In Search of the Holistic Vasectomy

“I’m a journalist, and I’m writing an article for a magazine about a doctor who I hear lives in Lugu. She has this…treatment, by which she can take a man’s testicles, and using only her hands, make it so that he cannot make a woman pregnant.”

The pharmacist, a woman, just stared at me. “What?”

I repeated myself, this time making a gesture roughly akin to what I assumed this doctor’s method looked like.

“She snaps pea pods?” she asked.

“In a sense, yes.” I answered.

“I’ve never heard of anything so crazy.” Said the pharmacist, and went back to dusting off her cough syrup bottles.

Over the course of the next two days, I searched the town high and low for my witch doctor, becoming more and more convinced that my editor in Beijing had inadvertently given me a bum steer. I asked every pharmacist and doctor I could find, and traveled to two neighboring villages. One man grimaced as I explained the procedure to him. “No Mosuo man would undergo such a procedure,” he told me.

“But I hear it’s painless…” I countered weakly.

“Well, if you find this doctor, you get it done and come back and tell me how painless it really is!” He said.

Ms. Tsao, the proprietress of my hotel (“The Customal Hotel of the Girl Kingdom”) was sympathetic. On the last evening before I left, we sat down together and shared some tea. She told me that I wasn’t first person to come to Lugu in search of a myth. “Lots of people have strange ideas about we Mosuo people. Some come here looking for a good time, thinking that because we practice open marriage that we are easy. They leave knowing better.”

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