We really don’t need husbands

Fiona MacGregor 

Among the Mosuo people of China’s Yunnan Province, tradition dictates that women call the shots, there are no marriages and sexual partners lead separate lives, even if they have children together. 

That their birth family is far more reliable than families formed by marriage. ‘We have a saying that explains it,’ says Qi Du back at the wooden farmhouse where she lives with her extended family. She’s stirring up a potent concoction of fermented rice and fried egg in a wok over the open fire that she says will help fend off the bitter, clate-Autumn cold. ‘A man and a woman are like two trees growing side by side: their roots are separate, but their branches overlap. A Mosuo saying goes something like this: ‘If you [a woman] are lying dead by the road and your love-friend walks past, he will keep walking. If your little brother sees you there, he will stop and cry.

Qi Du is a chatty, smiling woman in her early 40s with a passion for gambling on card games. She sees no reason to live with a long-term partner to achieve happiness in love, sex and child-rearing. We really don’t need a husband because in every household, you have a brother and a lama [a male family member who has been educated at the local temple and lives as a monk],’ she says. Marriage, in the conventional Western sense, didn’t exist among the Mosuo until new rules were imposed in the mid-1960s during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, forcing couples to enter official marriages in the same way as the nation’s Han majority. Until then, if a woman and man wanted to start a sexual relationship, he would start to visit her house at night. When one or both partners wanted to end relations, he would simply stop visiting.

UPHOLDING TRADITION

Today, life around the lake is changing rapidly due to increased exposure to outside cultures. But ‘It’s better for men and women to live apart because there is less conflict. If you and your love-friend live together, it will lead to arguments about lots of small things. It’s 8pm, and the moon is full behind the jagged peaks that encircle Lake Lugu like dragons’ teeth. The white eye of a motorbike headlight approaches and then passes into the blackness. Walking beside me on our return from the market, Gongts Dash Duma, or Qi Du as she is known, looks back along the road the bike rider has taken. ‘Didi – my little brother,’ she says with a grin. ‘He’s going to see his aipengyou.’ A few minutes later, a second bike bumps past on the pock-marked road, then a third. There’s a slow but steady stream of riders now and most are on their way to visit their aipengyous – sexual partners whom they usually only meet at night – travelling to their lovers’ home after sunset and returning to their own houses at first light. 

Earlier visitors to this mountainous region of southwest China named such relationships ‘walking marriages’. Now, the men of Yunnan Province’s minority Mosuo people use speedier methods of travel to get to their loved ones. But the principle remains the same: when a man and a woman begin a physical relationship, neither of them has any expectation that they will share daily life or a home – even if they have children together. 

SEPARATE LIVES

Here, in one of the world’s last remaining matriarchies, Mosuo men and women usually live in their mothers’ houses their entire lives, believing with the rules less rigidly enforced by the current government, many in the 50,000-strong Mosuo community choose to follow their culture’s traditions. ‘People [lovers] don’t get angry with each other, because we don’t have to get a divorce,’ explains Qi Du. ‘If we don’t get along, we don’t get along and simply stop seeing each other.’

And, she adds, since most Mosuo people remain living with their birth family rather than their spouse, break-ups are less disruptive than in other cultures.  ‘The men don’t tell the women what to do, the women just do it,’ she explains. ‘If the women don’t want to do something, we won’t. If we do, we do. Qi Du’s grandmother, Gonts Bima, in common with other Mosuo grannies, is the household’s matriarch and responsible for making all the family’s major decisions. Gonts Bima, whose face is as wrinkled as the plump brown walnuts that are being harvested around the lake, is sitting by the fire cracking up with laughter at her own jokes. She gives a comic performance of charades behind her son’s back. He’s a quiet man in his early 40s with a tolerant smile. Her gestures are funny, but clearly not particularly complimentary. She’s suggesting that he doesn’t bring home enough money for the extended family’s expenses. Yet for all her daft-old-lady antics, Gonts Bima, or Ama as she is known to the family, really does hold the power in this household. The land, property and possessions all belong to her. ‘If we need money for something or want to buy something important, we have to ask Ama,’ explains Qi Du. It’s also Gonts Bima to whom family members turn for advice. ‘When you were younger, didn’t you feel embarrassed speaking to your grandmother about personal matters to do with being a boy or becoming a man?’ I ask LiJia Zuay, 35. ‘Of course not,’ he replies, looking puzzled. ‘I am never embarrassed with Ama.’

