There was much to enjoy here, but I found I couldn't connect with it. I'd read more from this author in the future though.

A forgotten society embracing a matrilineal culture, hidden high in the Tibetan mountains. The title was enough to grab my attention and when the opportunity came to read it, I took it.

Essentially, The Kingdom of Women is a book based upon author Choo Wai Hong's journey of discovery of her ancestral roots and her "spiritual home" among the Mosuo.

So lets begin with a little background: author Choo Wai Hong had a high paying legal career in Singapore, which she gave up to embark upon this journey of self discovery. During her travels in China's Yunnan Province, she comes upon the Mosuo and is intrigued by their culture and customs. She is welcomed into the community and decides that she will lay down her roots here and "go native".

Thus Kingdom of Women is a memoir of Choo's times in the Mosuo community, covering a period of approximately seven years. We are introduced to the particular customs of this female dominant society, all the while lamenting at the adoption of modern Chinese cultural practices by the young Mosuo, and what soon may soon by lost to the mists of time.

The author's style is easy and not overly burdensome with clinical details - and her story comes across as part-memoir, part-travelogue. If you are looking for something more akin to an anthropological study of this fascinating culture, then this is not for you.

The Kingdom of Women is a non-fiction book about author Choo Wai-Hong’s life living with the Moseo people in a mountainous region of China. Originially from Singapore, Choo Wai-Hong came across the Mosuo people when she was travelling and learned about their matrilineal society - meaning the unlike the rest of China, and a majority of the world, bloodlines are tracked through the female line rather than the man’s, and the eldest woman in a household is the head of the family.

“A Mosuo girl is born free from cultural and societal restrictions to party, laugh, lead, toil and love. She has no need to fight for empowerment because she is empowered from birth. She comes from a long line of empowered mothers, grandmothers and beyond, all revered as vital members of the community, headed at the pinnacle by their Mountain Goddess. In a way, she is so used to the idea of an empowered existence that she accepts it all ‘as is’,"

This was a fantastic and easy to read tale of one woman’s encounter with a different type of people. They were very separated from China’s normal society and definitely lived within their own set of rules - such as men and women taking lovers or axia’s with a long-term axia given the term a ‘walking marriage’ or sese instead of a legally bound marriage. The men lived with the women in their family their entire lives for the most part, and did not live with their axia’s - even if they had children. The men would help with nieces and nephews in their home but one often not have a huge role in their actual children’s lives because all children belonged to the females. And while this sounds harsh, it’s actually not.

“Understanding that the wellspring of new life resides in women, this society believes in the sanctity of women as representing life and light.”

I loved Choo Wai-Hong’s account of her time spent in the village from the way she became godmother to the entire Mosuo tribe to how she was able to experience their festivals, births and deaths as well as witness how the developed world and modern-day society slowly began to creep in and change the traditional way of life even in the six years she herself spent with them.

"I could at last settle in to what would become the spiritual home for my feminine soul”

The comparisons Choo Wai-Hong was able to give to how the Mosuo customs and traditions differerd between them and Chinese society - were women are looked down upon and not treated the same as men - was really interesting from an outsiide perspective and I liked that as an Asian woman, she could really spell out the differences and wonders that were the Mosuo people.

“In this female-dominated bubble, no one thinks it strange that I am a lone female who goes about happily on my own.”

I did feel sad at the end that things were changing, and I wished that hadn’t been the last chapter as it seemed like a downer to end on. I would have also loved to have seen commentary of sexual assault and if the Mosuo way of life, and their ideas about lovemaking, made it so very little assaults happened. That is just something I wondered about, with the way the community was with each other. I also would have loved to have know about the Mosuo people treated women who might not want children as it is definitely a norm that all women have children. It seemed for the most part a happy, peaceful place and one I would love to experience.

“I feel cocooned within a cosmos that allows and encourages me as a woman to be me without asking for more.”

An interesting travel tale but weak in depth or context outside of personal experience.

From Netgalley for a Review:

This is one of those times that I kinda hate giving a numerical review to what I am reading because I truly did not like this book. What I thought I was getting was an anthropological study of an indigenous culture in Yunnan, what I got was a rich woman's story of self-discovery with the Mosuo people as a backdrop. I loath with a passion autobiographies, even more so ones where it is about a rich person 'going native' while still talking about how they have so much money and brag about sacrifices they have to make while living in this chosen environment. I just find them so unpleasant to read and avoid them like the plague.

