Emotional experience in the making: cross-cultural encounters in Yangshuo Cafés

Emotional experience is central to tourism, yet scholarship has predominantly focused on its outcomes while overlooking the generative processes through which it emerges. Drawing on an enactive approach and tourism encounter theory, this study develops a processual framework to examine how tourist emotions are formed within cross-cultural encounters. Using cafés in Yangshuo, China, as a research case, qualitative data were gathered through guestbooks, semi-structured interviews, and field observations. The findings indicate that tourist emotions are not delayed evaluations of the environment but are co-generated through the real-time coupling of body, brain, place, and action. This generative process unfolds across three dimensions: 1) Encountering the place provides the sensory and spatial conditions through which bodily feelings first take shape. 2) Encountering others reshapes the emotional tone of the experience through warmth, friction, and extended interaction in cross-cultural settings. 3) Encountering the self further transforms immediate feelings into reflective meaning as the present café setting becomes connected with memory, family relations, home cultures, and other absent places. This study repositions destination cafés as temporary cross-cultural third places that decelerate mobility and facilitate reflexive engagement. By demonstrating the embodied and emergent nature of emotions, the research offers a clearer explanation of how emotional experiences are ‘made’ during cross-cultural travel.