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Exploring the Mosuo culture
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Wu Yan
A LONG and bumpy bus journey landed me in Luoshui, a Mosuo community in Yunnan Province. Having worked with the Mosuo culture for several years at the China Folk Culture Villages theme park in Shenzhen, I had longed to visit a real Mosuo community. Now I was finally doing just that.
The ethnic Mosuo group is officially considered a branch of the Naxi Nationality, but they consider themselves a different and independent nationality. And indeed they are different, particularly thanks to their Axia custom, or “walking marriage”, plus the fact that they still retain their traditional matriarchal structure.
Hungry and not knowing where to go after stepping off the bus, I walked into a nearby family lodge, the inhabitants of which immediately offered to cook me a meal despite the inconvenient hour.
This is a family of 11 people, I was told later, but at that moment I saw only five — a woman in her 60s, a younger woman in her 30s, a man called Yino and two playing children. The women soon pitched in to cook for me. Yino, after moving several buckets of water around, sat down to talk with me.
I quickly turned our talk to the “walking marriage” tradition, and asked the kinds of questions he must have been asked many times before, as I tried to ascertain whether the practice was still followed, and if so how and why. Yino immediately said he and his family did indeed practise walking marriage. And he also extolled its virtues. He said two Mosuo lovers stay together out of pure love, and that the relationship ensures true love. He said that more and more people in cities are getting divorced, which he says is proof that walking marriage is better than secular marriage.
From my experience in Shenzhen's China Folk Culture Villages, I know that walking marriage is actually a kind of “friendship” marriage in which the man and woman never really marry each other. A “husband” and a “wife” live and work in their own matriarchal families. The couple that has established the Axia relationship actually has no economic links with one another. The “husband” stays at his “wife's” home only at night, returning to his mother's home during the day. It is the mother who takes responsibility for raising the children. The man helps raise his nephews while his children are raised by their maternal uncles. In the busy farming season, the “husband” will offer to help his “wife's” family. This kind of relationship is maintained solely by the love between the couple. If they no longer feel affection for each other, then they simply terminate their “marriage” and search for new lovers.
The family lit some firewood to cook without a chimney as the Mosuos have always done. The choking smoke filled the room and only floated away through the slits between the logs with which the Mosuos build their houses. My extended stay showed me that this was the same with every Mosuo family.
I asked Yino about the average Mosuo family's financial statistics such as yearly income. Yino answered that since his eldest sister manages the family's daily life, he was not clear about them.
Somewhat disappointed, I was satisfied to have received proof that women head Mosuo families. In the Mosuo community, the mother is the head of a family. The matriarchal line inherits family property and the mother makes the overall arrangements for everyday life and work. The family members are tied together through the same blood relationship, which enables the whole family to live together harmoniously. Quarrels, fights and abuses seldom occur among the Mosuo people.
Yino also gave me the impression that women are the major source of labour in a family. This was later verified by a book, which explains that by tradition one-third of Mosuo men became Lamas — they believe in Lamaism — while another one-third of them form caravans to transport goods in and out of the Mosuo territory through the mountains.
Later, Yino took me to visit another Mosuo. We met the hostess, who led us into a room where she lit a fire to prepare tea and poured each of us a cup of Guangdang — a Mosuo homemade alcohol. The weather was warm. Seated around the fire, my face was uncomfortably baked. “Don't you feel it is too hot sitting like this?” I asked. “We're used to it. We feel cold if we don't warm ourselves at the fire,” answered Yino.
“Is there a host in this family?” I asked, once again hoping to find out more about the Mosuo marriage practices. “No, we have walking marriage,” the woman shook her head and looked a bit shy. I really wanted to ask more, but I did not want to be too impolite.
It is said that at the beginning of a relationship, a young man usually visits his lover very secretly at night and leaves early in the morning so as not to be seen. The relationship will become more open as time goes by and may be recognized by both of the families in the end.
The hostess was around 40 years old. When I asked her birth date, she could only tell me the year, not certain about the month and the day. This happened with many Mosuos I met later. It seems that their traditional inattention to time has not abated completely.
A while later, the woman's elder brother stopped by. He was more open about the Axia marriage and even joked a little about it. In the courtyard, he showed me a row of rooms that he said were used by the family's adult women at night. When I asked to see the inside of one of them, he opened a door to a small room where he said a female Axia usually treats the male one with tea and chats with him. The room leads to another room that was locked. When I asked to see it, he just declined silently.
It is reported that some travellers really want to see how the Mosuos practise their “walking marriage” but only end up watching Mosuo men walking in the deep night. No woman has been seen outside at that moment of time, they said.
Mosuos' courtship is similar to that of most other people in the world, except that many of them used to start with exchanging songs. As for how they meet at night, it is said that different people have different ways, such as knocking on a door or throwing a stone.
Still an enigma
A book entitled The Last Matriarchal Tribe, written by Li Dazhu, a Mosuo government official, tells that about 70 per cent of Mosuos still practise walking marriage. When I talked with him, he said that he believed the explanations from other writers about the origins of walking marriage are not convincing, such as the social-economic explanations. He raised four questions that are yet to be answered: Why do Mosuos still have walking marriage while other ethnic groups, more underdeveloped and impoverished than Mosuos, have adopted monogamy? Why are Mosuos the sole people to have retained a matriarchy while all other ethnic groups in the world have long since made the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy? Why do Mosuos' matriarchal ties and other old traditions remain untouched while those of all other ethnic groups have without exception been destroyed in the process of social evolution? Why are most of the Mosuo people willing to use walking marriage rather than other forms of marriage?
Outside intrusion
Mosuo people still live relatively isolated lives. But early in the 20th century, an American named Joseph Lock broke their isolation. He lived with them for nearly 30 years and wrote a book about the Mosuo people.
Modern intruders, though, are mostly from other areas of China. A couple from Chongqing operates a restaurant that also serves as a bar at night. It is the only place at Luoshui where costumers can pay to get onto the Internet. “Oh, making money is not our purpose,” the male member of the couple said, referring to the few customers they receive.
A young lady from Wuhan runs another smaller restaurant. She also claimed she did not mean to make money. Both of them said they love the place and the Mosuo culture.
A young American woman called Julie told me it was her fourth visit to Luoshui and that her love for the Mosuo people kept bringing her back.
It seems that I am not alone in my fascination with the Mosuo culture.
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