Leaving Mother Lake

by Yang Erche Namu

  What is beyond argument, in any case, is that Moso society is not ruled by women as is invariably publicized by the mass media. Before the Communist revolution, the Moso were governed by male chiefs who inherited their position from their fathers and passed it to their sons, while aristocratic women could and did hold high offices but not because they were women so much as because they were aristocrats. Today, although there are no rules barring women from office, the administration is dominated almost exclusively by male cadres. Unlike women, who are constantly preoccupied with housework and farmwork, men are available to pursue positions in the outside world, to become village chiefs, administrators, cadres, technicians, teachers, traders, and so forth, and in all evidence, they have a fair share of authority in public and family life. Of course, in the Moso family, the maternal bond determines blood ties, but this makes Moso society matrilineal, not matriarchal.

  But if Moso society is not matriarchal, it is nonetheless remarkable. In many societies, even patriarchal ones, women are often more powerful than social convention would have anyone believe. As these expressions go, women may get to rule the roost or to be the power behind the throne; in other words, they may usurp the authority that is ideally vested in men. But Moso women do no such thing. They are legitimate figures of family authority, managers of family wealth, coowners of family property, caretakers of ancestors, and owners of their own bloodlines. Not least, they have personal rights and freedoms in the domain of sexual relations that are unthinkable in much of the rest of the world. Indeed, above and beyond gender relations, Moso society is extraordinary for its institution of visiting relationships, which may well claim to have solved a universal conundrum of human existence, predicated by the desire for sex and love, and the requirements of family continuity and economics.

  As French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss has shown, marriage is a mechanism through which bloodlines, family names, wealth, and other forms of privilege and social status are actuated and legitimized. Marriage, in other words, is the glue that holds societies together.

  But in most societies, for marriage to work, something usually has to give. In patrilineal male-dominated societies, that something is very often romantic love, and almost always (female) sexual freedom and pleasure. In more extreme cases, male lineages may well depend on the exclusive sexual cooperation of wives and daughters, a thing that women are not naturally inclined to provide. Such societies have to work hard to keep women’s sexuality in check, and they often take drastic measures to achieve this goal, among the most infamous, female circumcision, bound feet, widow burning, burkas, and all forms of social seclusion.

  On the other hand, where marriage is based on ideals of romantic love, sexual compatibility, and the equality of two individuals rather than concerns for family lines and property, it is the economic stability and the very unity of the family that risk coming unraveled. As our current divorce rates testify, love and sex provide a lofty ideal and a tenuous basis on which to build enduring marriages.

  The Moso have made an extraordinary cultural choice — they have sacrificed neither sexual freedom nor romantic love nor economic security nor the continuity of their blood-lines. Instead, they have discarded marriage. What they have gained is a society where all the essentials of existence (food, affection, property, and family lines) are birthrights established by the most evident fact that is the maternal tie. And interestingly, from the perspective of family continuity, not only women but men find fulfillment in this way of life, which frees them from the anxiety of ensuring descendants — with multiple sisters, Moso families are almost guaranteed a next generation.

  The Moso advocate this idealized maternal way of life as the best possible, and the most likely to foster happiness and harmony. Visiting relationships, they say, keep relations between men and women pure and joyful, and people who live in large maternal houses do not fight like married people do. We can trust that they are speaking from experience, because many Moso have tried marriage, under pressure from the Communist authorities, and most gave up. Unfortunately, the Moso can articulate the positive attributes of their family system with so much conviction because they have had a few decades to reflect on its benefits. For whatever advantage may be perceived in their tradition, the Communists failed to see. Instead, they judged Moso custom feudal and incompatible with socialist ideals.

  There is no doubt that the Moso feudal rulers encouraged both the matrilineal family system and the custom of visiting relationships. For a start, the large maternal households were found in the feudal center rather than in the peripheral mountains of Labei, and indeed, closer to the feudal center, not only the Moso but also the Pumi were matrilineal. Here, all classes of Moso engaged in visiting relationships, and apart from the ruling family itself, almost all Moso, including aristocrats, traced descent matrilineally. But the feudal lords nurtured local custom in numerous other ways — through proverbs and songs extolling the virtues of the indivisible matrilineal family; through the sponsorship of communal cults dedicated to the mountain goddess and other mother figures; through the taxation and corvée system, which levied households rather than individuals and thus encouraged families to stay together.

  On the other hand, the fact that men engaged in long-distance trade, and therefore could be away from home for months at a time, no doubt encouraged sexual infidelity and made sense of leaving the running of farm- and housework to women. And finally, if Buddhism did not contribute to the system, it was certainly well adapted to it. In the old feudal world, every Moso family, whatever class it belonged to (aristocrat, commoner, or serf ), was required to give up one son to study the Buddhist scriptures. It is estimated that in 1956, at the time of the Communist takeover, one-fifth of Moso males were monks vowed to celibacy but, as Joseph Rock had observed, not chastity. Evidently, visiting relationships were well suited to Buddhist Yongning.

