You never know what to expect from Namu. She’s a sex symbol who wrote a best seller. She’s a TV star and lingerie designer, an ex-model and ex-singer. She opened both a museum dedicated to tribal culture and what she calls a “love hotel”, outfitted with opium beds. She’s a jet-setter and perennial gossip-magnet, and sometimes it seems as if all of China either loves her or loves to hate her.
Yang Erche Namu, 41, cultivates an image of fearlessness with stories like how she fled her isolated village in the Himalayas at 14 as her mother hurled rocks at her back. But something had obviously unnerved her the other day, even as she made her usual entrance, with long swinging hair, tight black dress, jangling jewellry and teetering heels.
Her mobile phone was beeping madly, which was nothing new. Nor was it that she had provided the masses with yet another juicy tidbit: a video of her marriage proposal to President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, which was posted on a news website just days before news media reports linked him with the Italian ex-model Carla Bruni.
But this time, Namu, as she calls herself, seemed genuinely taken aback by the vehemence of the Chinese public’s reaction.
Comments about her on Chinese blogs are full of obscenities, condemnations and threats. It does not help that she once caused a stir by saying she preferred Western lovers to Chinese ones.
Being a provocateur has its downside. The government has been known to clamp down on almost anything that becomes suddenly too popular and outside its control.
She was hoping her latest publicity stunt, wooing Sarkozy in public, would not cause problems, particularly since having married and divorced an American photographer for National Geographic, she is now an American citizen. “Chinese people lack a sense of humour”, she said.
Then, as dramatically as she had begun, she changed tone. She cracked a wide smile and explained that it had started as a joke.
Like many other aspects of her life, the proposal was out of step with Namu’s ethnic heritage. She comes from the Mosuo, a tiny minority group of about 40,000 people who have their own language and religion. They are rare among Chinese ethnic groups in that they are matrilineal and do not believe in wedding vows. Instead they have so-called walking marriages, a system of serial monogamy. As long as they stay within the Mosuo community, women can choose and change lovers at will, have children with multiple men and raise their families in extended, female-headed households.
After leaving her village, where there were no telephones or flush toilets, Namu made it to Shanghai, where she pursued her pop-star career.
Namu says she used these opportunities to bring tourism and much-needed development to her people. Her detractors accuse her of sensationalising the Mosuo and exploiting her roots to further her own celebrity. Criticism increased when sex tourists began flooding in.
The New York Times
