Josambro

Lake Lugu is the home of the Mosuo tribe, a matriarchal and matrilineal society living in a valley on the border of China’s Yunnan and Sichuan provinces. At the center of their home and cultural identity is a sacred body of water that they call Mother Lake. Sitting at an elevation of around 7500 feet, Lugu is a deep pool of pure azure water dotted by a few small, lush islands bearing Tibetan style temples, shrines and one monastery. The men of Lugu are uncommonly handsome, the women beautiful and exceptionally outgoing. While this trait is strange for rural China, in a matriarchal society it makes sense. In Lugu, women make most major decisions, control household finances, and pass their surnames onto their children.

But what makes the Mosuo truly unique is one particularly juicy facet of their familial relationships, their practice of zuo hun, or “walking marriage.” The Mosuo do not marry – rather, a woman chooses her lovers from among the men of the tribe, taking as many as she sees pleases over the course of her life. In Mosuo culture, having fathered children with different women bears no social stigma. Children are raised communally, more-or-less, and in most cases grow up in the mother’s home, surrounded by any number of sisters, brothers, and “uncles.”

This highly personal practice (and not their colorful dress and tribal song-and-dance routines, as official Chinese tourist brochures would have you believe) has made Lake Lugu one of SW China’s most talked about tourist destinations, infinitely fascinating to Han Chinese tourists and foreign anthropologists alike. This, in turn, has changed the economy of the Mosuo from a herding and farming based economy to one of titillation-driven tourism.

It’s at one of the many outdoor BBQ stands that line the shores of Mother Lake where I meet up with a young Mosuo woman named Yangmei. Though she tells me she’s 19, her face is still flush with shades of adolescence. Perhaps it’s her cheerful disposition that causes me to pick hers over the other BBQ joints on the town’s one dusty street. Maybe it’s the way she calls me over.

“Hey, handsome boy…” she yells in Mandarin “Come on over, I just killed a goat.”

What man could resist a line like that?

“How much?” I ask

“20 Yuan (about $2.20 US),” she replies “with all you can eat, and free tea.”

20 Yuan buys a lot of mutton outside of the big cities, so Yangmei and I have a lot of time to talk. After exhausting the usual foreigner / Chinese chitchat about language skills and chopstick proficiency, the conversation turns decidedly more intimate.

“Why are you traveling alone?” She asks. “Don’t you have a girlfriend?”

“Not at the moment.” I answer “But I think you’re a bit young for me.”

Thankfully, she laughs at this (as opposed to throwing tea on me). “I wasn’t propositioning you!” she says, “Actually, I have a steady boyfriend, though my mother doesn’t approve.”

This strikes me as strange. In Mosuo society, a girl is considered a woman when she turns 13 and has her skirt ceremony. After the ceremony, she’s come of age, free to choose lovers as she pleases. I ask Yangmei what her mother’s objections are.

“Mother thinks I’m being disrespectful to our heritage by having a steady boyfriend. She thinks I ought to follow the old ways, to take more than one lover. It’s a big problem between us. Actually…” (At this her voice lowers) “My boyfriend and I are thinking of leaving Lugu after the summer, and moving to Kunming (capital of Yunnan province.) We may get officially married.”

As we speak, two Han Chinese men with cameras and pockmarked faces walk by. They stop for a minute, not to eat, but to take pictures.

“Why aren’t you wearing your Mosuo clothing?” One asks somewhat disappointedly.

“Ah, I only wear those on special occasions. These are my everyday clothing.”

“You are very pretty! Did you do zuo hun last night?” Asks the other, shooting Yangmei a sly, sideways leer.”

Yangmei just laughs, and offers the men some mutton. They walk on, laughing and babbling in northern-accented Mandarin.

“Doesn’t that bother you, two total strangers asking you about your sex life?” I ask when they’re out of earshot. “Where I come from, a guy gets smacked for that.”

Yangmei shrugs. “I’m used to it.” She says “They’re tourists, they don’t know any better. They don’t care about our religion, our culture or history. To them, Mosuo culture is all about sex, nothing else.”