I will say this in favor, Choo Wai Hong does not seem disrespectful of the people she has chosen to become a part of, so it lacks an exploitative nature that books of this style tend to have. She also has used her money to do a lot for the people and I respect that! Also, the book was well written, so at least it was just the tone that made me dislike the book.

I really wish the book would have come with references or recommended reading about the Mosuo tribe, some of the information given is immensely fascinating and I would love to learn more, but for all I know, it is entirely fabricated since there is no way of fact checking references used (another reason I strongly dislike autobiographical stories which heavily wind through cultures, you have to rely on the story teller's honesty)

If you like autobiographies then maybe this book could be more enjoyable, but to me reading it was a hassle.

This was a GREAT book!! It gave a wonderfully fascinating look into a quickly vanishing and unique culture!!!

I first read about this book in an article in Stylist magazine, and the thought that such a Kingdom- where women are essentially the powerful sex- fascinated me. It sounded like something from a work of fiction, and given how male-orientated the world is, I found it hard to believe that a society like this could still exist and not be influenced by the outside world. I found this book to be fascinating, insightful and thought-provoking. It made me want to get on a plane and go and witness the society for myself. I liked the fact that the author came across this fascinating kingdom while trying to escape from her stressful life in Singapore- this element appealed to the adventurer in me! I've already recommended this book to my friends, and although I think feminists will love it, its also a really relevant book for anyone interested in how tradition can be changed and influenced by the outside world.

Choo WaiHong is also known as Ercher Dzuomo, Majang Ah Hong, Amur and Ganma in the Mosou tribe. You will learn more about the author's way of looking at the Mosou world than the world itself. You will also learn about her residency and sort-of assimilation in a cool holiday resort that she considers a feminist experience.

What the book lacks: an interesting write-up. It's an okay-to-deadwood read. The author has obviously never been in a farmland or village - and it shows in the way she writes about toilet-habits, animal hunting, seeding and harvesting, meal prep and herb collection. Also, unfortunately, the author puts more of herself, her resentment of the Chinese customs and traditions, her unhappy lost soul, her search for meaning of life amongst the 'primitive' women. This book is not about the Mosou tribe as much as it is a chapter from the author's life. It reads as if the Mosou tribe are used as a vindication for all the loneliness and discrimination the author has felt in her life (Scion of a wealthy immigrant family, rich in her own right, capable and successful, single/ divorcee, no kids, probably middle-aged, is seen as a leader amongst the Mosou people, helps re-start the Gemu Goddess festival, becomes godmother to all Mosou children, makes Lake Lugu her second home.) I did not see anything unique in Mosou culture other than the fact that women are heads of the family, are sexually liberated and children follow their lineage. Everything else is like it is in every village that is cut off from modernity (okay, maybe the part where a grandmother says a prayer over a plate of chicken's head does not occur in every village, but still.) I could have learnt more in a documentary.

Questions: what do Mosou women use for menstruation? Hygiene? For STDs? Vaccinations? For food storage? (All that pig stuff has to smell.) What is the crime rate? (murder, theft? cat fights, anything?) What do the women talk about? (instances when author is in their company sound like culture lecture series) What is their daily routine? (since they have no TV or cell phone usually.) Superstitions? Did the Mosou women's sexual practices have an impact on the author's choices in partners? What was her house's sewerage plumbing connected to?

This is an ARC hence there are no pics, but a list of images is given. More pictures need to be in the final (non-ARC) version of this book than the specific ‘festivity-oriented’ ones the book purports to currently have. Lots of information in the book would seem interesting if carried with a corresponding image.

You-learn-something-new-everyday factoid: Mosuo word for father: Abu (!) It is exactly like the urdu-Pakistani word used for fathers.

