Choo Waihong grew up in Singapore before training and working as a corporate lawyer in Canada, the US, and London. She felt drawn back to China, but stumbled across the kingdom of women, a series of villages dotted around a mountain and Lugu Lake, where a Tibetan tribe called the Mosuo still practices its matriarchal ways:
As an unmarried woman in a community where marriage is non-existent, Waihong felt at home.
“All Mosuo women are, essentially, single,” she says. “But I think I’m seen as an oddity because I’m not from here, and I live alone, rather than with a family. I get a lot of dinner invitations, and my friends are always egging me on to find a nice Mosuo lover.” Has she? “That would be telling.”
With life centred on the maternal family, motherhood is, unsurprisingly, revered. For a young Mosuo woman, it is life’s goal. “I’ve had to advise many young women on ovulation, so keen are they to get pregnant,” she says. “You are seen as complete once you become a mother.” In this respect, Waihong, who doesn’t have children, is regarded more keenly. “My sense is that I’m pitied,” she says, “but people are too polite to tell me.”
Glossed over by most of these articles is that the Mosuo were historically ruled by a patrilineal nobility who forced the peasants to be matrilineal to prevent peasant competition.
I’m reminded of the War Nerd’s point that the Tibetans were never peaceful people at all.
Speaking of Tibet, is it Shangri-La or Dogpatch?