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Aug. 10th, 2024 11:44 amFor my book group last month, we read Leaving Mother Lake: A Girlhood At the Edge of the World, a memoir by Yang Erche Namu in collaboration with anthropologist Christine Mathieu.
Namu is a Chinese celebrity (singer, author, TV appearances, etc.) and my understanding is that she's written numerous autobiographies about that; this book, her first in English, stops before any of that begins and focuses entirely on her childhood and young adulthood as part of the Moso culture, notable for being arguably matriarchal in that women are the head of household and both men and women live in their mother's house/are considered part of their mother's family for their entire lives until the house/head of household status is inherited by a daughter. Formal marriage is not usually practiced, and men only visit their partners' houses as guests at night.
Throughout Namu's childhood, the Moso town in which she lives is already in flux as a result of the Cultural Revolution and the intermittent arrival of Han Chinese troops bringing dictates from the central government. One set of visitors also brings the opportunity for Namu and two other girls from her village to participate in a singing competition for representatives of various Chinese minority cultures, which they win! Afterwards, the two other girls are glad to go home, but Namu discovers in herself the hunger for fame, fortune, and the broader world, and through a series of dramatic rebellions and determined grabs at long shots eventually ends up at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music; her experiences as a Minority Scholarship Student there make up much of the last section of the book.
Namu is a clear and distinctive narrator with a highly personal voice -- she's always got huge main character energy, but she does not present herself as a heroic figure so much as just one who is extremely and aggressively herself, whether she's impulsively offering food to a stranger or destroying everything in the house where she works before storming out the door. She's not so much describing what It's Like To Grow Up Moso as her specific and idiosyncratic childhood, as a relatively unusual person from a relatively unusual family who goes on to do unusual things.
As a sidenote, Namu seems to be a bit controversial as a media personality, and her Wikipedia page, which of course I went to after out of curiosity, does not seem to have been written by a fan. There's a line in there that says "her descriptions of her childhood and the culture she comes from have been characterised as deliberate self-exotification" -- citation extremely needed, so who is saying this I do not know, and anyway who can judge that? I certainly can't. Though I know this book has been presented and packaged for me, an English language reader, in a different way than it would be packaged for a Han Chinese reader in a different way than it would be packaged for a Moso reader, and further mediated through the view of an anthropologist, although there's a note at the end to emphasize that Namu did indeed read and approve the whole thing as her personal story, et cetera et cetera. You know. I always find memoirs the hardest sort of book to write about anyway. None of my usual tools seem relevant. This is someone's personal story, as they're telling it to me; this particular story I did find particularly interesting.
Namu is a Chinese celebrity (singer, author, TV appearances, etc.) and my understanding is that she's written numerous autobiographies about that; this book, her first in English, stops before any of that begins and focuses entirely on her childhood and young adulthood as part of the Moso culture, notable for being arguably matriarchal in that women are the head of household and both men and women live in their mother's house/are considered part of their mother's family for their entire lives until the house/head of household status is inherited by a daughter. Formal marriage is not usually practiced, and men only visit their partners' houses as guests at night.
Throughout Namu's childhood, the Moso town in which she lives is already in flux as a result of the Cultural Revolution and the intermittent arrival of Han Chinese troops bringing dictates from the central government. One set of visitors also brings the opportunity for Namu and two other girls from her village to participate in a singing competition for representatives of various Chinese minority cultures, which they win! Afterwards, the two other girls are glad to go home, but Namu discovers in herself the hunger for fame, fortune, and the broader world, and through a series of dramatic rebellions and determined grabs at long shots eventually ends up at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music; her experiences as a Minority Scholarship Student there make up much of the last section of the book.
Namu is a clear and distinctive narrator with a highly personal voice -- she's always got huge main character energy, but she does not present herself as a heroic figure so much as just one who is extremely and aggressively herself, whether she's impulsively offering food to a stranger or destroying everything in the house where she works before storming out the door. She's not so much describing what It's Like To Grow Up Moso as her specific and idiosyncratic childhood, as a relatively unusual person from a relatively unusual family who goes on to do unusual things.
As a sidenote, Namu seems to be a bit controversial as a media personality, and her Wikipedia page, which of course I went to after out of curiosity, does not seem to have been written by a fan. There's a line in there that says "her descriptions of her childhood and the culture she comes from have been characterised as deliberate self-exotification" -- citation extremely needed, so who is saying this I do not know, and anyway who can judge that? I certainly can't. Though I know this book has been presented and packaged for me, an English language reader, in a different way than it would be packaged for a Han Chinese reader in a different way than it would be packaged for a Moso reader, and further mediated through the view of an anthropologist, although there's a note at the end to emphasize that Namu did indeed read and approve the whole thing as her personal story, et cetera et cetera. You know. I always find memoirs the hardest sort of book to write about anyway. None of my usual tools seem relevant. This is someone's personal story, as they're telling it to me; this particular story I did find particularly interesting.
