China’s White People

by Ernie Diaz

And it came to pass that the Chinese drove the white people from their forest homes onto the plains. And the Tibetans came to rule over them, so that the white people did follow the tolerant Mongols down into the high mountains of northwestern Yunnan. Here the white people thrived by the lakes in sheltering valleys.

We’re not playing Mad Libs with the bible. The path of the white people has been beset on all sides by oppression. In the Han Dynasty they were zuo, or “white wolves”. By the Song, the less imaginative “western barbarians” served to refer to them. Not until 1960 did they win formal recognition from the government as Pumi, the white people.

Dermatologically, the whitest thing about the Pumi is their teeth. The flaxen gowns their children wear are the only other clues to why these people would call themselves white. That, and their Alpine tendency to dwell on gentle hillsides by the water, in log houses with plenty of space between neighbors. No surprise, considering their home at 2500 meters, nestled in the piney bower between Old Folk and Yak mountains, spreading down to Dali’s Lugu Lake, resembles Interlaken more than any place within hawking and spitting distance of the Yangtze.

But after log cabins, the way of the Pumi and the Caucasian diverge dramatically. In outlook, the Han are whiter than the Pumi. For the Pumi would rather sing than argue, dance than devise, and insist on clinging to all that superstitious nonsense that deceives them into contentedly believing they live lives of meaning. If that sounds like a lot of minorities in western China, well then kindly remember a lot of people hardly see the difference between a Dutchman and a Dane.

To a people numbering scarcely over 30,000, that meaning boils down to divinely simple continuity. A wooden Pumi dwelling is a mini cosmos, with round pillars in each corner and a square one in the middle, the “heaven holding pole”, conduit between eternal and daily life. A massive hearth is the other dominant feature, beds laid around, and ancestral shrine behind.

The odd set of sheep or cattle horns, often with skull still attached, adorns most Pumi dwellings and might be taken for talismans of ill intent. These are symbols of wealth, however, and should deter none from visiting. Around the fire the Pumi spend the little leisure time afforded a pastoral/agricultural lifestyle, and rejoice in guests to entertain, rare as they are. Beyond communal bread-breaking, a Pumi clan will see their hearth-side guest eat to heart’s content before feeding itself. Only in the hardest of times will that guest leave without the four gifts, a fowl’s leg, a wedge of dried pork, a gourd of tea leaves, and a bottle of liquor.

With few visitors, the ebullient Pumi measure breaks from plow and pasture by festival. Not that all social intercourse is for public spectacle. Practically speaking, continuity means children. Until recently, Pumi arranged their children’s marriages with the all the care and worry of folk who can all too easily envision the end of their scant line. Beef-fed and heady from ion-positive air, the lusty Pumi youth took to melodramatic romance like middle school students to manga. The hills resounded to the improv- tunes of lovesick shepherds and jilted maids. The moon shone on glens where skylarking couples serenaded each other, and the bushes shook discretely.

Nowadays Pumi youngsters get considerably more leeway in choosing mates, and the berry of clandestine romance is not so sweet. Yet choose they must, and obey a host of pre and post connubial ordinances that go far in explaining the lack of over-population in Pumi country. Indeed, for an endangered species of a people such as the Pumi, hell bent on stocking their log cabins with three or four generations before breathing their last, they are uncharacteristically prim about how children are made in the first place. Even after the wedding, a new couple must conspire in moonlight Blueberry Hill courtship rituals until a baby is produced.

This is where even the ultra-PC China Expat deplores the excesses of ancient ways, for while they do lend a sense of wholeness to a minority tribesman’s life that we angst-ridden moderns will never understand, they also entail a cloud of taboos to dampen the most progressive souls. Some are just kosher: no cat or dog, horse or frog meat. Some are tragic-comic, such as ceremonially kidnapping the bride from her work between the wheat rows on her wedding day. Most are just tiresome. No singing love songs in the house, no making noise while you eat. No washing, combing, or cutting hair at night. No caps worn to the wrong side. No touching someone else’s head. No reason necessary. We’ve always done it that way.

Yet for all the tangled practice, the theory behind Pumi faith is one of elegant simplicity, and explains the origin of the White People, or at least their name. They spring from an all-mother, the goddess Dingba Cimu, adorned in raiment as white as the mule she rides, and the blameless milk she drinks. Her home lies in a cave on Cizi Mountain. Thousands of Pumi go there each winter to seek boons and offer sacrifices, but only women are allowed in the cave. In a similar vein, only women can be witches, better to say priestesses, of the Pumi religion, called Dingba or Hangui. So call it animistic, call it antiquarian, but you can’t call the Pumi way of life patriarchal. No coincidence the low rate of pointless feuding, and high frequency of singing and dancing, just as with their neighbors, the Mosuo.

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