Choo Waihong
has just brought out The Kingdom of Women: Life, Love and Death in
China’s Hidden Mountains, an
account of the Mosuo tribe, who worship the female spirit, and are the
last surviving matrilineal and matriarchal society in the world. The book
raises questions about gender roles in modern, urbanised society, and provides a
glimpse into a hidden way of life teetering on the edge of extinction in
today’s China.
A Singaporean,
Choo Waihong was a corporate lawyer with top law firms in Singapore and
California. She dealt in fund management law, not women’s rights, but,
separately, she was involved with AWARE, a women’s rights group in Singapore;
she acted as its vice-president for two terms.
In 2006, she
took early retirement, and left behind the fifteen hour days of corporate life
to travel in China. From the moment she stepped into the Kingdom of Women,
Waihong was captivated. She became the first outsider to move into the heart of
the tribe, where she stayed for six years. She now spends half the year with
them in Lugu Lake, Yunnan. The rest of the time she continues to live in
Singapore, while also travelling to Europe and America to spend time with her
family.
What do you
hope to do with your book?
I hope to tell the incredible story of the
woman-centric world of the Mosuo and to record a fast-disappearing but precious
piece of human history.
When did you
first become interested in the Mosuos?
After my retirement, when I first visited Lugu
Lake to witness the Mosuos’ Mountain Goddess Festival. Back then, I was just
another of the many tourists who visited Lugu Lake, which had already achieved
fame as a tourist destination – it is known in Chinese tourist literature as The Kingdom of Women (nu ren guo), or The Kingdom of Daughters (nu
er guo). The first Mosuos I met
treated me as a tourist, but over time as I visited them repeatedly, I morphed
into a friend and a fixture in the community.
How do the Mosuos
challenge ideas about gender roles in modern, urbanised society?
The customs and practices of the Mosuo tribe,
being matrilineal and matriarchal, are generally antithetical to the mainly
patriarchy-based culture in the modern urbanised society we know. We should be
challenged by the Mosuo model to question our own social and cultural premises
and assumptions.
Take the acknowledged pivotal role of women
in Mosuo society. In their women-centric
universe, the Mosuo hold women at the top of the pyramid and everyone, women,
men and children, live peaceably within that social environment. They show that this kind of matrilineal and matriarchal
human society is possible and that patriarchy is not the only evolutionary
model.
Another challenge the Mosuo pose is the
fashioning of a society without the nuclear family based on patrilineal lines.
Within the tribe, the basic family structure is based on a female bloodline
with no requirement for marriage between the male and female progenitors of off-spring. Children born to Mosuo women belong to, and
are well looked after in, their mothers’ household under the umbrella of a
matrilineal family headed by the grandmother.
It has proven to be a viable alternative model to the man-woman-offspring
nuclear family model.
How does a
woman’s life amongst the Mosuos compare to women’s lives in modern cities?
There is a world of difference between the
life of a Mosuo woman by Lugu Lake and the life lived by a woman in New York or
Beijing. From the moment that a Mosuo
baby girl is born, she is celebrated as a new and vital addition to her
matrilineal family. Her birth is a
precious link that ensures the family’s female bloodline continues. It is akin to the patriarchal preference for a
boy to be born within the family so that the male line continues, except that
in the Mosuo case, it is the reverse, with the birth of a female taking
precedence.
Unlike in New York City or Beijing, where all
children born to a nuclear family take their father’s surname, underlining the principle
of following the male bloodline, Mosuo children, both female and male, take the
maternal home name of their grandmother as their surname.
As a girl, the Mosuo female child is treated
as a valued member of her family and she grows up in a home environment that
elevates her female siblings and cousins, mother and aunts to a position above
her brothers and male cousins, uncles and granduncles. Everyone in the matrilineal home looks up to
the grandmother who is the head of the household. If an adult woman is capable and smart, she
knows she may one day inherit the position of the head of her matrilineal
household when her mother feels like taking a backseat in managing the family
farm. This would never happen in a
patriarchal Chinese Han household in Beijing, nor in a traditional aristocratic
family in patriarchal England.
In Mosuo society, each woman is accorded high
status outside her home. She is
respected and her opinions carry weight.
This encourages self-confidence in a woman. It is quite unlike the situation even in
present-day New York City where women have to fight every step of the way to
gain a voice within the male-centric family and society at large. The situation is even worse for women in the
ultra-patriarchal societies of Beijing and Singapore.
Are Mosuo
women worse off than women in modern cities when it comes to access to
healthcare, and reproductive rights?
Mosuo women do not have ready access to good
medical benefits when compared to women in modern cities, not because they are
Mosuo but because they live in a remote part of the country which is still
catching up with social development.
China is a large country, and although the Eastern part of the nation
has made great leaps in social development, its vast rural hinterland lags
behind. Lugu Lake, where the Mosuo live,
is much less developed than even most other farming areas in China. This influences availability of medical
facilities.
Hospitals are rudimentary and only recently
available. There is a small hospital in the
main Mosuo town of Yongning, with a larger hospital located in the bigger
county town 120 kilometres away. Today,
a Mosuo woman about to give birth would generally be taken at the first
instance to the smaller hospital in Yongning.
