Original Uncle Shake Quickly
Lugu Lake is a place I've been going to at least once a year since 2012.
The reason is simple, no matter how you open it, the scenery, the people, the experience of this place will never disappoint you, especially its autumn.
This time, I stayed for two days, and I was more leisurely, and I finished watching the long-awaited documentary "The Story of Three Mosuo Women" on the lakeside terrace in the warm early winter sun.
P1. Another life
The Mosuo people, who live at the junction of Sichuan and Yunnan, are the only group of people in China who have preserved the characteristics of matrilineal clan society so far. This documentary is edited by a young man from Hong Kong who came to Lugu Lake in 1998 and lived for a year not long after the opening of tourism. It mainly uses the perspectives of the young woman Da Shi Latso, her mother Che Latso, and her grandmother Ruan Ku Dadu, who are three generations of family members in Lugu Lake Luoshui Village, to interpret how the Mosuo people understand the world, how they get along with this society, and how they deal with the intimate relationships between people throughout their lives. In such a society, how people get along with each other, including men and women, parents and children? Coming from a typical Mosuo family, Dashi Latso grew up in Mosuo customs and married a Han Chinese when she became an adult, and the difference in ethnic habits led to many conflicts between the two.
Nguyen Kudadu is a typical old Mosuo man, over 80 years old, who only speaks Mosuo. She has experienced the whole process of Mosuo society from the traditional form before the founding of New China, to the Great Movement, to the implementation of monogamy, and then to the reform and opening up. Chelato is an ethnic tour guide on the shores of Lugu Lake, who has experienced the erosion of Mosuo society by tourism development and modern life. All three of them are witnesses to the changes in Mosuo society, and from their experiences, it is not difficult to see the characteristics of the Matrilineal family and collective life of the Mosuo people, as well as the challenges they are facing.
P2. About the family
The first characteristic of matriarchal societies is the large collective. Che Latso also said in the documentary, "As long as I am a Mosuo person, the elders I see women will call me Grandma, and they will also treat me as their own daughter." This notion of the "extended family" refers narrowly to the matrilineal extended family, without the role of father and husband. The grandmother's house is the most sacred place of the Mosuo people, every child grows up in the grandmother, and then lives in a big family composed of more than a dozen people with the grandmother as the link, and in the 21st century in Lugu Lake, there is a grandmother's house that has survived for one or two hundred years.
It is precisely this kind of family that gives Da Shi Latso the confidence to say that "a small family is not the goal of my life, even if I lose my lover, there is nothing, I still have the whole big family, the love of my mother and sisters, his love is only a small part of my life".
P3. About both sexes
The documentary had a Mosuo girl's words that particularly touched me. She said, "Mosuo men and women do not form a family together throughout their lives, and men live and work with their mothers and sisters during the day, and at night they can go to their loved ones to be with them." Maybe this is what you call 'distance produces beauty', both men and women, whether they have just been together or are old, and they have been in a state of newlywedness all their lives. "Men and women don't live together, but they love each other, which means that their relationship is actually purer.
There is no need to consider firewood, rice, oil and salt, differences in living habits, no need to worry about the contradictions between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, incompatibility between concubines and concubines, and no triviality of life, love is not easy to be consumed. It is also because two people have fewer opportunities to get along, so they naturally cherish it more and will not spend a lot of time arguing, cold wars and hurting each other. Marriage is no longer a union of two families, but two emotional fits, as Mosuo's grandmother Ruan Kudadu said, "(Marriage) The most important thing is the relationship between men and women, and you can leave anything alone if the relationship is good."
P4. About independence
In the documentary, Da Shi Latso's first expression was: "If I hear others say whose wife I am, I feel very uncomfortable, I am not his, he is not mine, I am me, he is him, at most I will tell them that he is the father of my child" Da Shi Latso's father also said: "Da Shi Latso's Han boyfriend actually wants to give him a dowry, and I am not selling my daughter." In the patrilineal society of the Han nationality, the dowry is used as money or things given by the man's family to the woman's family before marriage, which is equivalent to making the children born to the woman after marriage belong to the man's ethnic group and leave the female ethnic group. To put it bluntly, "It's like a relationship between money, not people." Most women have less breadth and depth of social relationships than men, so they are more likely to develop so-called "dependence" and thus detachment from their original selves.
Therefore, in Mosuo society, when both men and women are confident enough to interact as an independent individual, the relationship between them will also be stronger and more stable.
