Why is it common in the villages around Lake Lugu to see young men rather than old ones strolling at dawn, tired but looking content? They return from a zou hun, or traveling marriage, one of the most un-Chinese traditions you’ll find in China.
Traveling marriage is a Mosuo custom, not Naxi, the predominant ethnic minority in the Lugu Lake area of Yunnan province. And yes, there is a difference, unless Liverpool is more or less the same as Manchester, and Canadian culture is a subset of American.
The Mosuo get most of their PR juice from the widely held myth that it is a matriarchal society, where women make the rules, have all the rights, and peace reigns as a result. Although it is more accurate to call the Mosuo matrilineal, and for typically historical reasons. Until they became a tourist industry, the Mosuo were an elite society that ruled many oppressed. The nobility was unrepentantly patriarchal, and long ago imposed a matrilineal tradition on the plebs, to remove threats to their power.
Apparently creative repression has long-term benefits for the repressed. Although far from being the authoritarian land mothers that feminists would like them to be, Mosuo women have suffered far fewer social restrictions than their unfortunate Han counterparts, and an astonishingly progressive institution, the itinerant marriage.
As with moths and mating cats, it is the male Mosuo who travels. After her right of passage initiation, a pubescent Mosuo girl obtains a skirt and her own bedroom, although the rest of the house is typically communal and privacy is a rare commodity. Once she has passed puberty, she can start organizing traveling marriages.
Remarkable as their sexual freedom is, intimacy is always a matter of discretion, and itinerant marriages are secretly arranged only between prospective partners. Thus, the Mosuo man’s practice of walking to his date’s house only after dark (Mosuo village streets are notoriously poorly lit) and rushing home in the dawn hours when someone brazen enough to make comments is still in bed.
We can learn as much about ourselves in our reaction to the traveling marriage as we do about the Mosuo. Inevitably, the myth has grown that Mosuo women are insatiably promiscuous and that their boudoirs resemble open casting calls, with new talent auditioned every night. far from there Although it would be rare for a Mosuo woman to have only one partner for life, most such unions are long-term. Furthermore, it is equally unusual for a Mosuo woman to have more than one partner at a time, many of which last a lifetime. And we’re still reading angry editorials about the new immoral practice of “serial monogamy.”
However, even if the traveling marriage becomes a prolonged arrangement, the man will never settle with his partner’s family, nor the woman with hers. He already has a family that he is responsible for, as is she. There are no new nuclear family ambitions for the Mosuo, or shared ownership.
When children are begotten from itinerant marriage, the father is under no obligation, as it is for a Confucian born and raised as it is for a Presbyterian. If he is willing, he signals his choice to take an active role in raising the child with gifts to the mother’s family and declares his intention to do so. This gives him a certain status within the family, but in no way a claim to kinship. The child takes the surname of his mother, father or not.
One can almost hear Pat Robertson’s moral outrage, as she makes quick associations between the Mosuo system, the welfare state, and everything that ails degenerate modern society. However, if he were to make an in-depth tour of the surroundings of Lijiang, he would find very few mature men hanging around the street corners. A mature Mosuo man is honor-bound to stay with his mother’s family and support all the children born to the women of that family, none of whose bedrooms he has ever visited.
Women who choose partners as they please, men who care not for their flesh and blood but for their sisters’: if it all sounds a little too communal and hippie, consider the historically outlier consequences. Mosuo girls do not grow up to be sold to another family and thus enjoy esteem as more than just the mouth to feed of another clan.
Goodbye preference for boys, hello gender equality. Not Andrea Dworkin equality, with boys wearing skirts and girls playing football, but gender balance. Too many men and not enough children to grow the household. Too many females means not enough bacon was brought home. This leads to the practice of adopting and even exchanging children between households. If children get confused, at least they never feel alone. Mosuo culture is one of inclusion, inclusive on a higher level than that of the otherwise inescapable blood bond. It’s hard not to wonder what such a system could do in other parts of the world, where unkinship means isolation, the plague of the 21st century.
