Minority Report:The Mosuo, a small matrilineal tribe in central China, are preserving their traditions by exploiting them

By Matthew Forney | Lugu Lake
Longing to do more with her life than herd goats, Yang Erche Namu ran away from Zuosuo, a tiny village at the foot of the Tibetan plateau. As the 13-year-old girl fled, her appalled mother hurled rocks at her. For the next week, Namu walked on dirt paths before arriving at Yanyuan, the nearest county. She joined a song-and-dance troupe there, won a scholarship to study music in Shanghai, became a well-known lounge singer, married an American, divorced, and became China's first writer to lay bare her sexual adventures. In 1997, 14 years after abandoning her village, Namu wrote a best-selling book, Leaving the Kingdom of Daughters, which speaks candidly of her eight foreign lovers. She presented her libidinous ways as a natural part of her tempestuous life: after all, Namu belongs to the Mosuo, a matrilineal tribe with a tradition of letting women take many lovers and bear children without marrying.

Sex appeals. And today, the area around Lugu Lake, the Mosuo homeland where Namu grew up, has become a chic tourist destination, thanks almost entirely to the renown that Namu's book has brought it. With her words as a guide, some 50,000 mainland tourists are expected to flock this year to what used to be an unknown backwater. That's up from almost zero five years ago. This sudden influx of visitors has led to the usual excesses of prostitution, crime and karaoke. But it's also led to something vital and unexpected. Far from merely exploiting the Mosuo (pronounced "mwo-swo") as a kind of tribal freak show, the swarm of tourists has engendered a native pride that helps the Mosuo keep their traditions alive. "They think if thousands of Chinese come to see their lifestyle, it must be valuable," says Eileen Walsh, who recently completed a doctorate at Temple University on tourism's impact on the Mosuo.

Minorities occupy an uncomfortable place in Chinese society. The loyalty of Tibetans and Uighurs, for example, is often questioned, with their monasteries and mosques heavily monitored to detect signs of an independence movement. In a country where the overwhelming majority belongs to the Han group, minority culture tends to be subsumed. For instance, the Manchus, who governed during China's last imperial dynasty, are today nearly indistinguishable from the other "old 100 names," as Han Chinese call themselves. So the Mosuo's cultural survival is both surprising and heartening.

The Mosuo's success stems in large part from their knack for preserving their traditions while shrewdly exploiting them. The people of Luoshui, a village on the banks of Lugu Lake, have proved especially adept at this, transforming their entire settlement into a tourist collective. All of Luoshui's families participate in the three main visitor events—rowing dugout canoes, guiding horses and dancing around an evening bonfire—and they share the profits. Village elders have wisely barred motorboats from the lake so that it remains a peaceful, pristine attraction. And they have further safeguarded the waterfront's natural beauty by creating a red-light district a kilometer away, next to the police station. On a darker note, the district once attracted Chinese prostitutes from neighboring Sichuan province who wore Mosuo costumes. These days the working girls come mostly from Mosuo villages.

The Mosuo have a culture so marketable it could have been designed by anthropologists and tour guides. Mosuo shamans cure diseases by chanting volumes of memorized liturgies to drive off ghosts. Women carry on the family name and run households, adding a dollop of feminism to a male-dominated country. Most unique, though, is the Mosuo tradition of "walking marriage." Arranged matches, for centuries the Chinese norm, are unheard of. Instead, women commonly take several lovers during lives of serial monogamy, without suffering scarlet letter opprobrium. The men visit the women's homes at night, often secretly; any resulting children are raised by the woman's family. Even the name of the woman's trysting room is brochure-perfect: the "flower chamber."

