| By Lugu Lake the Mosuo people have their unique funeral, which is a very interesting subject to me, and this interest has to do with the early deaths of my parents and my sentiments toward life and death. I am attracted toward the matrilineal family pattern. My drifting lifestyle made nowhere home; there is no more attention from my mother; the places I have been are all foreign to me. I’ve lost my parents; I’m still drifting; no one understands the loneliness and bitterness I’m suffering. I have been longing to reunite with my mother, but she’s intangible. I want to call home, thousands of miles away, but it would never be answered. |  |
Wu Wei-He
By Lugu Lake the Mosuo people have their unique funeral, which is a very interesting subject to me, and this interest has to do with the early deaths of my parents and my sentiments toward life and death. I am attracted toward the matrilineal family pattern. My drifting lifestyle made nowhere home; there is no more attention from my mother; the places I have been are all foreign to me. I’ve lost my parents; I’m still drifting; no one understands the loneliness and bitterness I’m suffering. I have been longing to reunite with my mother, but she’s intangible. I want to call home, thousands of miles away, but it would never be answered.
I’ve lost home.
I was so attached to my mother. I miss the days I spent with her. The imagination of seeing my mother’s smile at the doorsteps of our house has been haunting me for years. I want to feel her attentive gaze on me. I want to be in her arms when I am on my deathbed.
The Mosuo people wrap a dead body in white cloth into the shape of an infant, which is a metaphor for life going back to where it was conceived. In a typical Mosou funeral, the wrapped body is placed on a seven-colored flower pad, placed in front of the house the dead once lived in. This is a metaphor for coming back to the mother’s embrace.
Afterword
After reading some material on Mosuo funerals and speaking with some Mosuo people, I realized that Mosuo is a community formed by matrilineal families but it’s not a matrilineal society itself. Funerals and religious ceremonies are managed by men. They believe in goddesses and also Buddhism.
I have discussed with many people regarding what could happen if women ruled the world, but I realized that we live in a world that doesn’t allow such a concept. The past is history while future cannot be defined; we can only move on.
