In 2023, a simple hope began to take shape in Hewan: to build, together with local Hmong youth, a place for free reading and exchange—and a starting point to which young people from different places might continue returning over time.
What We Made Together
Yuanye Reading Room
Hewan Water Village｜A free space for reading and cultural exchange｜2023—
The first things one notices may be the sign above the door, the shelves, and the rows of books. Yet the meaning of Yuanye lies in the ways the space is used. Someone may read quietly; someone else may share a favourite passage aloud. Tables become surfaces for making things, open floor becomes a place for dance or experiments, and the door leads back towards the basketball court, the street, and the wider life of Hewan.
Yuanye Reading Room — The Documentary
Made by young filmmakers｜Hewan, 2023
The documentary follows the making and use of the reading room. It also preserves moments difficult to fit into a short description: the hesitation of a first meeting, laughter that grows while working side by side, and the way a book can open a conversation.
The film is not simply about the completion of a room. It asks how reading can form emotional connections and bring young people from very different circumstances into genuine encounter.
观看《原也书屋》 →
Hand-drawn Invitations and Plans for an Ideal Reading Room
Co-created works on paper｜Hewan, 2023–2024
To let more local children know about Yuanye, we drew invitations together and carried them into the streets. At the anniversary gathering, everyone also drew an ideal version of the room: What should it contain? What would make people want to enter—and want to stay?
The drawings may not follow tidy architectural lines, but they answer a fundamental question: to whom does the reading room belong? Yuanye was never a finished space designed elsewhere and handed over for local use. It was imagined from the beginning by the people who would inhabit it.
Our Yuanye Memories
Co-created by Karen Zhang, Amily Yang, Chiu Du, Jinghong Hu, Aiwen Li, and friends
Anniversary scrapbook｜Hewan, 2024
On a breezy night in Hewan, with the Qingshui River sounding in the distance, we thought about how all of us would grow up—and how we did not know whether everyone would still be here the next time we returned. We decided to make a book of the time we had shared.
From an enormous collection of photographs, we chose the images that moved us most. We printed, cut, pasted, and added our different reflections, designing every page so that details vulnerable to time might remain a little longer on paper.
Every book, every person, and every place has a story of its own. Yuanye is where these stories gather. It carries the past and opens a path towards the future.
How We Built the Reading Room Together
It Began with Stacks of Books
The first collection came through the response of many people. At school, we invited classmates to donate books they had read, loved, and now wished to share. Those books then travelled to Hewan.
Yet their arrival did not automatically make a reading room. Visiting and local youth carried boxes, unpacked, sorted, and arranged the books together. Some crossed the room with stacks rising to their chins; others crouched beside the shelves and debated where each book should go. Yuanye took its earliest form through these ordinary, shared acts.
An Invitation Opened the Door
Once the books were in place, people still needed to enter.
Rather than hang a sign and wait, we picked up coloured pens and made invitation cards together. We then walked through Hewan, placing them in the hands of more children and inviting them to read, play, and meet new friends.
Perhaps a public space does not truly begin when its shelves are installed, but when one person chooses to step inside and another makes room for them.
Imagining an Ideal Yuanye
Later, we sat together and described the reading room we hoped Yuanye might become. Some thought about the books still needed; others wanted more games and making. We also asked how the room might become a place of mutual support and shared growth.
We decorated the walls, designed wind chimes, and rearranged the space. At Yuanye, co-creation was never an extra activity added after construction. It became the way the room continued to exist: each person who entered could leave another line in its unfinished design.
Filling the Shelves Was Only the Beginning
Reading Opened Us to One Another
We gathered to share books and read aloud the passages we most wanted others to hear. Sometimes a single page carried the conversation far away. Sometimes what remained was not the page at all, but the life story told by the person sitting opposite.
Reading did not move in only one direction, bringing an “outside world” into Hewan. Local friends brought their language, games, family stories, and understanding of Hmong culture to us. As Yuanye co-founder Chiu Du later wrote, “We saw another world in one another, appreciating and learning from each other.”
The Bus Arrived, and Old Friends Came Running
When we returned to Hewan, familiar voices reached the bus before it had fully stopped. Those who had once carried books, read, played basketball and hide-and-seek, and made wind chimes together were gathering again.
At the anniversary, we read, shared, drew invitations, and decorated the room. We also spoke seriously about what Yuanye might become next. Its most moving change may not be the number of books added, but the way strangers from a first encounter became old friends who waited for one another at the roadside.
From Hewan to a Wider World
The documentary was later screened at the China–Chile Young Leaders for Sustainable Development Forum. Standing before the Chilean Ambassador to China, Chiu Du told the story of carrying books, making invitations and cakes, playing basketball, designing wind chimes, and imagining the reading room together.
After the forum, Ambassador Mauricio Hurtado returned to his residence, brought out books from his own collection, signed them individually, and donated them to Yuanye. A book travelled from Chile to Beijing and then towards Hewan, while a small reading room beside the Qingshui River became connected to a much wider story.
What Yuanye Means
Yuanye offers free books and a place to sit and read, but its meaning is larger than access to a shelf.
It allows young people who might never otherwise meet to know one another over time. It lets learning happen not only through textbooks and classrooms, but through conversation, play, making, and the shared work of solving real problems. It has also taught us that cultural exchange does not mean one side arriving with a set of prepared answers. It begins when both sides sit down with curiosity, listen, and allow themselves to be changed.
Yuanye is not a gift we gave to Hewan. It is a relationship made—and continually cared for—together with our friends there.