In Search of the Holistic Vasectomy

By Joshua Samuel Brown - Lake Lugu, in China’s Northern Yunan Province; home of the aboriginal Mosuo tribe, the last purely matriarchal people left in China. The Mosuo are best known for their practice of walking marriage, a form of poly-amoury in which the women – masters of the household – chose their lovers for the evening from among the men of the tribe. Children are raised semi-communally, taking the mother’s name and living in the mother’s home. Theirs, according to all accounts, is a pure love, devoid of jealousy, duplicity or shame.

The men of Lugu are handsome, the women beautiful, and most all are skilled equestrians. Their village sits at an elevation of around 7500 feet above sea level in the mountains just south of Tibet. The Mosuo themselves practice a form of Buddhism akin to their cousins to the north. The lake is a sacred place, 30 square miles of pure indigo, broken only by a few small, lush islands dotted with Tibetan temples and one unused monastery.

I’d come to Lugu on a dubious mission, having heard tale from a reputable magazine editor in Beijing of a Mosuo Shamaness with an unusual procedure by which a man could be rendered fully sterile with no loss whatsoever to his virility. This procedure, according to what I’d heard, was permanent, nearly painless and required no surgery. In other words, holistic vasectomy by hand. So my mission was purely journalistic in nature. That I was able to spend four days in paradise in pursuit of said mission, well…call it a lucky bonus.

Arriving in the village after a six hour minibus ride that was both frightening and breathtaking, I immediately got to work trying to locate the good doctor. I stopped into the first pharmacy I saw (every small town in China has at least a few of these, denoted by a red cross inside a white flower) and explained my predicament. But how does one explain to complete strangers that one is seeking a witch doctor who performs vasectomies by hand? Not knowing the word for “vasectomy” in Mosuo (or Mandarin, for that matter), I resorted to pidgin linguistics.

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