Thanks to NetGalley and I.B. Tauris for providing me with a copy of this book that I freely chose to review.
This book and its author, Choo Waihong, introduce us to a fascinating tribe, the Mosuo, from the province of Yunnan in China, in the region of the lakes, where a matrilineal society has survived in an almost untouched fashion for centuries. The author, a corporate lawyer working in a big law firm in Singapore, left her job and went searching for a different life. She toured China, first visiting the village where her father was born, and during her travels read an article about the Mosuo that aroused her curiosity and she decided to investigate personally.
The book narrates her adventures with the Mosuo, how she ended up becoming the godmother (personally, I think she became a fairy godmother, as she invested her own funds to help keep the Festival of the Mountain Goddess alive, and also sponsored a number of students, helping them carry on with their educations) of an entire village, and built a home there, where she spends 6 months a year.
The book is divided into twelve chapters (from ‘Arriving in the Kingdom of Women’ to ‘On the Knife-Edge of Extinction’) and it does not follow the author’s adventure chronologically (it is neither a memoir, nor an anthropological treatise) but rather discusses large topics, using first-hand observations of the author, her conversations with the inhabitants, and the insights the writer can offer when she compares this society to the one she had grown up and lived all her life in. She acknowledges she had always subscribed to feminist ideas, but nothing had prepared her for what she saw there, and the experience helped her redefine her feminism. She has difficulty fully understanding the social mores and the organisation and inner workings of Mosuo societies (the nuclear family is unknown there, the family relations are complex and difficult to understand for an outsider and they are becoming even more complicated when the population try to adapt them to a standard patriarchal model), she cannot get used to the concept of communal property (she likes the theory of people sharing farm work and living as a community, but not so much when her SUV is used by everybody for things not covered by her insurance when she is not there), she needs indoor toilet facilities (I couldn’t empathise more), and she is dismayed at the way modernity and tourism are encroaching on the traditional lifestyle. Of course, it is not the same to be able to come and go and feel empowered in a society so different to ours whilst still being able to access and/or return to our usual lifestyle than to be born into such circumstances without any other option.
The Kingdom of Women is a fascinating read. It gives us an idea about how other women-centric societies might have functioned and it introduces concepts completely alien but quite attractive and intriguing. I might hasten to say that although, as a woman, I could not help but smile at the thought of many of the practices and the different order of things, I am sure quite a few men would be more than happy with the lifestyle of the men of the tribe (no family ties as such, dedicated to cultivating their physical strength and good looks, invested on manly pursuits, like hunting, fishing … and not having to worry about endless courting or complex dating rules).
Choo Waihong is devoted to the tribe and their traditional way of life, and she has adopted it as much as they have adopted her (the relationships is mutually beneficial, as it becomes amply clear when we read the book). She explores and observes, but always trying to be respectful of tradition and social conventions, never being too curious or interfering unless she is invited in. Her love for the place and the people is clear, and she has little negative to say (she does mention STDs with its possible sequela of congenital defects and the issue of prostitution, which is not openly acknowledged or discussed), although when she talks about her attempts at keeping the Mountain Goddess Festival alive, it is clear hers is not the scientific model of observing without personally interfering (we are all familiar with the theory behind the observer effect but this is not what this book or the author’s experience is about ). The last chapter makes clear that things are quickly changing: most of the younger generation, who have had access to education, do not seem inclined to carry on upholding the same lifestyle. They are leaving the area to study and plan on getting married and starting a nuclear family rather than moving back to their grandmother’s house and having a walk-in marriage. Young men, that as she acknowledges do not have access to varied male role models, leave their studies to become waiters and dream of opening restaurants. Many of the older generation of Mosuo men and women are still illiterate but, they have mobile phones and take advantage of the touristic interest in the area, selling their lands and leaving the rural tradition behind. As the author notes, she was lucky to have access to the Mosuo people at a time of quick social change, but before the old way of life had disappeared completely. Others might not be so lucky.
This is a great book for people interested in alternative societal models and ethnological studies, written in a compelling way, a first person narration that brings to life the characters, the place and the narrator. It might not satisfy the requirements of somebody looking for a scientific study but it injects immediacy and vibrancy into the subject.
As a side note, I had access to an e-version of the book and therefore cannot comment on the pictures that I understand are included in the hardback copy. I would recommend obtaining that version if possible as I’m sure the pictures and the glossary would greatly enhance the reading experience.

In a land where women rule, what would that be like? Choo WaiHong found out, when she vacationed there after quitting her high pressure law career in Singapore. It turns out to be quite magical. She loved it so much she built a house and joined them.

There is no marriage among the Mosuo of Yunnan. Women take male partners at will, keep the children, and send the men home – to their mothers. Girls are brought up to manage everything; boys get to do all the heavy lifting. The matrilineal bloodline is precious, and nothing else matters. Three generations live together, headed by the grandmother. Men know their place and enjoy it. They get to dress up, wear jewelry, and spend their off hours preening to attract the female eye. There are no courtships, no dating. A suggestion and an answer are all it takes, because this will be a one night stand. Men are not expected to live with women or raise children. Women value men only for their looks. Tall and beefy preferred.

