Leaving Mother Lake-Namu and Christine Mathieu

I just read Leaving Mother Lake: A Childhood at the Edge of the World and thought it was a fascinating book. It's about the Moso girl Erche Namu who grew up in an extremely remote village between China and Tibet, ran away when she was 14, and eventually became a famous singer. It took a few days to hike to the road from her village, then a few days to travel to the city.

This book is full of interesting cultural information about China and about the Moso and other tribal people in the 1980's. For example, in Namu's village, property is passed down to daughters, not sons. They didn't marry. After a girl had her "skirt ceremony" after her period started, she became a woman. A women would stay in her own room in the home of her mother (men never owned houses), and a man would knock at the window of a woman at night, and if she liked him, she could let him in.

The Afterword mentions that the Chinese government tried to make the Moso culture become more like the mainstream Chinese culture. They didn't succeed at first, but gradually, after much work, (sadly) did influence the Moso and other tribes to leave behind some of their cultural heritage and become more Chinese.