Chinese writers often eroticize the Mosuo as denizens of a lakeside love nest. And the locals wink at the visitors' romantic expectations, cannily recognizing the commercial potential. At the popular Mosuo Folk Culture Museum, which sits in a cornfield near the lake, employees perform a mating ritual. A man sings of his love from outside his sweetheart's window. She answers in a beguiling falsetto that "My uncle lies awake; you must wait." But he can't wait, and, to ribald encouragement from the crowd, he scales his way into her second-story window. Although jumping from window to window does sometimes happen, the singing doesn't follow the pattern, and a guide quickly explains that men "never walk chaotically from house to house." There follows a lengthy lecture on how walking marriages underpin stable families. One Chinese man asks if he can have a walking marriage too. "If the woman will have you," comes the coy reply. It's pleasant entertainment, and the tourists leave understanding something of this unique tradition.

All this attention has helped walking marriages hit a new stride beyond even the Mosuo. Another minority in the area, the Pumi, always practiced conventional marriages. But people like Jama, a 26-year-old Pumi who pretends to be Mosuo while rowing customers in her canoe, has forgone a wedding in favor of a walking marriage with her boyfriend. While nursing their 14-month-old son by the lake, she explains that "if I decide my boyfriend isn't worth it, we'll split up, so we don't fight like married couples do." Locals say walking marriage is spreading quickly among the Pumi but, significantly, only in Luoshui, where tourism has piqued interest in Mosuo culture.

With the Mosuo constantly on show, there's no longer a clear curtain between what's staged for the tourists and what's real. Mosuo women, for instance, only began putting blossoms in their headdresses a decade ago when plastic flowers first arrived. Curious tourists asked what they meant and the Mosuo concocted an answer: many flowers means seeking a lover, one flower signals a steady love, no flowers means buzz off. But what started as a charming reply to visitors has become common practice. "Cultures always change, and with tourism it happens faster," says Zhou Huashan, a researcher who has lived beside Lugu Lake for two years and has written a book on the Mosuo. A reborn pride in their culture, though, pervades. Only in the most heavily visited areas do young Mosuo women wear their traditional costumes—even in the rainy season when tourists stay home.

Seeing the money to be made from Mosuo tourism, the government has tried to grab a piece of the action. Officials in Ninglang county, which includes much of the Mosuo's territory, last year built the garish Mosuo Village Hotel on the lake. Most travelers, however, prefer to stay in the real village, where the hotels tend to be family-run, instead of in a government-built facsimile. Frustrated, the county has built a tollbooth outside Luoshui to collect $5 from each person entering what should be a public place. "They might have some other plans to develop this area," says village chief Celi Pingcuo, "but we hang together and help ourselves."

Of course, as the area becomes more popular there's a danger that it will get overrun and be spoiled. A recent event in a remote Mosuo village hinted at what's to come. On the final night of a three-day funeral for a family's matriarch, Mosuo men in sheepskin cloaks danced around a fire to frighten away ghosts. Suddenly, two tourists barged in and, at their own invitation, slipped into skins and joined the sacred ritual. No visitor had ever shown up like that. Still, none of the locals seemed to mind this incursion. And one of the two, a doctor from Shenzhen named Wang Lianghua, was enraptured by what he saw on his trip. "There are a lot of lies about the Mosuo," he says, "and a lot to learn from their culture."

As for Namu, she's back—and poised to cash in on Mosuo mania like everyone else. Though she now lives in Beijing, she recently returned to her childhood village of Zuosuo with a plan to build her own guesthouse there. Sitting in a small local restaurant, eating a bowl of soup filled with chicken feet, she discusses her future with her Chinese business manager. First, he says, he'll arrange to make her the "cultural ambassador" for the popular Red Mountain Pagoda cigarettes. Then, the cigarette company will pave a road to her guesthouse. From Beijing, he adds, she'll be able to steer tens of thousands of visitors a year to the area, and "we'll monopolize all the scenic attractions around the lake."

Namu, now 32, nods but remains noncommittal. "I have mixed feelings," she says later. "We need tourism so that [BRACKET {local}] people will stay and not move to the cities," but she knows that all this development could spin out of control and wreck the calm beauty of her homeland. Still, her grandiose plans have at least brought her close to her family again. Her mother—no longer estranged—will run Namu's guesthouse. The prodigal daughter has returned.

Times Asia　http://www.time.com/time/asia/features/china_cul_rev/minorities1.html