Leaving Mother Lake (32 page)

By Rock’s time, however, all that was left of the ancient Naxi kingdom were a few crumbling feudal enclaves plagued by local tyranny, opium addiction, and banditry, among which Yongning was the only vital exception. In Lijiang the Naxi had been subjected to Confucian administration for two hundred years, and they had adopted so many Chinese customs that even Jacques Bacot had thought them just like the Chinese. But Rock quite rightly saw that the Naxi had also retained extraordinary traditions, in particular an ancient religion called Dongba, whose ceremonies were written in an exotic pictographic script unknown anywhere else in China. Rock, who believed the Dongba had originated in the pre-Buddhist Bon religion of Tibet, devoted the rest of his life to the translation of Naxi ceremonial texts. Now, the Moso also had a folk religion, called Daba, but they did not have manuscripts or pictographs. The Daba religion was purely oral, and Rock assumed that it was nothing more than an impoverished version of the Naxi Dongba.

It is truly a great loss to anthropology that Rock’s intellectual passion lay with the religion of the Naxi and did not include Moso culture. For whereas his translations of Naxi ceremonies are unsurpassed for the attention he paid to detail, when it came to the Moso, he was anything but precise. Although Rock had been a close and loyal friend of the Yongning feudal lord with whom he had spent “many happy and peaceful hours,” what he had to say of Moso society could be summed up in a few acerbic generalities to the effect that women owned houses and took lovers for as long as they wished, and that the Moso had such an “inordinate number of bastard children” that the word
father
was altogether missing from their vocabulary — a phenomenon that he further attributed to the many Buddhist monks who lived in Yongning and whose vows of celibacy “did not refrain them from sexual activities.”

As I was to discover some years later, the Moso themselves have kept very fond memories of Dr. Rock, whom they credit with legendary deeds of kindness, including his fathering of many blue-eyed, blond-haired children. These stories, however, are probably just stories. Rock was a formidable figure, a bad-tempered and opinionated man who never went anywhere without his portable bathtub and an armed garrison but who nurtured a timidity toward women that bordered on the pathological. If we believe his biographer, the late Sylvia Stutton, he was the least likely man to have fathered anyone.

In the fall of 1990, I enrolled as a scholar at the Academy of Social Sciences in Yunnan to research a Ph.D. topic I was still at great pains to define beyond the stubborn notion that I wanted to learn about the Moso. By then I had read all of Rock’s books and I still knew little more about the Moso than what I had found out from Teacher Lü’s newspaper articles. Worst of all, I had visited Lijiang the previous year and discovered that it was impossible to travel farther. The Country of Daughters was closed to foreigners. The region was too backward, Comrade X of the Public Security Bureau had explained, there were no roads and no way to guarantee the safety of foreign friends. And now my professors at the academy confirmed what I already knew: that non-Chinese scholars were not allowed to do fieldwork in Yongning. But they proposed a solution. The academy had just hired a brilliant young man, Lamu Gatusa, the first and only Moso academician. I could get all my information from him, and I could also study Naxi culture with the Naxi scholars — since, after all, the Naxi and the Moso were the same people.

“Really? They are the same people?” I asked, hopeful. “Maybe not,” said Lamu Gatusa, who informed me that the Moso had petitioned the central government to be identified as a “Moso nationality” entirely separate from the Naxi.

From our first meeting, Gatusa and I became friends, and like all good friends, we talked a lot — about the Moso, their family life, their extraordinary sexual customs, their moral values and religious beliefs, and the differences between them and the Naxi. Within a few weeks, and by complicated means, we had obtained permission to travel together to the valley of the Yangtze River that divides Naxi and Moso territories and where the Moso are neither matriarchal nor matrilineal but patrilineal and therefore believed to be a “link population” between Naxi and Moso. This, my first introduction to Moso culture, to the beauty and majesty of Moso country, and to the kindness and generosity of Gatusa’s family, made an indelible impression on both my heart and my memory.

Back in Kunming, we began working on the translation of ceremonies from the old Daba religion that we had recorded in Labei, as well as others Gatusa had collected over several years. And, of course, we kept talking. One evening Gatusa told me about a beautiful Moso singer called Erche Namu who now lived in Beijing. He had visited her some months before. “We were pen friends when she was at the Music Conservatory in Shanghai.” He laughed, his dark eyes shining. “She married an American. He speaks Chinese just like a native. . . . True, his Chinese is perfect! Oh, yes, that American husband, he’s really something!”

