The changes seem to come faster each month. In 2006 mobile phones began working in remote areas, and by early 2007 nearly everyone had them. Now you could be plowing your field in the mountains, miles from the village, and receive a call from your wife asking you to pick some wild greens for dinner on your way home. Young men working in other provinces send text messages to their hometown sweethearts. Out of Dimen’s official population of 2,372, about 1,200 work and live elsewhere. There are some success stories; many can earn more than $200 a month. Those who wind up in factories might earn less than half that, still far more than they could earn at home. But they miss the life of Dimen that is sung in songs, the crying cicadas, the fruits of spring, the quiet beauty of the mountains.

In Dimen people sing nearly every day. In classrooms students sit with perfect posture at their desks. They repeat in perfect a cappella pitch what their teacher has just sung. On weekends a troupe of older girls dressed in jeans and pink tops stand before the Singing Teacher and practice fast-paced songs, each taking a solo. Two gravelly voiced elderly women, respectfully called za by all, guide the younger children in reciting simpler chorals.

One of the za has blue-tinged eyes. At first I thought this was a genetic remnant of outsiders who had come through the region—perhaps foreign traders diverted from the Silk Road. Dimen has had many invaders, the blue-eyed za told me. “In 1920 a Chinese warlord kidnapped my mother’s 16-year-old aunt to make her his ninth concubine. No one heard from her again.” In those days, the blue-eyed za said, people who came stole our things and killed people. Each time, she and her family put sticky rice in their baskets and ran into the mountains to hide.

When the za asked me for eyedrops, complaining that her eyes were cloudy, I realized the blue in her eyes was cataracts. Several people had already told me she was the only one who knew all 120 verses of the epic song of Dimen’s history, hours of a bluesy repetitive melody. According to this anthem, the original Dong ancestors of Dimen began as a people who wore no clothes. Invaders had driven their descendants to Dimen. “That old song is boring,” two teenage girls later told me. “We’re too busy to learn something we don’t like.”

The blue-eyed za was 74, but she could lift twice as much kindling as I. She could scamper over uneven rock. She could stride up the mountain, leaving me breathless behind. But what would happen to the epic song after she was gone? What is an unwritten Dong song if there is no one left to remember it? How many other traditions of Dong life would soon be lost?