The Mosuo Sisters

Wenrui Chen reviews The Mosuo Sisters, directed by Marlo Poras (2013, 80 minutes)

25-year-old Juma and her younger sister Latso come from a Mosuo family, an ethnic minority with a population of only 40,000 residing around Lugu Lake in southwestern China. The sisters had been working in Beijing since 2005, trying an alternative way of life to support their poverty-stricken family. As rural-ethnic-migrant women in urban China today, however, their options were limited and met with mixed fortune. Juma sang in a Mosuo bar and Latso worked there during daytime and enrolled in an accounting class at night. The bar went out of business in 2009 due to the “global economic downturn,” according to the bar owner, and led to Juma and Latso’s unemployment in the capital city. The Mosuo Sisters by Marlo Poras follows them back to their village in Yunnan and looks closely at the lives of Juma and Latso in the ensuing year and a half, following them as they face the difficult task of reversing their outbound journey.

The Mosuo sisters opted for a temporary split along the rural and urban divide. Juma followed her boyfriend—a Tibetan singer she met in Beijing—to Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan province. She continued to work as a Mosuo singer—this time in a Tibetan club, struggling to deal with the meager income, a family still in grave need of monetary support, and sexual harassment from her pleasure-seeking customer-fans. Latso, now a dropout, was forced back to farming at home with a tenuous hope to someday resume her studies in the city. She finally abandoned this dream a year later.

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