Those with some means would be driven to the larger country hospital,
while those in the more remote hamlets would have to make do with local
midwives in their homes.
Like all women in China, whether in the
cities or countryside, younger Mosuo woman would be on one kind of
contraception or another as the national family planning policy has reached all
corners of the vast country. A woman in
a rural region or belonging to an ethnic minority group has long been allowed
to have two children, as opposed to women in the cities who faced a one-child
policy until very recently. The number increases to three for some selected
ethnic minorities, although the Mosuo tribe does not belong to the latter
category. The policy limiting birth
numbers in families works on a disincentive basis, with a cash penalty being
imposed on any birth exceeding the prescribed number.
The subtitle
mentions love, life and death. What is the most enduring life lesson you’ve
learned from the Mosuos?
I’ve learned how easy it is for women to be
confident and reach their potential when they are freed from being put down by
their family, people in their community, and society in general. Unlike most other communities where women
face discrimination and oppression in different and varying degrees due to the
pre-dominant patriarchal paradigm, Mosuo society enjoys a distinctly different
and opposing environment where womanhood is respected and revered. For that reason, Mosuo women living as women
in a woman’s world are different from you or I, who invariably bears some scar
or another from being a woman living in a man’s world.
What’s the
most enduring lesson you’ve learned from the matrilineal and matriarchal Mosuos
about love?
I’ve learned about the nature of it, of love,
if by ‘love’ we mean love between a woman and a man. Because the Mosuo bring to the definition of
love such a refreshingly different approach, it clears the cobwebs of
convoluted common-place notions of the one-and-only true love in one’s life,
the need for sexual exclusivity in love, the idea of a man possessing the body
of a woman as if she were a chattel, the unproven nature of male polygamous
love as opposed to female monogamous love, and the need for permanent pairing
in a marriage between a woman and a man in the social evolution of humankind.
As I wrote in my book, “When I look at the
overall scheme of things, I do not see the Mosuos ranking their love life very
high up in the scale of family life.
While they recognize human sexuality for what it is, that it is natural
for a woman and a man to have sex together, and celebrate it by giving complete
freedom to people to indulge in it, they never elevate it into the be-all and
end-all of human existence. Sexual love
may be crucial for the survival of their tribe but it is not the glue that
links a family together. Love, for the
Mosuo, may be more than one, but it is private and most certainly comes way
below family.”
What’s the
most enduring lesson you’ve learned about death?
I’ve been struck by the way the way the
Mosuos grieve over the departed - a long, deep grieving which ends abruptly
upon cremation.
In their religious mix of ancient shamanistic
practices and Tibetan Buddhist beliefs, they take to heart that dying comes
with the promise of rebirth. From the
moment a relative dies, the Mosuo grieves, and grieves loudly and
exaggeratedly, throughout the often-protracted mourning period, of days, weeks
or even months. The cries of grief and
regret are loudest and most animated when the mourners accompany the cortege to
the cremation site on a mountainside.
But when the final act of lighting the funeral pyre takes place, the
grieving stops instantly. The moment the
fire catches in the pyre is the moment the Mosuo believe the deceased’s soul
has departed, to the mythical place of origin of their tribe. That soul would be on its way for a
rebirth. There is no more need to grieve
anymore as the departed soul is on its way to a new beginning. No more crying, no more mournful faces. The mourners immediately leave the funeral
site to troop back to the home of the deceased for one last meal, chatting and
bantering, signifying that life has already returned to normal.
Can your
Mosuo friends read your book in English?
No. I am afraid none of my Mosuo friends will
be able to read my book just yet, although I am sure those among them whose
photos appear will be thrilled to see themselves in print. I am looking to have
the book translated into Chinese.
Will the
book draw too much attention to the Mosuo internationally? What about within China, if there is a
Chinese edition?
The book must draw some international
attention to the existence of this matrilineal and matriarchal people, but the
Mosuo tribe is already well known in China for being an interesting tribe with
its intriguing social practices and Lugu Lake enjoys a reputation as a much sought-after
tourist destination.
I really don’t think a Chinese edition of my
book would risk exposing the Mosuo way of life to the greater Chinese
market. There are already more than a
dozen books on the Mosuo written by Chinese anthropologists, sociologists,
scholars and journalists as well as a host of television documentaries and
snippets about the tribe and its unique lifestyle. Tens of thousands of tourists throng the
lakeside Mosuo hamlets every year, with many more being predicted after a new
airport recently opened.
How will the
Mosuo survive in modern China?
The prognosis is not good. The old way of
life among the Mosuo began disappearing when their homeland opened up to
tourism at the start of the twenty-first century. Much of the tribe’s traditional culture is no
longer practiced amongst the younger Mosuo living by Lugu Lake where tourism is
concentrated, although there are still traditional remnants to be found further
inland in the more remote villages.
These issues are explored in the last chapter of my book, On the Knife-Edge of Extinction.
Details: The Kingdom of Women in
published in hardback by I.B. Tauris, priced in local currencies.
