Mosuo Sisters
A film by Marlo Poras. 2013. 80 minutes. In Mandarin/Mosuo/Tibetan. Subtitled.

Study Areas: gender and labor, ethnicity, translocal migration, modernity

25-year-old Juma and her younger sister Latso come from a Mosuo family, an ethnic minority with a population of only 40,000 residing around Lugu Lake in southwestern China. The sisters had been working in Beijing since 2005, trying an alternative way of life to support their poverty-stricken family. As rural-ethnic-migrant women in urban China today, however, their options were limited and met with mixed fortune. Juma sang in a Mosuo bar and Latso worked there during daytime and enrolled in an accounting class at night. The bar went out of business in 2009 due to the “global economic downturn,” according to the bar owner, and led to Juma and Latso’s unemployment in the capital city. The Mosuo Sisters by Marlo Poras follows them back to their village in Yunnan and looks closely at the lives of Juma and Latso in the ensuing year and a half, following them as they face the difficult task of reversing their outbound journey.

The Mosuo sisters opted for a temporary split along the rural and urban divide. Juma followed her boyfriend—a Tibetan singer she met in Beijing—to Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan province. She continued to work as a Mosuo singer—this time in a Tibetan club, struggling to deal with the meager income, a family still in grave need of monetary support, and sexual harassment from her pleasure-seeking customer-fans. Latso, now a dropout, was forced back to farming at home with a tenuous hope to someday resume her studies in the city. She finally abandoned this dream a year later. 
 
The lives of Juma and Latso were challenging in different ways, yet as members of the same family, both suffered like most rural dwellers, lagging behind the exponential economic growth experienced by the rest of the country. For the Mosuo sisters, the significant socioeconomic disparities between rural and urban China are further accentuated by their ethnic identity as members of a vulnerable but lasting matriarchal community where men and women are expected to practice “walking marriage,” and remain living and laboring at their own mothers’ household even after having children (who stay with the maternal family). The lifelong tie to the natal family endowed the sisters with economic and procreative responsibilities falls apart as they move. When Juma visits her boyfriend’s home, an affluent (and patriarchal) Tibetan family in Gansu province or 900 miles north to her village, she finds her expectations completely confounded.

Interspersed with narratives in their own voices, the documentary foregrounds the stories of Juma and Latso in Chengdu and Yunnan with minimal manipulation. It takes a humanely frank look at the lives of ethnic minorities in the Han-dominated and urban-centric Chinese society, as on one hand it disengages remote local communities from economic development and re-distribution while on the other commodifying their cultural identities in an “ethnic economy” on the other. In Beijing, the Mosuo bar where Juma had worked was advertised as the “Kingdom of Daughters” [nu’er guo] from Yunnan; and in Chengdu, Juma was the “passionate [duoqing] Mosuo girl from Lugu Lake.” In both cases, the commercial re-packaging through costumes, musical selection, and stage settings unmistakably fixed the ethnic performers to their place of origin in their translocal search for a modern life. Including them as wage earners in exotic spectacles, the market mechanism in post-Mao China continued to exclude them and other people of the ethnic minorities from the national cultural community. As Juma tellingly comments on her singing job, “they (the night club customers) don’t see a real, living person when they look at me.”

Thanks to the booming tourist industry, for most Han Chinese urbanites the “ethnic economy” has extended quickly from the urban spaces to Juma and Latso’s hometown. A simple search of “Lugu Lake” on Baidu or Chinese Google shows nothing but page after page of tourist guides, hotel prices, and transportation information. As the only matriarchal society extant on earth, the Mosuo and especially their institution of “walking marriage” are deliberately mystified as the cradle of promiscuity if not polyandry as they become, ultimately, a tourist attraction. Featuring the Mosuo sisters as identifiable protagonists in their life struggles, then, this documentary film can be read as a critical comment on the ethnocentric cultural economy and also an admirable effort to communicate across social boundaries. In the end, as the film makes clear, despite the cultural and socioeconomic marginalization of the Mosuo, their hopes and dreams in a highly polarized Chinese society today indeed share a great deal with the rest of Chinese society.

The film would be a useful teaching tool for college-level classes, including courses in Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, Anthropology, East Asian culture and societies, and Ethnomusicology. The documentary provokes broad questions about women and labor, ethnicity and body, non-Western feminism, translocal migration, modernity, and more specific questions about contemporary China, ethnic tourism, and urbanization.

Wenrui Chen is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 

 

 

Last Updated: September 11, 2014