P5. On equality
In the documentary, Da Shi Latso expressed the second thing: "She gave birth to a child, and a Han girlfriend who has a good relationship asked her if she gave birth to a boy or a girl, and she said that I didn't pay attention to it, I only paid attention to the child's strong hands and feet, so I helped my best friend to find out the gender of her mother's child, and her mother's reaction was even more strange, saying who would pay attention to this, why do you ask this?" Some issues in contemporary society, such as the feminist movement, equality between men and women, and the objectification of women, especially the gender antagonism that has been particularly prominent in recent years, women's boxing are all based on the gender antagonism between men and women. Why is there such a thing as an opposition? It's not that marriage is a transaction, it's a transaction, it's a transaction, it's a transaction, it's not a transaction. The reason why people are human beings is that they come to this world naturally, and they get along with people, society, and nature with natural laws.
It's just that in the process there are always people who want to PUA others, become a driving force that can be controlled and can be stepped on on others to enjoy, and come up with a set of rules, theories, and heresies to alienate nature, the original thing. In order to achieve the purpose of being able to step on others and live, there is a country, a nation, a religion... Every system of speech, every culture, is actually a set of shackles.
P6. About freedom
Grandma Ruan Ku said: "In the culture of the Mosuo people, there is no concept of "virgin", and no one urges marriage. If you find a partner, your elders will not tell you not to look for it, and if you don't find a partner, they won't force you to find it, and whoever doesn't want to get married won't leave. It is natural for some people to marry many people, some to marry only one person, and some to never get married. "Because of a big family of more than a dozen people, it's not a big deal to have one or two who don't raise offspring, and you don't have to worry about being completely carefree in this world when you get old.
P7. About thinking
Grandma Ruan Ku said: "Look at a woman, don't look at her face, look at her heart, Mosuo people don't have the concept of virginity, you can't look at people like this, and disrespecting women is equivalent to disrespecting your mother." Grandma Ruan Ku calmly and indifferently told her three love histories, just like the story of an old Han man recalling his sister. Mosuo's system of speech about women determines their strong mindset. They are independent living beings and are not attached to any species. They don't have harsh requirements for women. On the other hand, in contemporary society, words such as "beautiful lovers", "virtuous wives", and "bride price and mansions" all hope to construct female characters as desired by a patriarchal society.
Patriarchy, through the nuclear family, saw women's work in the family almost unpaid, whether it was at home before marriage or with children after marriage. Patriarchy, in turn, gives cultural and value legitimacy to this division of labor and oppression. And there is no gender distinction, and these modes of thinking are all established in Morgan's speech system. This can't help but remind me that our PUA, peach buttocks, and Cullinan's speech system today determine our fanatical pursuit of money, chasing the mindset of being above others or currying favor with the powerful.
P8.About the living method
This is a documentary filmed in 1998 and completed in 2001. Today, it is popular again on Douban, which has nothing to do with the rapid progress of urbanization today, the inability of a large number of women in cities to have children and settle down, and the increasingly antagonistic environment of urban men and women. Each of us has to deal with relationships with others on a face-to-face basis. In particular, the intimate relationship is handled, the social city is closely related to oneself, and many times it is necessary to go to nature to heal the wounds.
In the early days, in the patriarchal society of the Han Chinese, the intimacy of our fathers was settled in the vicinity, and the women admitted the worthlessness of their life's dedication and swallowed their anger. However, today's urbanization has given women the economic conditions to live independently, and also given the material foundation to live a life of self-respect and self-love, but it has not provided enough partners for urban women who are only willing to be upwardly compatible to choose men. High-quality men are scarce after all, and most of them are still potential stocks, so they give sharp-eyed girls paper to take them. Human suffering is because people only live under one concept, believing that there is only one way to live. If you want to solve people's pain, you must crack people's obsessions. To break people's obsessions, we must open our horizons, look at the world, see different people, and different ways of living. In our Han culture system, it is immoral to lift up the pants and leave. But in the eyes of the Mosuo people, that is morality, and it is immoral if you don't leave. With the great principle of being responsible for women and children, you can bully women's free labor all your life. If the man himself is forced outside, he can also balance his poor self-esteem by bullying his wife and children when he comes home.
P9. About doubts
I want to write so much in this article to talk about what can be learned from Mosuo's free view of marriage after urban men and women become financially independent, and whether there is a system of intimate relationship between the sexes to solve emotional, reproductive and economic problems. I actually think that the expression of the three women of Mosuo gives us a good perspective. How should urban men and women look at romantic relationships, sexual relationships, child-rearing relationships, and how they should live materially? Marriage based on complete equality, independent life, and following the emotional foundation may be a good solution to the current urban marriage dilemma.
But there are two big problems to be solved: the first is that urban men and women definitely don't like the big family lifestyle, but they don't necessarily like the single apartment life for a long time, and there is no family life, how to solve the problem of raising children. The second is how today's discourse system can truly achieve equality between men and women, and how we can find freedom in intimate relationships. Let's leave these two questions to everyone to think about。。。。。
END