I wondered if I would ever meet Namu, and if my Chinese would ever be perfect. Then, as the months passed, I wondered if Gatusa would ever realize his dream of recording the entire Daba ceremonial corpus and how much of it I would ever get to translate. By then I was devoted to our religious studies.

Examining Daba liturgy and ritual, I had been struck by fundamental differences between Naxi and Moso religions that fueled other questions I had begun formulating ever since our visit to Labei. In particular, I was not convinced by the description of Labei Moso as a “link population” whose customs were derived from both Naxi and Moso cultures. As far as I could tell, the people of Labei were very different from their Naxi neighbors, even those who lived closest to them on the opposite side of the Yangtze River. It seemed to me that the Labei people were Moso in every way but one: they were not matrilineal.

Gatusa’s work on the Daba was entirely original. No one else knew anything about the old Moso religion. Joseph Rock had simply
assumed
that the Daba was a poor relation of the Naxi religion. And a few decades later, Chinese scholars (and others) had done the same thing in order to provide evidence of the common origin of the Moso and the Naxi, a proposition sorely lacking in historical documentation that appeared to me in an ever more interesting light. For Naxi and Moso history, I had found out, was far from a proven fact. It was a matter of theory, of ethnohistorical reconstruction, of detective work based on a patchy historical record and correlative evidence: linguistics, customs, genealogies, religion, and thus it was open to discussion, to further enquiry and research. In other words, it was a Ph.D. topic. But it was also a significant political issue that my teachers at the academy were now advising me not to bother exploring. Because the idea that the Naxi and the Moso were once the same people was the very thing that legitimized the Moso’s official classification into the Naxi nationality — and the very thing the Moso were now contesting.

But my teachers were too late. Curiosity had already grown into a fixation that was to drive me for the next six years to do nothing else but attempt to unravel the mysteries of Moso and Naxi history. During these six years many things happened, but of special interest: in 1992 I obtained a restricted permit to visit Yongning for the first time; and some months later, northern Yunnan was unconditionally opened to foreign visitors; then in 1993 the Chinese government rejected Moso demands for national identification; and I met Erche Namu in San Francisco.

Seven years later Namu sat at my desk, next to me, and she began to tell me stories about her childhood, what it was like to be a girl growing up in Moso country. And so she talked, and we cried and we laughed, and then we cried again, and in this way we drafted the story that became
Leaving Mother Lake.
But this story, the story of Namu’s girl-hood among her people, is in every way an extraordinary one, telling of a unique experience, a unique destiny, and an inimitable personality. It is not the story of all Moso.

What I present here is not the story of all Moso either, but rather a little of what I have learned about their society and what I have hypothesized of their history. And I can only hope that it speaks on their behalf as helpfully as Namu credits me for speaking on hers. Because ever since the Communist revolution intruded into their world in 1956, the Moso have been under great pressure to explain themselves, and few of China’s ethnic people have been so consistently misrepresented and misunderstood and at times, indeed, mistreated.

The Naxi nationality to which the Moso officially belong dwells in northwest Yunnan province, on both sides of the Golden Sands River, as the Yangtze is known in these parts. On the western shore, Lijiang Autonomous County is home to approximately 240,000 people who are identified specifically as Naxi (pronounced Na-shi), while the people who call themselves Moso live on the eastern shore in Yongning and number about 30,000. The Yangtze has divided the Naxi and the Moso for centuries, at the very least since 1381, when the Ming court established Lijiang and Yongning as separate feudal districts. And with this ancient administrative boundary came important developments. In Lijiang, Confucianism and Chinese culture increasingly influenced the Naxi, and especially after they came under direct Chinese rule in 1723, they took part in all the major political upheavals that befell the Chinese nation. In 1949 the Naxi were at the vanguard of the Communist revolution. By contrast, the Moso were oriented toward Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism, and today they are still devout followers of the Gelugpa, the Yellow Church of the Dalai Lama. And although Yongning was a feudal district administered by Chinese decree, the Moso lived almost entirely isolated from the rest of China — until 1956, when the People’s Liberation Army turned their world over.