In light of the tremendous amount of tourist money that’s come into Lugu precisely due to this perception (the Mosuo are the richest tribe in Yunnan), Yangmei’s tolerance of leering tourists is understandable. Still, I find myself wondering if perhaps tourism isn’t the shark-shaped fin in Lake Lugu’s once pristine waters. In recent years, Han Chinese men have been lured to Lugu Lake by the prospect of easy sex, giving rise to various and sundry unsavory businesses on the outskirts of town. I ask Yangmei if that’s what the half-dozen or so single Chinese men walking up and down the town’s one dusty street are after.

“Probably.” She says, “With families, it’s the culture. They really like the singing and dancing shows, that sort of thing. But with single men, they think all they need to do is show up and they’ll be invited home by a local girl.”

“Does this ever happen?” I ask

“No!” she answers, laughing “Those guys will probably wind up spending the evening at one of the Karaoke parlors outside of town. The girls who work there aren’t even Mosuo…. just Sichuan women playing dress-up.”

Yangmei and I continue talking until the sun goes down. I ask her questions about Mosuo culture, and she asks me more immediately practical questions (“how much will my boyfriend and I be able to make working in Kunming?”)

When the sun goes down, I return to my guesthouse, which bears the interesting though nonsensical name “The Customal hotel of the girl kingdom.” Like most of rural China, women (in this case Ms. Tsao, the proprietress of the hotel and her three teenaged daughters) perform the real work, while the men mostly seem to loaf around. In the center of the courtyard, a group of Mosuo men sit smoking and playing cards. The men have an air of serenity about them, a quality I’ve found in short supply in the rest of China. The older men, I find out, are uncles, fathers to Ms. Tsao’s daughters. The younger ones, I presume, are the daughter’s lovers, waiting for the evening to end and the night to begin. In the morning, if tradition is upheld, they will return to their own homes. It is from this, the sight of local men walking home after dawn, that the term “walking marriage” is derived.

In the morning, the men are gone, the women are working, and it’s time for me to be moving on. I decide to hitchhike, and stand by the side of the one road out of town with my thumb out. The first vehicle that passes by stops, and I hop into the back of a converted army jeep being driven by a Mosuo man wearing a cowboy hat with a girl of about seven riding shotgun.

The pickup is rattling along the dirt road when the little girl spots something. “Uncle, stop!” she shouts, and the man dutifully obeys. A moment later, the girl is scrambling up a tree trunk about 15 yards from the road. “Uncle, get a bag! There’s lots of fruit still in this one”. The girl starts throwing down a small yellow fruit, something like a cross between a kumquat and an apricot.

“Your daughter must have eyes like a hawk to spot those fruit.” I say, wondering if I’m making a false assumption about their relationship. The man just chuckled.

“Yeah, that she does,” he says, and offers me one of the sour little fruits “I couldn’t spot them from that far away.” I ask him where they’re both heading, and he says something that wouldn’t be out of place in any modern American father-daughter relationship.

“Back to my house. My daughter stays with her mother on the weekdays, but I take care of her on the weekends.”

As the van bumps along, I find myself thinking about Yangmei’s mother, and wondering if her concerns, which seemed so amusing to me yesterday, might not be legitimate. Might her daughter, by choosing to love in the way so alien to the Mosuo (yet normal in most of the rest of the world) be inadvertently planting the seeds of cultural demise? What will Mother Lake – and the Mosuo – look like twenty years down the road?

The Author in Lugu Lake, 2004

I am keeping a diary of the film’s production at Snarky Tofu, but before getting too far on that I figured I’d post the original story at Josambro.com

Binglan Xiaojiemen (or betel nut girls) are Ubiquitous in cities and towns throughout Taiwan. These scantily clad women sit on the side of the road in transparent glass booths, from which they dispense baggies of betel nut, a mildly narcotic locally grown substance ingested primarily by men, usually taxi drivers, truckers and so forth. Though every so often some government official looking to score points with the high minded morality crowd will lead a crusade to get betel nuts banned (or at least to get betel nut girls to dress more modestly), little has come from these efforts. This story was inspired by a friend of mine who spent time getting to know some of these women. The first words, meaning ‘tell me’, are in the Taiwanese dialect.

