Earlier this month, Nicolas Sarkozy made it on top of the FP list of "Most Eligible World Leaders" ("Interests: Anglo-Saxon economic reform, jogging, the United States of America"). Et voilà, here we go:
"I want to say to the President of France: 'Choose me. I will be a perfect wife for you," said Namu - whose full name is Yang Erche Namu - in a filmed internet plea aired by French website aujourdhuilachine.com.
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She is from the Himalayan Mosuo minority near Tibet - a matriarchal people (...)
Apparently, for a Mosuo woman, proposing seems the normal thing to do. Then again:
where the women never actually marry.
Instead, they take a series of lovers throughout their lives and bring up the children under one roof.
The roof of her mother's house hasn't been big enough for Namu, though, judging from this source from 2004:
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[S]he was a 13-year-old running away from a small village in which she felt trapped, and from a mother from whom she was estranged. Few in her tribe expected her to survive. To her people, the world beyond their mountainous home was largely unknown and incomprehensibly vast. Not only did she survive, she thrived, making her way to Shanghai, where a combination of luck and talent secured her a place at the prestigious Conservatory of Music, where she was the school’s first Mosuo student.
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Sounds like an interesting person. Rachel DeWoskin might have thought the same, making Namu the focus of a lengthy article on "the new cultural revolution" (no, really!) for the Sunday Times and claiming that Namu "gave China the right to vote" (to vote a TV idol, that is. For the beginning, don't let it get too ambitious, right?):
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Yang Erche Namu is somehow both a predictable and unimaginable candidate for playing the part of China’s Paula Abdul (the American Idol judge who is a constant source of gossip). She is a model of the conflict between what audiences want to watch and what Chinese censors claim to want to conceal.
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She won’t consider marrying a Chinese man; westerners, she tells me conspiratorially, are “more romantic”. The subject of Chinese women dating anyone other than Chinese men is a fraught one in China. The reasons for this range from historical resentment over barbarian invasions to the gender imbalance in China’s population and concern over the dwindling number of marriageable Chinese women. Namu, by publicly taking herself out of the running, is a PR agent for western men and potentially a terrifying role model.
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An article from the Shanghai Daily (Publicity hound wants to be first lady of France) serves as an example of how terrified some Chinese are. Namu is labeled as a "disgraced talent show judge", and the author doesn't forget to mention that Namu is quite experienced as it comes to be engaged with foreigners:
Yang is also famous for her love affairs with foreign lovers. She married an American, divorced him, had a seven-year romance with a Norwegian diplomat and became an author when she decided to write about her adventures.
If the proposal turns out to be a failure, Namu could then propose to Hugo Chávez (# 5 on the FP list), who is on pair with Sarkozy in terms of divorces.