  But to claim that the feudal system nurtured Moso culture does not in any way explain the origins of Moso customs or why the Moso should be alone among all their neighbors to have institutionalized the matrilineal family and the absence of marriage. In other words, it does not answer to the questions of where the Moso come from and how old their matrilineal system might be.

  Although the name Moso appears in ancient Chinese records as early as the seventh century A.D., the Moso’s ancestral origins, their extraordinary family system, and not least, their historical relationship with neighboring Naxi remain steeped in mystery. In truth, the historical record is very incomplete and at times filled with so many obscure or contradictory details that it seems indecipherable. But perhaps even more problematic is the fact that neither the Moso nor the Naxi appear to have traditional claims to this ancient name Moso. Today the Naxi take offense at it, and the Moso request it as their own in order to distinguish themselves from the Naxi. Moso is never mentioned in the old Naxi pictographic manuscripts, or in any of the Moso legends and ceremonial texts. The Naxi and Moso respectively call themselves Naxi and Nari in a similar vein to their Yi neighbors, whose own name is Nosu — na and no both meaning “black,” while xi, ri, and su mean “people.” As to the name black, it is almost certainly derived from an ancient tribal system that for centuries divided the various peoples of southwest China as Black and White tribes.

  Putting aside the old name Moso, however, the historical record, oral tradition, and linguistic analysis all suggest that the Naxi and the Moso trace their origins neither to a single “Moso” tribe nor to two distinct tribes but to several people who arrived in Yunnan under different circumstances and at different times — Qiang, Tibetans, and Mongols, as well as ancient indigenous tribes. For, quite aside from being subjected to invasions by outsiders, the native people of Yunnan were at war for centuries, engaged in conquest, feuding, raiding, dispersal, intermarriage, and regrouping under the banner of various federations, kingdoms, and empires. Not surprisingly, the historical record mentions dozens of tribes whose names have now entirely disappeared. When groups w
ere conquered, they were either enslaved to provide labor and/or military service or assimilated into the system of tribute payment to local feudal lords. In fact, even as late as the sixteenth century, Chinese and local historians report that northern Yunnan was inhabited by congeries of rebellious tribes whom the local feudal lords were still trying to pacify under their respective tax and corvée systems.

  By 1956, whatever their more distant past, the Moso and the Naxi were entirely different people who shared neither territory, language, religion, nor custom — even though Chinese historians had confused their identities for centuries and the Communists were about to class them as a single nationality group. And undoubtedly, whether in Yongning or Lijiang, people owed much of their cultural particularities to local elites who had exerted themselves to impose laws and customs upon previous generations.

  Now, on both sides of the Yangtze, the feudal lords believed themselves to be descended from an army officer left by Kublai Khan during his conquest of China. But whatever this common claim to a distant Mongol ancestry, the family histories of the Moso and Naxi rulers are entirely distinct. Not least, the genealogy of the Lijiang chiefs shows consistent father-son successions from the Mongol conquest, while that of the Yongning chiefs makes no mention of any Mongol ancestor and shows a messy line of inheritance passing as often as not from fathers to sons, brothers to brothers, and uncles to nephews. It is only after primogeniture and patrilineal succession were mandated by Imperial edict in the eighteenth century that the names of official wives even appear in this record. In fact, the old Moso elite may look not only to the Mongols to seek their own splendid origins.

  Yongning lies south of an ancient Qiang state described in the imperial histories of the Sui (A.D. 581–618) and Tang dynasties (A.D. 618–907) as a Country of Women (Nü Guo), which certainly appears to have been not only matrilineal but also matriarchal. These documents are remarkably detailed, for they provide a precise geographical position, naming rivers, towns, and territorial boundaries, as well as information on economic, social, and political organization. The Country of Women was ruled by queens and a council of state made exclusively of female ministers. Men, the imperial scribes tell us, were not held in high esteem; they took the names of their mothers, tilled the soil, and went to war. The record also provides the names of several queens who paid tribute to the Chinese court, among whom figures a Ngue — which is the clan name of the old aristocracy of Yongning and which is not found among any of the Naxi in Lijiang.

  As I had discussed with Teacher Lü so many years ago now, Western anthropological theory does not believe in matriarchal states; it believes only in myths about matriarchy — but knowledge of the Country of Women has not come to us via mythology. It has come to us in written, official documents. The Country of Women disappeared from the imperial record during the ninth century, after the Sino-Tibetan wars, but if it ceased to exist as a state, is it not possible that some of its clans, among them the Ngue, made their way to Yongning? And if this is a possibility, the Country of Women may not only throw light on the validity of current ethnic boundaries between Moso and Naxi but also reopen the case of the matriarchy in Western anthropological theory.

  Until the late 1980s, the Moso were virtually unknown outside western China. There were several reasons for this, such as extreme geographical isolation, and not least the fact that for several decades after the revolution, they did not have a name of their own but were simply called Naxi. Isolation is still the most prominent feature of Moso country and one need not go far off the beaten path to discover picturesque villages without running water or electricity, and a virtually cashless economy where trade and barter are still done by horse caravan. Amid these tall mountains where modern commodities and infrastructure are practically invisible, the illusion of going back in time is almost perfect. Here one gets the feeling that history has stood still. But appearances are deceiving. For the Moso have never truly been sheltered from the great historical movements that have shaken the Tibet-China frontier. And the more recent watersheds of eco- nomic liberalization and globalization have not passed them by.