Betel Nut Ingénue

‘Ga wu gong-a!’ Ah-wei laughed, slapping Ah-nei’s bare white shoulder with her palm. ‘Was it romantic? I hear foreigner men are so romantic. Tell me, tell me!’

‘Hmmmm…let me think.’ Ah-nei ran long fingers through her hair as if trying to conjure up moments past, prolonging her friend’s suspense. ‘Yes, definitely.’

‘Lucky! I can’t stand you!’

A blue Hyundai announced itself before the glass booth, tires crunching on gravel. ‘This one is mine.’ Ah-nei grabbed two baggies of betel nut and walked to the car, flamingo-like on high heels. Ah-nei bent down at the waist and presented the driver with a full view of the goods offered and those about which he could only dream.

‘Two bags leaf-wrapped, right handsome?’

The driver was in his early forties by the looks of him; he’d bought from the stand a few times before, always on Monday mornings. He was, by the looks of his car a family man, and Ah-nei assumed he was a businessman. The small struggles and low-grade disappointments of his life were just beginning to etch their map on the skin of his face. Ah-nei imagined the man leaving a doting tai-tai at home in a big apartment in Ilan on Monday mornings, leaving her to raise their child in a healthier environment while he drove into Taipei to manage whatever his business was during the week. She imagined that he had a small, non-descript efficiency apartment somewhere in Taipei not far from the office; he tried to drive back at least once or twice mid-week to spend the night with his wife and child. He loved his wife, or so he told himself, but couldn’t deny that he felt as if he’d comprised somewhere along the line. These thoughts he dealt with through drink, and the occasional debauch. Though she did not know his name, Ah-nei knew that she represented to him just a small taste of the latter. She smiled inwardly at the realization that in some small way she had a place in the environment of the man’s marriage.

‘Ganxie’ said the man, smiling. ‘Thank you for remembering me.’

‘Not so many handsome men buying from me, mostly pock-marked truckers.’

The driver held a 200-kuai note just inches out of the window. Ah-nei leaned in closer; strands of long black hair, soft as corn silk, tickled the man’s wrist as he handed her the money. ‘Keep the change,’ he said, and slowly accelerated back onto the road. She tucked the note into her the purse dangling from her hip as she walked back into the glass booth.

‘Why didn’t you just put your tongue in his ear?’ Ah-wei was amused. ‘You got close enough.’

‘You’re such a prude! Besides, I didn’t have to. It’s all about the implication.’

‘So you say! So what did you imply with your handsome ahdoga? Tell me everything. Where did you meet him?’

‘At a pub in Ilan. I think he is an English teacher. He speaks good mandarin, but only a little Taiwanese. ’

‘Was he nice to you?’

‘Mmmm…after we left the pub, he took me dancing, and then to sing Karaoke. He could really sing in Chinese.’

‘And then? What did you do after you left the KTV?”

‘Ai-ya, what do you think? And you know what they say about foreign men being bigger? Its really true.’

‘Pervert!’ shrieked Ah-wei, blushing ‘I knew you were bian-tai!’

‘Jealous!’ Ah-nei said, and perched herself on one of the booth’s two high, elegant stools and set back to work spreading white paste onto green leaves while her friend occupied herself with the task of wrapping the leaves around whole betel-nuts. Ah-nei thought about her foreigner. After they’d made love, she lay in his arms and told him about her life, about being a betel nut girl, having to dress up and smile for strange men all day long. Such a shameful profession, her mother said, only one step above prostitute. But the foreign man didn’t find it shameful at all. She hoped he would come by, hoped she would see him again.

For a few minutes, the two worked together in silence, two beautiful flamingos in a glass booth on the side of a provincial highway. Another car pulled up. Ah-wei was the first to look up from her bowl of betel nuts.

‘Wassa…a westerner.’

The driver, a thirty something white man with thinning hair and a pockmarked face was looking through the glass booth, staring at the two women. His eyes resting momentarily on Ah-nei. The man said something and laughed. The woman in the passenger seat, a Taiwanese, laughed and said something. The man laughed and said something back to her, then rolled down the window.

