WildChina founder Zhang Mei (MBA 1996) released her first book this year: Travels Through Dali with a Leg of Ham, a travelogue and recipe collection culled from the kitchens of her hometown. She speaks with associate editor April White about her decision to embrace the cuisine and culture of her hometown.

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April White: Have you always been a traveler, Mei?

Zhang Mei: Pretty much. Yeah. Yeah, it started a long time ago when I got the first chance to travel in college. I jumped on the opportunity and just never stopped. And HBS seemed to have sort of released me into the nature. So I went free and traveled more.

April White: What is it about traveling that is so interesting to you?

Zhang Mei: You know, travel for me, it's endless learning. In Chinese, there's a wonderful phrase that says-- [SPEAKING CHINESE]-- which means traveling 10,000 leagues is like reading 10,000 books. I'm always discovering something new, learning about a different group of people, tasting different food, learning about a different kind of plant species or bird species that I've never known. The world just gets bigger and bigger in travel.

But you know, in writing this travel book, though, I tend to discover more similarities across geographies, rather than differences. And that's the funny part. I feel like traveling is a loop. You start off discovering differences, or learning differences. And in the end, you will find a lot of commonalities among people.

April White: So your approach to travel seems very different from the sort of sightseeing that some people do. How do you approach travel? How do you think about discovering a new place?

Zhang Mei: The most important thing to me, to travel, is the cultural part of it. I love nature. I love hiking. I love going to Tibet and just hike for days and days, or go to the Andes and do the same thing, hiking all the way Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, which is just physically thrilling and challenging. And I get addicted to that.

But more long sustained attraction of travel to me is the discovery and learning of the people, because I believe any destination is different. It's because of the human creation of what people living there have done with the natural environment they are given. And so I always want to meet the locals. What do they do on a daily basis? What is their education system different from ours? What is their farming system that's different from ours, or similar to ours? So I always seek out to meet the locals.

April White: So how did your love of travel become WildChina?

Zhang Mei: Aha. I never thought of starting a business or owning a business on my own. I actually really enjoyed working for McKinsey because I didn't have to deal with the jammed printer or copy machine. But this was back in 1999. I was leading a pro-bono project for McKinsey working for the Nature Conservancy, which is a large US nonprofit environmental conservation organization. And they came to Yunnan province in southwest China where I am from.

They were attracted, first of all, by the amazing biodiversity and cultural diversity of Yunnan region. And they wanted to explore helping Chinese government building a national park. The only challenge is there are six million people living there in the region where they want to build a park. And so McKinsey went in, I led the team-- we went in to look at alternative ways to build economic-- sort of alternative economic livelihood for the local population if we were to build a national park, right?

After that, I was so convinced that we have to build a high end, more sensitive, sustainable kind of tourism practice to the region. I was very convinced by the proposal. And I quit my job and started the business. But also, at that time, I did rationally analyze the business economic trends of China. China was on the verge of extraordinary economic growth. And with GDP growth, people will start to travel.

Except back then, there was no market segmentation, whatever-- when you talk about traveling to China, everybody had the same itinerary, the same sort of restaurant food, or the same Yangtze cruise. There was no market differentiation, no tailored, in-depth experience into China. So I thought, well, no one could access China better than I could, in a way, because I speak the language, I grew up there, and I could appreciate the Chinese culture in a way that I didn't see interpreted in the travel industry.

So I gave it a go. This was year 2000. And here I am, still in the business 17 years later, and loving it.

April White: How have you seen the travel industry in China change in those past 17 years?

Zhang Mei: Oh, it's gone through the roof. First, in 2000 to 2008, the interest to travel to China was extraordinary, just because of the upcoming Olympics and China entering WTO. The whole world was looking at China, so my venture really timed it very well, unintentionally. After the Olympics, inbound travel going to China tapered out a little bit just because most people who are interested have done it.

And also China, over the years, have become a much wealthier destination, so it's no longer a very affordable destination. I mean it is still affordable, but it's not cheap anymore. So the inbound interest to China has gone flat or down a little bit.

At the same time, outbound travel coming from China-- so travel by Chinese citizens exploring the world-- has skyrocketed. That, I would say, starting from 2005, really took off 2010, 2012-ish. Chinese started traveling the world.

April White: Travels Through Dali is a different kind of travel because you're returning to the region of China where you were born. What made you decide to write this book?

Zhang Mei: I've always wanted to write a cookbook, funny enough, because I always-- I grew up in a typical Chinese family-- many, many aunts and aunties and relatives, cousins. And one of my aunt is a very good cook. Every time I go home, the way she cooks is just-- like, I would put on five pounds every visit.

But being in the States at that time-- this was like 10 years ago when I wanted to write a cookbook-- I couldn't find the ingredients. And I didn't really have the recipes. And when I ask her how to cook, she would give me one line and say, some onions, some beef, some this and that, and cook for 10 minutes or whatever. It's very simple, and I couldn't really follow it.

So I said, look, I'm going to go home and actually study how it's done. So I went home and studied a few weeks in a cooking school and went to document her recipes. And I thought the food is just amazing, yet it's a region of China that is not very well known. But over the years, those recipes got shelved a little bit.

Only two years ago, WildChina was celebrating its 15th year anniversary. And we thought, let's do a book. So the idea came up-- what do people really want to ask me all the time? People always ask me how I put together a trip, how I go to a destination and meet the locals, and how do I spend time with them to really discover the richness of the history, of the tradition.

