“I grew accustomed to shuttling between Singapore and Lugu Lake, navigating a hectic city life and a different rural rhythm in the mountains,” she says. Her longer stays – she now lives with the Mosuo for a few months, three or four times a year – gave her the chance to discover more about this private, often misunderstood community.
In the absence of marriage as a goal, the only reason for men and women to have anything resembling a relationship is for love, or enjoyment of each other’s company. If it runs its course, the usual reasons for staying together – for the children, societal or financial reasons – don’t apply. 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.”
What happens if a woman doesn’t want children? “That’s simply not one of their choices. To even ask that question is to see the Mosuo through our eyes, our way of doing things. The question is not pertinent,” she says.
And what if they can’t have children, or produce only boys? “They will formally adopt a child, either from an unrelated Mosuo family or, more commonly, from one of their maternal cousins,” she says. “A few generations ago, before China’s one-child policy – which extends to two in rural areas – families were huge. There are a lot of cousins around.”
To western eyes, this is the less progressive side of the Mosuo way of life. Is a society that, in many ways, emancipates women from marriage, and gives them sexual freedom, actually producing glorified 1950s housewives who have no choices other than motherhood? It’s a frustration that Waihong feels with her goddaughter Ladzu, now 22. “She is a mother, and leads a very domestic life,” says Waihong. “For a young Mosuo woman, that’s not unusual. But I wish it were different. For me, it’s a waste.”
But things are changing. Since (mostly) Chinese tourists began arriving in the early 1990s, bringing paved roads, an airport and jobs for Mosuo people, their traditional way of life has started to feel outdated to its young inhabitants. Ladzu and her friends may still be living for motherhood, but she is part of a pioneering generation in transition: she is married, and to a Han Chinese man. She still lives at Lugu Lake, but in her own house, with her husband and son, who was born in February. She is not alone: although her grandmother’s generation, in their 60s and 70s, still practise “walking marriage”, as do many women in their 40s, about half of women in their 30s live with their “partners” – the fathers of their young children. A minority of men and women marry outside the community and move away.
“I know one Mosuo man who is living in [the nearest Chinese city of] Lijiang, married with two children,” says Waihong. “Equally, I know a young Mosuo woman, working as a tour bus driver, who has a child on her own and lives in her mother’s household.”
Education often makes the difference: there is a junior high school at Lugu Lake, but the nearest senior school is 100km away, and few children attend. Even fewer head on to further education. “I know a handful of men and women who have become civil servants or college lecturers,” says Waihong. “But most only have their junior school certificate.”
In many ways, it doesn’t matter to young Mosuo: tourism is providing careers – from waiter to guesthouse owner, tourist guide to taxi driver – until now, a foreign concept. This new rising class has money and the chance to meet people outside the Mosuo community; many families are renting out land for hotels to be built on. Subsistence farming is on the way out, slowly being replaced by the commercial farming of prized local crops. Where land is still farmed for the family, mostly in more rural parts, children head home to help with the harvest. “And they know there will always be food on the table for them, back home with Mum,” says Waihong.
It is a society in transition, in a country that is changing fast. Feminist activism is on the rise in China, battling ongoing discrimination; China still describes unmarried women over 27 as “leftover”. Can these naturally emancipated Mosuo women – and men – show Chinese society a different approach to family life? “Yes,” says Waihong, “to wear their singlehood with pride.”
Young Mosuo are carving out a different path from their parents, embracing “western” marriage and family life with gusto. Zhaxi, who built Waihong’s house, says there will be no Mosuo culture left in 30 years. She is less sure. “I think their traditional family structure may come to be seen as halcyon, once they see what the alternative is,” she says. “They were the original trendsetters, 2,000 years ago; they don’t know how good they have it.