A HARD LIFE

Kuma, a bustling grandmother in her early 60s just laughs when asked if the men know that the women are in charge. ‘Of course they know. They know we are too important,’ she says. ‘Our culture is a good one, because women are free to make choices in love. The women have high status.’ But power brings responsibilities, and Kuma, in common with other Mosuo women to whom I speak, believes that a woman’s life is much harder than a man’s. ‘The women do everything, it can be very hard,’ she says with a sigh. ‘The men say they are full [after dinner] and don’t want to do anything.’ Modern life is also bringing changes to how Mosuo women feel about their power. Traditionally, men have taken little responsibility for raising their own children. In general, this hasn’t been seen as a negative. ‘Mosuo men are a lot less selfish than Han men because Han men only care about themselves and their immediate families, but Mosuo men care about everyone,’ says Kuma. Male role models are traditionally provided by the children’s maternal uncles, who live in the family home. But the traditional system means that the burden for providing most of a child’s physical and material needs lies with its mother, and the cost of raising a child alone is the most frequen tcomplaint raised by Mosuo women when discussing their matriarchal lifestyle. ‘It can be very difficult,’ explains Qi Du. ‘The men have labouring jobs, but often they won’t give money for the children.’ In the past, when the Mosuo lived a more subsistence existence, a child’s material needs were relatively basic. Now, with more exposure to the outside world through tourism, television, commerce and schools, women here say that they feel pressure to buy things for their children. This is one of the main reasons many women now prefer to have longer-term relationships with the father of their children and encourage them to be more involved in parenting. Older Mosuo women understand why the change is happening.

MOVE TO MONOGOMY

Ja Shima, a remarkably sprightly woman of 86 with a distinct fondness for baiju (the local rice spirit), had six husbands and six children by different fathers. Each relationship lasted between one and four years. ‘Three of them left me, and I left the other three,’ she says of her former husbands. ‘It was a hard life, because we never had enough food in those days and often the men didn’t contribute to the children’s upbringing. But if a man was no good in that way, I would just get another one.’ However, she thinks that it’s better now for women to stick with one man, at least while the are growing up. ‘Children were easier in the past. They didn’t need so many things and you could just make things for them,’ she says. ‘Now it’s harder for mothers if the men don’t contribute.’ Her neighbour, Li Hua, an efficient, handsome woman in her early 30s, agrees. She’s the only woman in the village who lives full time with her husband, the pair running a small guesthouse for the few Chinese tourists prepared to venture this far into the Yunnan–Schezchuan border region. ‘People think I am odd,’ she says with a sigh. ‘But it’s much better if you live with your partner. Many of the women with love-friends don’t get enough help to get things for the children.’ As if on cue, her husband arrives home from the market bearing several tiny pairs of socks and other clothes for their ten-month-old baby boy, who sits on the earth floor playing with sticks from the fire. The Chinese government’s one-child policy doesn’t apply to many of the country’s minority peoples, who generally live in less-populated rural areas. Mosuo women are allowed two or three children depending on which province they live in. Unlike the Han, who generally value boys above   girls, Mosuo are happy to have daughters.

DESTINED FOR DIVORCE

Most Mosuo women still prefer to live apart from their lovers, even if they’re in a long-term relationship. One morning, as Qi Du prepares breakfast of black pudding and fried flat-bread, there’s an old man sitting beside Gonts Bima at the fire. I ask who he is, and Gonts Bima giggles like a schoolgirl, quickly makes a cross sign with her fingers to indicate that he is her love-friend, and then gestures that it should be a secret, although clearly everyone in the room knows exactly who he is. The pair have been together for decades, but generally it isn’t considered polite to discuss personal relationships in front of the men. Later, Gonts Bima explains that during the Cultural Revolution, she and her love-friend were told they had to live together as man and wife, but as soon as it was over, they went back to living apart. ‘We prefer it this way,’ she says, grinning.  ‘We get on better. ’And younger Mosuo woman can also find it difficult to settle into sharing their home with a husband. Kuma tells me that, quite often, Mosuo women who travel to the nearest city, Lijiang, for work will marry a man they meet there, but such relationships often end in divorce. ‘I wasn’t happy living with him, we weren’t getting along,’ says 19-year-old Xiao-Juan, who married and had a baby with a Tibetan man she met there 18 months ago. Her baby still spends time with his father, but Xiao-Juan has returned to her village and already has a new love-friend. ‘I am happier now,’ she says. The intrusion of the wider world is also changing attitudes. There are still a few Mosuo villages without electricity, but in the majority, television has taken over from local dances as the evening entertainment of choice. With it has come the ubiquitous Han-Chinese soap operas – implausible dramas in which submissive female characters seek lifetime happiness with their hero of choice. It may be a coincidence, but Mosuo women, self-reliant for so long, now also speak about how nice it would be to have one man there to look after them during difficult times, but the pace of change is slow and most prefer the old ways.