TSETA Dashi is 29, the proud father of a five-month-old daughter. But he doesn't see much of the baby ... because mother and daughter live in another village about 19 kilometres away.
Dashi prefers to continue living with his mother, along with his maternal uncle, two brothers and his younger sister, Pizuchuma, who has two daughters. And where is Dashi's father? He has always lived with his mother and nowadays rarely visits. Dashi's elder brother has two children, but they have always lived with their mother at her mother's. The father of Pizuchuma's children similarly still lives with his mother.
On first meeting it all seems like a complicated case of severe marital breakdown. But in Luoshui village, on the shores of Lugu Lake in a remote part of southwest China, the structure of the Tseta family is normal.
Lugu Lake is home to one of China's most distinctive minority nationalities, the Mosuo people. For the Mosuo there is no notion of formal marriage and no marriage ceremony. Instead, in spite of the best efforts of 45 years of Chinese Communist Party rule, they persist in the Mosuo practice of 'walking marriage'.
In traditional Mosuo society, the adult children, men and women, live in the maternal home even after they have acquired a partner. So 'walking marriage' makes for a lot of to-ing and fro-ing in the evenings. Most nights, Dashi's elder brother wanders across the village to visit his partner and children; he returns home for breakfast.
Pizuchuma's partner, who lives in the same village, also arrives at dusk at the Tseta house and leaves in the morning. Dashi, with 19 km to travel, practises what he agrees is more of a 'bicycling marriage', and only gets to see his partner and new baby about twice a month.