Nestled in the spectacular mountains of the southern China-Tibet borderland, Moso country begins east of the Yangtze and extends from the mountains and terraced fields of Labei across the Yongning plain and beyond Lake Lugu into the territories of Qiansuo and Zuosuo in Sichuan province. The lake, which the Moso call Xienami, or Mother Lake, lies at about ten thousand feet of altitude. It is immense. Towering above it is the squat figure of the sacred mountain Gamu, the mother goddess who watches over the Moso people, and perhaps also the tourists and other alien visitors who have come to experience “matriarchal life” in the Country of Daughters.

As could be expected, Moso country is more complex than tourist guides and the mass media may ever care to explain. To begin, the Moso are not the sole inhabitants of the Country of Daughters so much as they are the dominant ethnic group. Other groups include Pumi, Lisu, Yi, Tibetans, Naxi, and more recently Han Chinese who have settled as traders in the town centers. As to the Moso themselves, they do not form a strictly homogeneous cultural group but rather several local groups. Thus, in the mountains of Labei where Gatusa comes from, the Moso trace their genealogies from fathers to sons and they also contract marriages in a way fitted to a larger cultural complex spanning the Himalayas from western China to Ladakh. Until 1956 there were three Moso districts, the largest of which was the feudal principality of Yongning in Yunnan, while the smaller districts in Sichuan —Qiansuo and Zuosuo, where Namu comes from — had seceded from Yongning in the early eighteenth century. Today the Moso are still divided on either side of the administrative line between Yunnan and Sichuan provinces, with the Sichuan Moso being officially classed as Mongols and the people of Yunnan as Naxi.

Yet, in spite of territorial and administrative differences, all Moso identify themselves as Moso as well as share essential cultural traits that not only make sense of their common identity but also readily distinguish them from both the Mongols and the Naxi. All Moso speak and understand the same language, worship common gods, eat the same foods, sing the same songs, and wear similar traditional dress, and all Moso, even the patrilineal people of Labei, share the belief that the true Moso family, that essential, founding unit of society, is the extended maternal household.

And certainly, from the perspective of those on the other side of the mountains, this matrilineal Moso family cannot help but fascinate — for the Moso are reputed to be the only people in the world who consider marriage an attack on the family. In fact, marriage was never entirely absent from Moso society, and Moso families have grown ever more diversified since the revolution, but formal marriages and nuclear families are still relatively few. Outside patrilineal Labei, the ideal family is a large group of people, all related through the women of the house — grandmothers, maternal great-uncles, mothers, sisters, maternal uncles, daughters, sons, grandchildren, nephews, and nieces. At the core of this family, there may be no husband, no wife, and no father, but, instead, brothers, sisters, mothers, and maternal uncles. Ideally, Moso families should never divide, wealth should be held communally and shared equally for the benefit of all family members, and there should be no need for inheritance rules because property may simply pass on, down the generations, as children succeed their mothers and uncles in the ancestral home.

While the Moso uphold this ideal of an indivisible family, however, they also keep sexual relations strictly out of the family — a rule of conduct that finds its most concrete expression in the fact that in a Moso house, only women have their own bedrooms, evocatively called
babahuago,
or “flower rooms.” Old people and children under thirteen sleep in the main room, near the fireplace or in wooden alcove beds alongside the walls. Adult men are expected to sleep at their lovers’, or if they don’t have lovers, in one of the outhouses or guest rooms if the family has those. And Moso custom not only forbids adult men from sleeping under the same roof as their sisters, it also prohibits any type of sexual talk, allusion, joking, or even the singing or humming of love songs in the family home. Although women and men are free to choose their lovers and to maintain sexual relations for as long or short a time as they desire, what a woman and her “friend”
(azhu)
do in the privacy of her bedroom is left to individual discretion. If a couple decide to make their relationship public, they can spend time together with each other’s relatives, but their romantic involvement should not be discussed in front of family members of the opposite sex, including their own children. These rules of sexual propriety are so strict that ideally, and this was the case until the Communist intervention, they would qualify the public disclosure of children’s fathers. In the past, people often learned about their fathers indirectly, or they might not have known at all. And although there are two words in the Moso language for father,
abo
and
ada
, fathers were commonly addressed as Awu, which simply means uncle.