This remarkable memoir transports us to the remote reaches of the Himalayas, to a place the Chinese call "the country of daughters," to the home of the Moso, a society in which women rule men. According to local tradition, marriage is considered a foreign practice; property is passed from mother to daughter; a matriarch oversees each family's customs, rituals, and economies. In this culture a young girl enjoys extraordinary freedoms--but the impulsive, restless Namu is driven to leave her mother's house, to venture out into the larger world, defying the tradition that holds Moso culture together. LEAVING MOTHER LAKE is a book filled with drama, strangeness, and beauty. Yet for all the exoticism, Namu's story is a universal tale of mothers and daughters--the battles that drive them apart and the love that brings them back together.
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Leaving Mother Lake
chris_lzh(Tianjin)
So this is not the same edition that I read, but it is the same book by the same authors.
So I’ll get the negative bit out of the way first: Especially in the first few chapters, the book seems to be written with a kind of “Look at as Mosuo, aren’t we so great and wonderful and different” tone to it. It’s hard, no, impossible to tell whether this tone comes from Namu or Christine Mathieu. The book is written in the first person as if it were Namu relating her story, but of course I have no way of knowing just how much or what kind of an influence Christine Mathieu had over the final product. I mentioned this to the friend who leant me the book, and she told me to read the Epilogue first, as that explained a lot of Mathieu’s interest in the Mosuo and the motivation behind this book. So I did. But reading the Epilogue didn’t really clear anything up.
In fact, certain passages from the Epilogue only increased my misgivings about the book. All of a sudden, Mathieu seemed to be not merely describing, but idealizing Mosuo society. Compare these two quotations from the Epilogue:
“As these expressions go, women may get to rule the roost or to be the power behind the throne; in other words they may usurp the authority that is ideally vested in men. But Mosuo women do no such thing. They are legitimate figures of family authority, managers of family wealth, coowners of family property, caretakers of ancestors, and owners of their own bloodlines. Not least, they have personal rights and freedoms in the domain of sexual relations that are unthinkable in much of the rest of the world.”
“But in most societies, for marriage to work, something usually has to give. In patrilineal male-dominated societies, that something is very often romantic love, and almost always (female) sexual freedom and pleasure. In more extreme cases, male lineages may well depend on the exclusive sexual cooperation of wives and daughters, a thing that women are not naturally inclined to provide.”
Now, all I know of Mosuo society is what I read in this book, so I won’t comment on that, except to say that Namu’s own story comes close to suggesting that Mosuo society may well be as much of a gilded cage for women as any other society on this earth. However, Mathieu’s characterization of patrilineal societies is nothing more than a collection of ext......
full review2006-04-04 19:58 | 1 comment
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