And I said, yes, that's what we're going to do. We will travel to this part of the country which I'm most passionate about and develop a trip around this region. And the theme of it is something very, very dear to my heart. It's eating, cooking with ham.

April White: The leg of ham in the title of your book is not some kind of metaphor. It was an actual leg of ham that you traveled with. Tell me what made you decide to do that and how people reacted to it.

Zhang Mei: Growing up in the '70s in China, ham always seemed like such a precious thing. Particularly, an entire leg comes across as the sign of prosperity, so I've always wanted it. Most people don't know China has ham at all. And I came from the other end. Before HBS, I didn't know the world had ham, but Yunnan. So I always thought Yunnan was the ham country.

Yet, after I got to HBS, they gave me this ham and cheese sandwich at the Kresge Hall, and I thought this is ham cheese sandwich? It didn't taste very good, to be honest. But after that, a few years later, my father-in-law sent me an entire leg of ham in the mail, and it's very good. I asked him, what sort of ham was that? He told me, it's Virginia ham.

That's when I started getting really interested in different ham areas around the world. They are so different in culture-- Virginia and China, no connection there, really. And then later on, Switzerland, Italy, France, Spain-- everywhere I go, you find humans, cultures, across such geographies use the same methods to produce tasty things-- conserve meat for a year or two years.

I secured a leg of him, traveled with it, and visited old friends and new. We cooked with folk song singer. We cooked with a chicken farmer, a small restaurant owner. Everywhere we went, I cut off a chunk of the ham and gave it to them and asked them to cook a dish with it. And I documented all the recipes.

And while we cooked, the stories would always come out. They would tell you troubles with their kids' school-- the difficulties in raising chickens, or whatever would come out. And I think that's just so beautiful. It's a luxury in life when someone take you in, both a stranger and someone from the hometown, and share with you a slice of their life. And I wanted to share that with my readers.

April White: Can you tell me one of those stories that really stuck with you-- one of the stories or recipes from the book?

Zhang Mei: The chapter about Dali Old Town, which is an old town in the center of the book-- and I gave it a little bit of history of how the place seemed very familiar to me, yet it seemed very different to outsiders. And Dali town has become sort of like the mecca for backpackers and for a new generation of Chinese. Everyone goes there looking for a more relaxed way of life. And I was explaining my fascination with this part.

So it starts like this. In 1989, a group of American students arrived for a study abroad year at Yunnan University in Kunming, where I was studying. They were from Oberlin College in the US in search of an authentic Chinese experience, which included having a Chinese roommate. I was one of the lucky students invited to move out of my eight person college dorm and live with one American girl. Our room had an in-suite bathroom and hot running water. Compared to the queues for the communal bathhouse in the regular dorm, this was heaven.

Every school break, the American students would strap on big backpacks and travel to Dali. It was the place to be. They would return with fascinating photos, snapshots of a place I thought I knew well, but viewed through the lenses of an outsider. They marveled at the otherness of Dali's Bai people, their culture and architecture.

Some of the boys would also return with big bags of marijuana to dry out in the dorm room. The weed didn't have much potency, I was told, but they smoked it all the same. What a wacky way to see my hometown, I thought. What are they seeing that I am not seeing? So I decided to do the same. I saved some money by giving private English lessons and I traveled back to the Dali myself that year.

April White: So tell me a little bit more about Dali. Obviously, you had a perspective on it and then you saw it through new eyes when you were in college with the American travelers. And now, I imagine you see it through new eyes again, as you've returned and sent other tourists there. Tell me about how it's evolved for you over the years?

Zhang Mei: My relationship with Dali started in my early memories as almost like a teenager to a mom. I was the teenager. I didn't like anything about Dali. I was embarrassed about being from Dali. When I got to HBS, I didn't want to tell anybody I was from Dali.

Why? Because there are a couple of things that attracted, nowadays, everybody to Dali were the things that drove me away. Number one thing, it has perfect climate. The weather-- it's sort of like Berkeley here. It's like California. It's spring year round. Flowers always bloom. And the mountain is always green.

And that kind of bothered me because I felt perfect weather made people lazy. Everyone was very content to be home and happy with their life. And no one really ventured out. And I didn't quite like that as a teenager.

And then what's next? The slow lifestyle-- it's in the mountains. And I remember my father used to walk to the market every day. And he would buy a little bit of-- $0.20 of cilantro, $0.50 worth of greens, and cut a sliver of meat from the kitchen and cook a meal. And the next day he'd do it again.

I'm like, this is so inefficient. Why do you do that? Just shop for a week. He was like, no, no, no. You've got to have fresh ingredients every day.

And well, now, it's very hip here. Now, that is called farm to table cuisine, right? But back then, I didn't see it as that useful. I thought it was a waste of time.

And then, number three is Yunnan people are very home proud. If you ask anybody where you are from in the region, they will tell you this little town. They say like, oh, I'm from Mengzi. We have the best noodles. I'm from Yangbi. We have the best walnuts.

And everyone's so proud of home that I felt like we were really not looking outside. The truth is, though, after years of traveling around the world, I returned to Dali, I realized it truly is a place worthy to be proud on the international scale, really.

Skydeck is produced by the External Relations department at Harvard Business School and edited by Craig McDonald. It is available at iTunes or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. For more information or to find archived episodes, visit alumni.hbs.edu/skydeck.

Featured Alumni

Mei Zhang

MBA 1996

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