Every year after the high-school-wide nervous breakdown that is exam week, ISB holds an event called 'China Links', intended as its cliched name would suggest to deepen students' appreciation of Chinese culture.

Among the eleventh grade's options was a student-led trip to Xi'an, an opportunity to build homes with Habitat For Humanity (HFH) in Yunnan, traveling to the home of porcelain at Jingdezhen, camping in Western Hunan at a Miao village, and staying in Beijing to explore the city.

I opted for the trip to the Miao village, and the four-day trip is, to me, emblematic of what the school wants China Links to be like. A mix of student initiative and teacher guidance helped us enjoy the locale properly. Simon Frank, a student, explains that usually China Links is too restrictive: "Last year, the trip to Huangshan felt tedious because the teachers plotted out every single activity. There was no time to explore."

After a three hour flight to Zhangjiajie, and a four hour bus ride, we arrived at De Hang. Far from the city now, the Miao village offered hints of what China was like before urbanization. Allowed to wander freely for meals, we saw that the older residents still dressed in traditional clothing: cloth was still woven by hand on wooden contraptions: bridges were constructed with stones and branches.

There were moments of unabashed silliness and indulgence. For example, on the rafting trip which split the tedious bus ride in two, 10 kuai water cannons led to inter-raft water cannon battles between ISB students, Chinese tourists, and the watergun salesmen on one-man wooden boats. In one less justifiable moment, a student wearing just his boxers ran through the village square on a bet.

Around the campfire in the little rented lot of a local farmer's land, we indulged in the cliches of scary stories (a teacher, hiding behind a bush, leapt out at the climax brandishing a hatchet, eliciting screams all around) and singalongs. Trip leader Mike Hall brought his guitar and harmonica with him, and led the group through blues, '90s pop, a little Beatles and some other classic rock.

The area was beautiful, evoking images of traditional shanshui paintings. To give an example of its beauty, a wrong turn on a journey to a famous waterfall led us to another, equally impressive waterfall.

But by the second day, when we had returned to De Hang, one of the convenience stores outside the hotel had bought a pair of speakers and now blared Chinese and English rap. By the third day, a new bridge had been conjured out of nowhere next to the hotel. And throughout, the insistent, punctual blaring of an angry tour bus driver reminding his clients of deadlines broke the tranquility of the village. We were all complicit in the economic changes in the village, and that three days had wrought such visible change stirred us uncomfortably.

Mike Hall, who has visited the area anually for the last decade or so, told us repeatedly that when he first visited, he was the first foreigner the villagers had ever seen. He told us that every year there was more plastic in the rivers, and even though ISB students recycled all their plastic and disposed of their waste properly, shreds of plastic inevitably fell through. As the man who leads the China Links trip there every year, maybe that's why he seemed so solemn the whole trip.