The Mosuo are an illiterate society. They lost their written language countless years ago and haven’t missed it. They don’t use cash; they use co-operation. They have adapted to things like mobiles by picturing the last four digits of a phone number and associating them with a person.

There’s a problem with The Kingdom of Women, aside from the fact there is no kingdom and no king – or leader of any kind. There is always a nagging sense that this can’t be right and can’t continue. For one thing, it is too remarkable that a high powered, foreign, Singaporean lawyer who did not speak the language should immediately be accepted by everyone in a remote, backward village - to the point of being named godmother to everyone there. And she was only there half the time, continuing her jetset life elsewhere. Then there is the question of how this Shangri-La could maintain its independence from its own country and government. This is after all, China, where the government doesn’t think twice about enticing or shifting millions of Han to Tibet to make the natives a minority in their own land. Choo says they even avoided the two child rule for rural enclaves by never marrying, so there were never any family units to enforce it on. Somehow, not even the Cultural Revolution made them bend to the laws of the land.

Well, Choo addresses some of this in the final chapter, wherein the Mosuo have now taken to cash, tourism, landowning and renting, their offspring wanting to marry legally, and all mod cons are welcomed, including recreational drugs. The old ways are not even on the table.

David Wineberg

An amazing window onto the lives, hopes and struggles of women in a remote part of China. As China develops are breakneck speed, these women fight to preserve their culture, heritage and way of life from the encroaching capitalism and globalization. The last matriarchal tribe left in China, this is the story of heroic women fighting to bring up their families and preserve their culture in a world that is rapidly spirally out of all recognition.

‘I never set out to write a book when I first stepped inside the Kingdom of Women.’

Instead, Choo Wai Hong was on a journey to discover her Chinese roots, and Lugu Lake, which is located on the borders of Yunnan and Sichuan in western China, was just one stop on her tour of China. Lugu Lake is the home of the Mosuo tribe, said to be one of the last matrilineal and matriarchal societies on earth.

This book is an account of Choo’s time with the Mosuo. She spent seven years living with the Mosuo and was considered an honorary member of this small tribe.

There are two aspects to this book. The first is an account of the Mosuo customs and lifestyle. The second is Choo’s search for a more meaningful life than the high-powered and high-pressured life as a lawyer that she has left behind in Singapore. The two aspects intersect where Choo contrasts her experience of more traditional patrilineal Chinese society with Mosuo life.

Until I picked up this book, I was unaware of the Mosuo tribe. I was fascinated by the structure of a society in which the grandmother is the head of each family, where kinship is matrilineal and where women live independently of men. So, what about the men? The men do not have a role as husbands and fathers, instead their primary familial role is as uncles to the children of their sisters. Men have other responsibilities as well. Choo writes that ‘the men handle the dirty jobs’. Women cannot take the life of an animal, or handle a corpse. Mosuo society believes in the sanctity of women as representing life and light. Men also provide their physical strength and are vital for the creation of children:

‘A woman bearing the seed of childbirth needs a man to water it to bring forth life.’

Women judge men on their physical condition, which makes the males very competitive. Choo likens them to peacocks.

Choo’s stay with the Mosuo tribe is made possible by the fact that she is wealthy. This enables her to make material contributions to the tribe, and to observe how differently this society operates. I enjoyed reading this account of the Mosuo tribe, and would like to learn more about this society. I wonder, though, how long this society can continue to exist. As Choo points out, they have become a popular tourist attraction in recent years and this exposure to the outside world has resulted in a number of the younger members moving away from traditional practices.

Note: My thanks to I. B. Tauris and NetGalley for providing me with a free electronic copy of this book for review purposes.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

The author, a high-powered lawyer in Singapore, tired of the corporate boys clubs and after taking early retirement, sought out what may be the last matriarchal society on earth--the Mosuo people of south-eastern China. They define family entirely by a matriarch's bloodlines, with males visiting, but not living with their sexual partners, while living with their own female-headed households, and land controlled by the women. Tourism and curiosity has both brought money to a developing region and threatened their traditional female goddess religion (which seems to operate in tandem with Buddhism comfortably), and drawn the disapproving attention of the Chinese government, which (aside from the Cultural Revolution) largely left them alone. Hong is clear-eyed about how and why the locals have adopted her--she supports their kids in school, underwrites local festivals and keeps buying SUVs that they borrow as communal property, but she also takes pains to live their for substantial periods of time, respects their structure and tries not to be the "lady from Philadelphia" about their very rural and primitive lifestyle. All said, trading widespread flush plumbing for a ban on mansplaining sounds pretty good sometimes.