‘Hey, give us four Sarsaparillas’ the man shouted in Mandarin at the booth. When Ah-nei looked up, she saw that the ,am was now staring straight at her and smirking with a rough familiarity. For a moment, she stared back, feeling her skin flush before breaking the gaze off. She spoke tersely to Ah-wei.

‘This one is yours. Go and give them the sodas’

‘But I can’t…I don’t know what to say to foreign….’

‘Don’t say anything, just give him four cans of soda and take the money.’ Ah-nei kept her head down, eyes fixed on her own long fingers spread white narcotic jelly onto green leaves with fixed determination. Ah-wei pulled four cans of sarsaparilla out of the cooler and put them into a transparent plastic bag.

‘I want to say something to him in English! Um, hello is hao du yu du, right?’

‘Don’t bother, he can speak Mandarin. Just give him the sodas and take his money.’

Ah-wei slid open the door of the glass booth and walked gingerly towards the car, stiletto heels on gravel shoulder. In the back seat was an older couple. They looked like they must be the foreigner’s parents. The father looked at Ah-wei, powerful Taiwan sunshine shining off her tight black skirt almost blinding him. The mother stared straight ahead, and was not smiling. Ah-wei had forgotten how to make the sounds in English for hello. She gave the driver the sack of sodas.

‘Xie xie nimen’ the man said, handing her exact change ‘thanks to you both.’

The car pulled back onto the road. Ah-wei watched it, and thought she saw from the corner of her eye the man turn and wink. She teetered back into the booth. She understood now.

Ah-nei’s fingers were still working furiously; now she was rolling pasted leaves tightly around the betel nuts. Ah-wei sat down on the high stool, crossed her long legs, and took up the job of pasting green leaves. The two women worked in silence as the sun rose higher in the sky. A few cars stopped, and Ah-wei made deliveries and chatted with customers while her friend continued working, fingers rolling pasted leaves around nuts, squeezing them tightly.

‘We have enough now.’ Ah-wei said when she saw that the pile of rolled betel nuts threatened to spill from the plastic basket.

‘OK.’ Ah-nei wiped her hands, and for the first time since the foreign man had come, she looked up, eyes blinking in the sunshine. The two women sat listening to the humming of the air conditioner as the sun hovered over the mountains like a ball of jellied fire.

At last, Ah-wei broke the silence.

‘Was he at least, you know…more romantic?’ She asked quietly.

‘No.’ Answered Ah-nei. ‘He was just bigger.’

Click here to readMilky Teats of Serendipity at Cherry Bleeds.

It’s just before midnight and the wind is howling like a pack of vicious, evil wolves. Typhoon Sepat is bearing down hard over the eastern coast of Taiwan, and here on Penghu we’re being battered by ever-shifting gusts as the center of the storm pushes slowly towards us. There is no rain; that will come later, and stay perhaps for only a few hours, but perhaps for days. Many residents on the island have placed masking tape over their windows to keep the glass from exploding inward should things get really heavy. Even the laundromat, which never closes, has been shuttered. And amidst all of this preparation for wind-borne disaster I have been bitten on the testicle by a huge red fire-ant.

It was the last thing I expected on this of all nights. Taking the dog for one last long wind-walk before the anticipated deluge, I sat down on the grass for a few minutes to admire the handiwork of my neighbors and listen to the howling from what I assumed was a safe vantage point, on an open meadow far from any trees, garbage cans, or potentially exploding windows. I was considering the implications of the large taped X’s over the windows of a seventh story apartment across from my wife’s school when I felt a hideous, sickening burning sensation on my right testicle. Enraged and naturally confused, I jumped up and screamed so loud that my dog became frightened and ran towards me.

“What is it?” My wife shouted over the wind.

“I think a fire ant just bit me in the nuts,” I screamed back. I pulled down my pants, feeling slightly sick and conscious of an ever-increasing burn, but saw nothing of the offending insect. Once I was satisfied that the ant was no longer attached, I ran painfully back to my building, wincing as the wind screamed mockingly. By the time I got home the area of the bite was red and swollen. My wife prepared a salve for me (Aloe Vera, Basil & Lavender, if you’re interested, and no, I won’t be posting any pictures), and the swelling soon subsided.

