Travelling in South Yunnan in December last year, I visited a village where the Dai, a matriarchal people, lived, farmed and raised fighting roosters.
I ran into some guys the night before who had hired a driver to take them out to where they lived. Though I was just a tourist out on a daytrip, what I saw of matriachy in action was awesome.
The villages were wealthy, given the people, who were pretty much self-sufficient, started planting rubber trees.
A rubber tree lasts for 15 years, with the harvester making about 300 RenMinBi per year, per tree.
The plantation we visited had hundreds of trees, which belonged to one family. We passed a lot of plantations on our way to the villages.
The Chinese economic situation — the boom that keeps booming, year after year — consumes every drop of latex they can pull out of the trees, and will apparently continue to do so for many years to come, as long as the world wears sneakers and drives cars.
Like sensible people everywhere, the Dai don’t trust banks, so the re-invest their money in their businesses, vehicles and homes.
When we entered the village, walked past everybody having a town meeting. We were obviously more interesting than the topic at hand, as everyone ignored the speaker and looked at us.
It was almost all men at the meeting, so I think they were just doing it to keep themselves busy. According to our guide, the Dai women make all the decisions, own all the property, and have responsibility. They raise the children, and also do all the work.
The lifestyle enjoyed by men living in this matriarchal society deeply appealed to my inner 14-year-old. They, basically, just hang out.
They drink, party, ride around on dirtbikes, go to meetings and hang out in each others’ basements (well, their wives’ basements). They smoke lots of cigarettes, maybe tap some rubber in the mornings, and tap their wives at night. If they aren’t good enough husbands, they seem pretty expendible, and get kicked out with nothing.
The men also train fighting cocks.
Before you judge: Cockfighting is awesome. Trainers fit razor-spurs if they want a fast match, or not if they want them to go all day. Before anyone says (queue whiny voice:) “Those cruel oriental types, they don’t place the same value on life as civilised westerners”, the sport was introduced by the Portugese during those heady colonial times, at least according to one guy I talked to.Sometimes the trainers give the birds amphetamines, which is fairly prevalent in that part of the world — The Golden Triangle is just down the river, and I read somewhere that meth has replaced heroin as the big cash crop for Burmese warlords.
The episode reminded me of many stories I heard of the early days of Muay Thai kickboxing back in Aotearoa, when fighters took Thermoblast diet pills before their fights. As you’d expect when old white dudes know your own neurology better than you, the pills soon got banned and the practice died out.
Back to the Dai and their cocks: They didn’t mind us hanging out and watching for a bit. Once the blood starts going, it gets pretty exciting. A few beers, a pack of smokes, and a cool hundred on `Fancy Boy’ to kill `Prancing Paddy’: How better to spend an afternoon?
We visited some Dai ladies, who were rendering down sugarcane sap into blocks of sugar to take to market. Huge steaming vats of the sweet stuff, boiling for hours until the it could be set into blocks that looked and tasted like palm sugar.
Our guide, a Han Chinese, was a wonderful host on their behalf. He would walk into anyone’s house, or yard, or cockfight, get the locals to explain what was happening.
It takes a masterful combination of massive balls and that awesome Chinese hard-headedness to tell someone you’ve never met that you’re taking four gawking laowai (foreigners) through their house.
In about two seconds, he had the women sit us down with bowls of hot sugarcane juice, which we then felt obliged to drink. Hungover, in the tropical heat of Ganlanba province (the Thailand of China, apparently), there are few things you want less than a bowl of steaming sugar soup.
They told us it was very good for pregnant women and laughed at us. It was something else: being in a situation where your habitual interpersonal valencies are pushed to respond to the local social grammar. How do you behave when all the social furniture you are used to has been taken away? What do you do, then? How do you act?
It was a wild time, operating mostly with my own perceptual systems, rather than mostly through habitual social trance. I was unmapped, and traversing alien social topographies, inhabited by a gender I had not yet encountered. Like wandering into a secret valley of the Amazon women or something.
They were lovely, lovely people, who acted with true generosity, grace and forbearance.