  So much has changed in the past fifty years. So much has changed for China and for the Moso. As China has become more urban, wealthier, and open to the world, news of Moso culture has spread beyond Yunnan to the rest of the country and, in the past few years, to the world. Today foreign journalists and filmmakers can travel freely through Moso country, and even Western anthropologists can take up residence for as many months as their research visas allow. To date, German scholar Susan Knödel and American Eileen Walsh have contributed to Moso studies their own doctoral dissertations based in extensive fieldwork. But the great majority of visitors to Moso country are not scholars or journalists but the thousands of Chinese and increasingly also foreign tourists who come to Yongning in ever greater numbers every year. Most stay only a few days, just long enough to look, to do a little horse riding, to paddle across the lake and visit the temples, to sing and dance around the bonfires and speculate on what it is like to live in a society with no fathers or husbands, where free love and women rule — the exoticism of it all, the innocence or the wantonness, depending on where you happen to stand on sex and morality.

  In the space of a decade, Yunnan province has become one of the most favored tourist destinations in China, and tourism has wrought stupendous changes there, creating great wealth matched by an enormous gap between those who are involved in the new industry and those who are not. In Yongning, in spite of local efforts to spread both the industry and the wealth it generates beyond the lucky few, tourism is still very much concentrated in the village of Luo Shui near the lake, where hardworking, entrepreneurial families have turned their log homes into spacious guest houses. In only six or so years, standards of living in Luo Shui have increased dramatically, with many families having a television set, running water, a telephone, and plenty of cash in the bank — a material comfort that is in stark contrast to much of Moso country.

  Meanwhile, as the outside world increasingly intrudes into their own, many Moso are voicing concerns that their traditional way of life may be enduring on borrowed time — and, ironically enough, when there is no longer a need to fear government interference. Today almost all Moso children go to school, where they learn the Chinese curriculum, and with it, to define themselves beyond Moso language and culture, beyond subsistence farming, and perhaps also beyond the extended maternal family. In the more remote villages, economic urgency is pushing young people to leave and seek work in the cities, where some will inevitably end up settling for good. And in the wealthier communities where tourist dollars make television sets affordable, the young now have access to a world their elders never dreamed could exist.

  Few in Moso country would disagree that tourism holds the surest promise of economic well-being. But can tourism alone sustain economic development and stem the migration of young people to the cities? And if not, what then? And if yes, at what cost? The “matriarchy industry,” indeed, creates a strange paradox, for it makes the promise of modernity dependent on the preservation of tradition. But then again, since the Communist revolution, visiting relationships and the maternal family have acquired much more than market value, they have come to symbolize the best in Moso tradition and to embody Moso identity itself. And surely, this is more than an incentive for cultural preservation.

  The Moso say that the future lies behind us while the past is before us. By this they mean that the past is what we know, because it is what is in front of our eyes, while the future, since it is behind our back, cannot be seen. I am now thinking of those sacred images of snakes that swallow their tails, bringing end and beginning together in a gesture of eternal regeneration. I am also thinking of the resilience of a family system that has survived the tribulations of centuries of history, and not least, of the unique genius of a people who made freedom to love the keeper of their collective happiness, and who are still doing so even as they dance around the bonfires,
hand-in-hand with curious visitors.

  Christine MathieuSan FranciscoNovember 2001

  THE LAST WORD

  I have long understood that my life is different. As I grew up in my village, and then traveled to Shanghai, Beijing, and later to America and Europe, I was always conscious of being different — different from my family, my own people, and others. But I also knew I was carrying a treasure — the treasure of my birth in the Country of Daughters. Although I have chosen to make my life mostly in the Western world, it is only this country that gives me an inner peace that I know I cannot find anywhere else no matter how long and how far I travel. I think I always knew this, but I could never find the words to truly explain myself to others until I began working on writing my story with Christine Mathieu. After many years of friendship, I discovered I could connect with Christine in a way I have never done with anyone. She knew where I came from; she had walked our mountain paths and drunk our salted butter tea, and even sat with my mother in our house in Zuosuo. More than that, she could make sense of my confused, emotional recollections. I had never before reflected so deeply and I had never trusted anyone with so many secrets. Although I had written about my life and told my story many times in interviews with the Chinese media, I had only ever skimmed the surface.

  I spent three months in San Francisco with Christine, telling her my story. In those three months, we talked over every minor and major event and explored every visual and sensual recollection I could bring to mind, so that I found myself not only talking about my life but reliving it and recovering feelings and incidents I had buried very deeply long ago, deep enough so that I might forget them. Our talks were often painful but also very funny at times, and almost always surprising. This experience of deeper reflection and memory was completely new to me; it was as though I were seeing my village, my mother, myself even, in an entirely new light, as though I were making new acquaintances, discovering new depths of understanding.