Had I learned some kind of lesson from the experience I’d gladly impart it here.
But I suspect it was a freak occurrence, one of nature’s random attempts at humor. All I can say is that danger comes from all directions during a category five storm.

In the meantime, I’m going to resort to the unheard of by using this blog as a soapbox from which to rail against one aspect of life here that I’m finding increasingly odious. In this entry from many months back I wrote about a brand of chip I’d found in a story in Penghu, pondering aloud whether or not the artwork – which I thought was vaguely reminiscent of Mainland Chinese cultural revolution-era propaganda – might not be part of some cross strait cultural pollination. It wasn’t, as it turned out, and a few readers pounced on me on both that and another comment I’d made concerning some Taiwan independence advocates displaying an “Us or Them” mentality.

Again, I was dead wrong about the chips, for which I’d like to apologize, both to the President company that produces them, and to the chips themselves, each bag, individually.

I am sorry, President brand sweet potato chips. I see now that the artwork on your packages hearkens back to early Taiwanese cinema and not, as I had assumed, the Chinese cultural revolution. Plus, you are all very delicious.

But I do want to expand on my second (and more odious, in the eyes of many) opinion that there’s a growing sense of “Us or Them” growing in Taiwan’s collective unconscious. Maybe not so much “Us or Them,” as in “Taiwan or Mainland China,” but something more like “Us and Them,” with the “them” being “outsiders”, anyone who isn’t Taiwanese. The way that I’ve seen this manifesting itself is through language. Taiwan has an interesting linguistic make up; The two most widely spoken dialects are Hoklo, or Taiwanese (that’s the language being spoken in my wedding video) and Mandarin Chinese. During the martial law era, Taiwanese was suppressed by Chiang Kai-shek’s KMT as a way to foster a more “Chinese” identity among native Taiwanese.
Since the lifting of martial law, Taiwanese has become more widely used, in some parts of Taiwan surpassing Mandarin Chinese as the common tongue. Almost all Taiwanese people can still speak Mandarin, but some prefer to speak Taiwanese.

All this, in my opinion (I’m a blogger, so I’m supposed to have “opinions”) is fine and dandy. Like most westerners who’ve lived in Taiwan a long time, I studied Mandarin and can’t speak more than a few sentences of Taiwanese myself, but as an enemy of imperialism I like the idea of once-linguistically oppressed people reverting to their preferred tongues once the shackles of imperialism have been lifted. And I try – really I do – to use Taiwanese when I can, even though that its a hard language to learn (9 tones as opposed to Mandarin’s 4).

But over the last couple of years I’ve had a number of experiences that have made me think that Taiwan’s collective unconscious might be painting itself into a linguistic corner.

A few years back, I was doing an article for a HK based paper about tourism on Taiwan’s east coast, and had arranged an informal interview with an government official in charge of promoting tourism in that area. I was brought into the officials office by a third party, a guy who owns a really nice boutique hotel not too far from Ilan city. I’d introduced myself in Mandarin, the official responded in kind, and we made some small talk. I got my notebook out, ready to to scribble down any data which might help me to cobble together a story about the region. We weren’t three minutes into the interview when the official switched to Taiwanese and started talking not to me, but to the guy who’d brought me. I sat there patiently, and every once in a while the guy who brought me would translate from Taiwanese into English for me. I jokingly told the official that I spoke Mandarin, so we could all just speak together, and he laughed and said that I should learn to speak Taiwanese.

“Ha ha, fair enough” I said, “But I live in Hong Kong, so not much opportunity for that.”

The two continued talking, and I left feeling that the guy had been a bit of a dick for not speaking in a dialect that all parties assembled could understand, especially when the non-Taiwanese speaker was a writer trying to do an article about the beauty & accessibility of the very area that the government official was charged with promoting. But, like, whatever…

Now had this been an isolated incident, I probably would have forgotten about it. But over my last year back in Taiwan, I’ve played “the dumb foreigner” in at least a dozen variations of another pointless linguistic play. One of these happened just yesterday.

I was walking my dog in the park by my building where a trio of city landscapers were having their lunch break. One of them said “Ni hao?” to me, and I replied “hen hao, xie xie. Ni ne?”

