A canoe paddles me across to a wooden jetty on which Namu is waiting to welcome me. Grabbing at the steps and clambering a little clumsily upwards, I already feel she has the advantage over me, and a kiss on the cheek followed instantly by the buzz of her mobile confirms that.
Her hotel, built on the site of an apple orchard, only opened four months ago. It resembles a Wild West fort. A walled outer yard leads to a pine log facade with tall double doors that open onto a courtyard, enclosed on all sides by two floors of accommodation. Between phone calls Namu escorts me, effusively, into a dimly lit room with a flagging wood fire at one end, a huge television at the other and, somewhere in the middle, the sewn-up, cured carcass of a pig. She insists on butter tea for us all, ‘made by my mother’, fiddles with the TV remote until she finds a pop video for us all to watch, then, with a lingering flutter of her big dark eyes, disappears to deal with a group of her fans who are staying here tonight.
My timber-clad room is draughty and bitterly cold, and Namu’s fans are in celebratory mood, drinking down in the courtyard and committing Karaoke, very loudly, until the wee small hours. Eventually, they stagger to bed and I hear doors slamming shut. Unfortunately, they’re noisier asleep than they ever were awake and snoring that must be seven or eight on the Richter scale shakes my pine-clad peace. Around dawn I fall into a deep sleep, from which I’m woken by the sound of fierce and powerful expectoration.
Day Eighty : Lugu Lake
I’m becoming quite endeared to Namu’s superstar pretensions, partly because she’s so unashamedly open about them and partly because I’m pretty sure that deep down she knows it’s all a game.
Joshua, a Beijing-based American journalist, is following her around. She introduces him with an airy wave of the hand.
‘He’s doing a story on the real Namu,’ she says, without much enthusiasm.
We talk at breakfast about the strength of superstition in modern China. Joshua lives on the fourth floor of his building in Beijing, because the number four is considered unlucky and so the apartment is correspondingly cheap. Eight, on the other hand, is auspicious, and mobile phone numbers with eight in them are only available at a premium.
He sees I’m reading Namu’s book about her childhood, Leaving Mother Lake, and we talk about the world it describes: a society that has no words for husband, wife, marriage or virginity; in which women make all the decisions about who they go with and who they stay with. A man may be an azhu, a close male friend, but that’s as close as they get to any form of marital obligation. They practise Zouhun, ‘walking marriage’, in which a man and a woman may spend the night together, but he walks back to his own home in the morning. Couples share neither ties nor possessions. Women inherit all the property and bring up the children.
We’re interrupted by Namu’s piercing voice, rising from the courtyard.
‘It is my uncle’s house, we have to bring something!’
J-P, who wants to film Namu at the childhood home where her uncle and aunt now live, suggests we take some Yunnan ham.
‘No!’ barks Namu. ‘Not good enough.’
A little later, bearing Yunnan ham, augmented with cigarettes, sugar, a bottle of brandy and a bottle of whisky, we’re picking our way across a ploughed field, over a suspicious-looking stream, past a sow with a gaggle of piglets in tow and into a dark, old, smoky, timber farmhouse. In a small courtyard chickens peck away around feeding troughs made from hollowed-out tree trunks. The main room has no windows, only a hole in the roof, whose rafters are coated with thick black grime from the fire. Chitterlings and pigs’ bladders hang from the beams. Smoke-veneered, wooden panels around the sides of the room are hung with celebrity calendars, posters of pop stars, and cut-outs of glamorous ladies. While Nigel lights this atmospheric but gloomy interior, Namu preoccupies herself with her looks, holding up a hand mirror and adding a touch of make-up before producing a pair of clippers from somewhere and trimming her eyelashes. Her aunt, a good-looking woman with a black, turban-like coil on her head, whose sole concern seems to be to provide us with refreshment, puts three large lumps of pork fat in a bowl on the fire and drops tiny pancakes filled with wheat flour into the bubbling mix.
When we start filming, a black cat nestles down beside me, looking very sweet but tormenting our sound recordist with loud meows at unscheduled times.
Our talk turns to Namu’s relationship with her mother, which is clearly at the heart of everything that’s happened to her.
Not only was she not the boy her mother wanted, she was also what she calls ‘a crying baby’, to such an extent that her mother was driven to give her away and she was sent to live with an aunt. At the age of eight she was sent away again, this time to stay with an uncle who had lost his loved one in an accident and lived alone with his yaks up in the mountains.
Namu speaks of this with a nice touch of understatement.
‘That was a very interesting time, and very hard. My uncle never speaks and the yak never speaks, so…’ she gives a short, piercing laugh, ‘…so I had a really interesting childhood in the mountains.’
At 13 she went through the Mosuo woman’s rite of passage, the traditional skirt ceremony.
‘The lamas help you choose the day,’ she recalls. ‘And then in the morning, very early, mamma prepared the skirt, beautiful, long, long skirt, and beautiful jacket and hair things and flowers and the key. The key that is the power for you to continue to take care of this matriarchal family.’
The key fits what they call the Flower Room or Flower Chamber, which was Namu’s first room of her own. From that time onwards she was entitled to choose who she wanted to share her room with.
Mosuo boys, on the other hand, have to wait until 18 for their freedom, which is marked by a ritual burning of their bed.
She describes the process of courtship.
‘When a man come to your house, normally he leave three things, one belt, one knife, one piece of clothing. If the woman doesn’t want him back any more she lays them outside the door as a sign.’
‘What if she decides she’s made a mistake and wants to see him again after all?’ I ask.
Here it becomes wonderfully Victorian.
‘She will ask her grandmother to go to tea with the boy’s grandmother. They will bring like a bamboo box, some chicken meat, some Tibetan momo, some Tibetan wine, and when the lady receive all this she will tell the boy, why don’t you go one more night there.’
The freedom of choice offered to the girls did not fool Namu. She recognized that it was another way of keeping her tied down, and all her instincts were to break out of the confines of the village and see the world.
‘I want to go to Beijing, wear high-heeled shoes and pink lipstick, you know.’
So she ran off to Beijing and Shanghai and became a successful singer, until she damaged her hearing. Far from giving up, she turned to fashion and went to live and work in San Francisco, New York, Paris, Italy and Japan. She lived with a Norwegian diplomat but that now seems to be over and she’s fallen for a Frenchman.
She tells me all this as the fire crackles and the smoke drifts lazily up into the rafters of what feels an essentially mediaeval cottage. Her aunt, thinking Namu is talking too much, tries to get at the fire to make us all a cup of salted butter tea.