Himalaya

Series: Himalaya
Chapter: Day 80: Lugu Lake
Country/sea: China
Place: Lugu Lake
Book page no: 187

Day 80: Lugu Lake

Lugu Lake, China
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Introducing myself to the piglets.

So she ran off to Beijing and Shanghai and became a successful singer, until she damaged her hearing. Far from giving up, she turned to fashion and went to live and work in San Francisco, New York, Paris, Italy and Japan. She lived with a Norwegian diplomat but that now seems to be over and she's fallen for a Frenchman.

She tells me all this as the fire crackles and the smoke drifts lazily up into the rafters of what feels an essentially mediaeval cottage. Her aunt, thinking Namu is talking too much, tries to get at the fire to make us all a cup of salted butter tea.

The interesting thing about Namu is that she bothered to come back to Lugu Lake at all. Though she calls herself, wryly, 'a five-star gypsy', the claustrophobic world that drove her away still seems to have a hold on her.

I put it to her that she's still trying to win the approval of the mother who rejected her and she nods. But it hasn't been easy for either of them. What Namu did, and how she did it, was in every way extraordinary, but it nearly severed her links with her mother for ever.

She also seems genuinely fond of her people, describing herself as a 'Mosuo cultural ambassador'. This seems to excite her and she leaps up. There is something we must see.