moral frontier: straws banned, paper bags celebrated, guilt and virtue measured in grams of recycling. But here the calculus is different. For many in Ha Giang, plastic is not an ethical dilemma but a simple tool. When margins are thin, survival trumps sustainability.
Philosopher Val Plumwood once argued that environmental thought often slips into what she called “hegemonic centrism”: assuming one’s own framework of values is universally applicable. I feel that pull in myself; my instinct to translate Lee’s world into my categories of health and harm, problem and solution. But perhaps the deeper task is to recognize that what feels like a crisis to me may appear as pragmatism to him.
There is a line I once underlined in Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: “It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.” For Lee, plastic tells a story of possibility: of meals carried home, crops protected, children delighted. For me, it tells a story of choking rivers and endangered birds. Both stories are true. Both shape worlds.
Lee’s casual shrug about plastic is not ignorance. It is situated knowledge, born from life where survival is not guaranteed. My reaction - part sorrow, part judgment - comes from elsewhere: from cities where clean tap water flows, where trash is whisked away each week, where I can afford to pay extra for a canvas bag. The anthropologist Anna Tsing writes about “friction”: the awkward, unequal encounters through which global connections take shape. I feel that friction now, not only between me and Lee but within myself. My categories rub against his realities, creating both discomfort and insight.
As we continue through the village, I hold my notebook loosely. Every time I begin to write, I hesitate. Whose story am I writing? Lee’s? The children’s? Mine? Words are never enough. I simply let the scene unfold around me.
Later, as we climb back onto the scooter, I think about luxury. In the Netherlands, walking in the forest is a luxury. A hike becomes leisure, a form of health, an antidote to the city. Here in Ha Giang, concrete is a luxury; roads that make travel possible, houses sturdier against the rains. Even the arrival of tourists like me is a luxury, their spending folded into precarious livelihoods. What counts as “natural” or “artificial,” burden or gift, depends on where you stand. For me, a plastic wrapper is a scar on the landscape. For Lee, it is a minor trade-off for a full stomach or a child’s smile. It would be easy to frame this as contradiction, as right versus wrong. But maybe it is something else: a reminder that values, too, are situated. What appears irresponsible from one vantage may appear necessary from another.
We ride on. The mountains blur past, ridges fading into haze. I feel the scooter tilt beneath me, the sharp wind biting my face. My body remembers the tension of avoiding contact, but slowly I allow myself to lean more naturally, to move with the curves rather than against them. Perhaps that is the lesson: to ride not through but with. With the road’s jolts, with Lee’s rhythm, with the contradictions of plastic and poverty, joy and harm.
By evening, we arrive in another village. Children run behind us, laughing, their hands still sticky from candy. Women sit in doorways, peeling vegetables. The air is cool, heavy with the smell of woodsmoke.
I do not have conclusions. Only the reminder that my own reactions – my reflexive sorrow at plastic, my discomfort with candy, my awe at the mountains – are part of the field I study. They are not universal truths, but situated responses.
There are moments in life when experience suddenly crystallizes into a new awareness, when the ordinary turns luminous. For me, Ha Giang’s illumination was this: that care itself is plural. That what feels like harm to me may feel like relief to someone else. That the stories we tell about nature, about responsibility, about luxury, are not interchangeable but deeply rooted in circumstance.
Perhaps the work of my research is not to resolve these differences but to live in their tension. To recognize that contradictions carry knowledge. That a plastic wrapper on a mountain path is both evidence of global harm and of local survival. That joy and grief can mingle in the same piece of foil.
As the night falls and the scooter rests, I close my notebook. I let the day stand as it is, uneasy, instructive, unresolved. Not knowing, but present.