Which is Mandarin for “Hello, how are you?” and “I’m fine, yourself?” Pretty standard fare.

One of the other gardeners immediately chimed in, saying in Taiwanese.

“The foreigner speaks mandarin! speak Taiwanese so he can’t understand you!”

Which, of course, I understood because the first words you learn in any language are generally me, you, speak, understand and I can’t understand.”

And anyone who lives in Taiwan knows the Taiwanese word for “foreigner” (“Ah-do-ga” – To my ears, an ugly sounding word).

Anyway, I just stared at the woman for ten seconds, before saying to her in Mandarin “If you don’t want to talk to me, just don’t talk to me.”

“Ha ha…your Chinese is so good!” She said.

“Yeah, Whatever…” I replied, and walked on in a slightly less good mood.

Again, if this were an isolated incident, I probably wouldn’t be writing about it either. But over the last year while traveling in Taiwan I’ve had the same sort of thing happen at least a dozen times. A local person starts a conversation with me in Mandarin and then immediately switches to Taiwanese, or I pass by a group of people speaking Mandarin with each other and, as I walk by, they switch to Taiwanese (usually saying something in Taiwanese like “switch to Taiwanese, a lot of foreigners can understand Mandarin, which is dumb because A, I don’t care what they’re saying, and B, see remarks about first words you learn above.

I have a hard time understanding this mentality.

Though I’ve met a few westerners who can speak Taiwanese, such folks are still pretty rare. I’m not sure what the numbers are. If any readers in Taiwan care to elucidate me, I’m all ears, but I’d say that less than 1 in 10 Chinese speaking western residents – people comfortable speaking in Mandarin day in, day out – speak better than a few dozen words of Taiwanese. But by and large, westerners who live in Taiwan live here because they feel warmly about Taiwan and its culture. Once upon a time Taiwan was loaded with western Sinophiles who stayed because life on the Mainland was too politically restrictive, or because they couldn’t make the kind of money in China that they could in Taiwan. But for your average westerner who isn’t going to China to start a labor union (an activity also against the law for foreigners in Taiwan, BTW) or run through Tienanmen square with a Free Tibet banner, those days are pretty much gone. If you love China, you go to China; If you love Taiwan, you live in Taiwan.
Or you can love both places, and go back and forth (if you can swing the plane fare).

But the fact remains that the majority of non-Chinese who take the time to learn any Chinese dialect, whether they plan to spend most of their time in Taiwan, Shanghai or Singapore, are probably going to study Mandarin. My opinion (again, blogger…got opinions…) is that Taiwanese people are cutting off their nose to spite their face when they make people who like and care about Taiwan feel stupid for speaking Mandarin as opposed to Hoklo.

Anyway, I’ve blathered way too long. I’d love to hear back from anyone in Taiwan who has opinions about this, or who may have had similar experiences.

Anyway, an editor at Lonely Planet clued me into a lovely mention of Snarky Tofu here and a blogger called Benji Lanyado referencing it (here) at Guardian.com.

Dammit. Garbage truck song a-chiming. In Taiwan, the mating call of the garbage trucks is a musical tune, the kind of annoying, clamorous ditty that makes American kids beg for ice cream money. We’ve got a ton of recycling (more on that later).

OK, I’m back. But it’s relevant to the overall theme of Snarky Tofu to mention the particulars of the recycling, because with Taiwan 7 now safely at the printers I’ve just sent a good chunk of the 40 or so pounds of hotel brochures, maps, advertisements, flyers, periodicals and magazines to the pulp mill to be made into more of the same (but updated), or toilet paper. I needed to free up some space for the next project. I think I must have put a picture of myself buried in travel propaganda on the blog sometime around the time I finished the whole project…somebody mentioned a naked picture of me somewhere, but in a positive way….

Anyway, yes. Where were we? Several blog posts brewing. My lifestyle is changing. I am a married man now! Beautiful women MUST stop sending emails asking me to accompany them on their upcoming whirlwind tour of South East Asia. (My wife shall now field these offers; luckily we have similar tastes in women.)

Back to work. Somewhat less narcissistic post to follow.