Some time ago, I heard about a book called Leaving Mother Lake, which told the story of a young woman raised in a remarkable tribe in western China near the Tibetan border, and her journey into mainstream Chinese life. I haven’t yet got round to reading that, but it meant that I immediately jumped on this forthcoming book about the same Mosuo tribe, this time told by someone entering, rather than leaving, the community. The Mosuo are remarkable as (apparently) the only remaining matriarchal and matrilineal society in the world, and this book tells the tale of a successful Singaporean lawyer who takes early retirement and finds a spiritual home in this unique community.

The story begins on a Sunday afternoon when a leading lawyer finds herself, yet again, at the office. Choo WaiHong’s determination and commitment have led her to the very top of her profession, but she has made great sacrifices for her success: her working day is often fifteen hours long and, although she can afford luxurious trips to visit friends and family around the world, she has no time to get to know herself. In a moment of sudden resolve, she resigns and decides to spend the rest of her life exploring China and finding out more about the country of her ancestors. As an independent woman in a man’s world, she has spent her life fighting to be recognised for her abilities and having to work twice as hard to get the same acknowledgement as male colleagues. Now she hears about the remote Mosuo tribe, who live in the beautiful region around Lugu Lake in the far west of China, where women are the driving force behind society. Fascinated, Choo takes a trip to explore this unique tribe and their community; and her interest turns into a love affair with this ancient way of life, which leads to her assimilation as an honorary Mosuo.

One thing to be aware of is that this book has two aspects to it. On the one hand, it offers an introduction to the customs and lifestyle of the Mosuo; while, on the other, it’s one of those rather hackneyed stories of a high-flying, single, wealthy woman finding spiritual meaning in a remote, simple community. Being primarily interested in the former, I found there was a bit too much of the latter for me to be entirely captivated by the book, especially because Choo’s personal journey doesn’t really involve any struggle or soul-searching, which might have made the story a bit more dramatic (even if this would have probably made it even more of a modern cliche). I find that it helps for me to have some empathy or emotional connection with the narrator in this kind of travel book, but unfortunately it was hard for me to find a point of contact with Choo.

It is interesting, however, to see how Choo responds to this society. Although she is a member of the international elite and has already created a life very different from the patriarchal world of her upbringing, that clearly still resonates deeply with her. And so, as she navigates Mosuo society, her reactions and realisations tell us a great deal about the position of women in traditional Chinese society, as much as about the Mosuo matriarchs. She explains the key aspects of Mosuo life: that sons and daughters customarily remain in their own mother’s home, as do the children of the daughters. Women control all financial affairs, run the households and act as managers for any business interests. There is no such thing as marriage. Women take axias, temporary lovers, sometimes developing long-term arrangements with a single man or choosing a series of short-term liaisons. The identity of the father is unimportant, because all childen are born of the same woman, and in traditional Mosuo society men do not have roles as fathers or husbands. Instead they serve as uncles to their sisters’ children. I was struck by the links between this kind of community, where a child is regarded as a woman’s with an almost negligible contribution by a man, and the kind of prehistoric communities imagined by Jean M. Auel in her Earth’s Children series). It’s an attractive idea that, somehow, the Mosuo have preserved an enclave of truly ancient human society, in its most natural form. This was fascinating to me, and Choo stresses the revolutionary impact it had on her, as the daughter of a world in which women are frequently treated as second-class citizens under the control of men.

As someone who knew nothing, I found this an interesting introduction to a unique (and threatened) way of life. Indeed, the book’s subtitle referring to the ‘hidden mountains’ implies that the Mosuo are little known, whereas Choo makes it abundantly clear in her final chapter that they have become a very popular tourist attraction in recent years, and that the arrival of the millennial lifestyle means that many younger members of the tribe are drifting away from traditional practices. The story certainly brings up lots of ideas that I’d love to explore further. I don’t know how this book will be regarded by those who already have some knowledge of the Mosuo, through one of the numerous documentaries made about them, or through other books. Personally I can’t get away from the sense that much has been simplified, and that Choo’s experiences present a very privileged picture of this community. I’m now even more determined to get hold of Leaving Mother Lake, to see how someone raised in this society copes with China’s very different attitude to women. And I’d love to know whether anyone has come across a more historical, sociological or anthropological exploration of this society.

The full review is available on my blog at:
https://theidlewoman.net/2017/03/12/the-kingdom-of-women-choo-waihong/