Author: Laura Wagner

Translation

Throughout Chinese history, its people have cared about the concept of “unity”. However, because China is so vast, historical sources do not often discuss many ethnic minorities or regional issues that conflict with this concept of “unity”. Ever since the 5th Century BC, Confucianism has had a huge influence. Because Confucian scholars value men, and also influenced academic thinking, government, and the people, historians did not often research women’s experiences. Furthermore, in Chinese history, scholars were usually closely related to the court or royal family. This reality excluded the stories and lives of rural people. In this way, scholars only recently found “女书/ Nüshu”; a type of calligraphy and language that only those who are women in Hunan, Jiangyong can understand when spoken or written.

Nüshu is a syllable phonetic script in the Chinese dialect developed in Hunan, Jiangyong, but scholars don’t know what era Nüshu started. Although Jiangyong people have many myths explaining how Nüshu came into being, these myths all have some shared details; it was a very talented girl who created Nüshu. She combined embroidery, reading, and writing methods to create her works. The appearance of Nüshu is characterized by the rhombus-shaped overall outline of the characters, beautiful and delicate handwriting, and unique shape, so it is also called “long-legged mosquito” writing. The forms to use Nüshu include: “three dynasties books”, “fan songs” (writing secret songs in a folding fan), “paper books”, and “letter script”. Some Nüshu are embroidered on handkerchiefs, which are called “embroidered characters”. Most of the content describes local marriage and families, social interactions, secret grievances and personal affairs, rural anecdotes, folksongs and riddles of Han women, etc.

Examples of Fan Songs:

“Sworn Sisters” are more or less best friends for life. The process of becoming “sworn sisters” usually had similar ceremonies as marriage. Sworn sisters are the only ones who could use Nüshu to communicate with each other. This sisterhood had a number of matters that only included them, that is to say, Jiangyong’s sworn sisters had societal rules that prevented men from participating. In Confucian or male-focused societies, especially in rural areas, forced marriages are common. However, in the countryside, misogyny can be dangerous; in the past, rural women often had tiny, bound feet, and walking was so excruciating that they had no way to comfortably leave their house. They couldn’t read “men’s writing” (the Chinese language), received no education, and sometimes had no happiness in forced marriages. Additionally, if the husband abused the wife, there was no way to get divorced or find help. Therefore, sworn sisterhood was a safe group: women could come to share hardships and share joys. They could talk honestly about their feelings and secrets without worrying that men would understand their handwriting or their speaking and fan songs.

In addition to the two women in the sworn sisterhood, their families could also receive benefits from sworn sisterhood. A man in the documentary said that if one family and another had a very beneficial relationship in the past, then a marriage would be arranged before they were born (Yang, 2006). If the children of both families turned out to be the same gender, they could become sworn sisters or brothers, and then the family would receive the same benefits.

To non-Chinese people, this “sworn sisterhood” relationship is still very interesting. 12 years ago, Leila Rupp wrote a book called “Sapphistries” (a portmanteau of “sapphic” and “histories”). Its content discusses the written evidence of sapphic relationships throughout world history, so it includes sworn sisterhood. She cites historical information from various sources to argue that if Jiangyong had a way for women to “marry” women, then why couldn’t “sworn sisters” not only include a friendship or mutual protection, but also sometimes have a romantic relationship? In addition to this example, Lisa See, an American, also wrote a book about sworn sisterhood and Nüshu in 2005; “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan”. Most recently, Violet Du Feng and Qing Zhao, two Chinese Americans, directed a documentary about how modern Chinese women preserve the Nüshu traditions; “Hidden Letters”.

 In 1949, China gave new freedoms to women, but the government soon tried to abolish Nüshu and customs associated with it. According to the 2006 documentary, the government discovered Nüshu in the 1950s or 1960s, and because they did not understand it spoken or written, they thought it was a secret espionage code. According to a man in the Nüshu documentary, in the 1960s, many soldiers stole hundreds of thousands of Nüshu three dynasty books, fan songs, paper books, and letters and burned them at the side of the river (Yang, 2006). In 1982, Professor Zhebing Gong argued that Nüshu is a legitimate written language, but scholars disagreed. Some scholars said that one condition for identifying written language is that it is widely used in society, but because Jiangyong women are the only group who use it, scholars said people cannot regard Nüshu as a “written language”. Some scholars also believed that Nüshu characters were “witchcraft symbols”. In 1985, Zhebing Gong took his thesis to Beijing, and scholars finally agreed that Nüshu was actually a written language. Even though the original Nüshu women are long gone, it seems that both scholars and this current generation feel that as one of the world’s most unique languages, Nüshu deserves special preservation.

Due to Confucianism and patriarchy, scholars did not previously respect Nüshu, and Chinese sources for a long time did not mention Nüshu, women’s experiences, or rural life. However, both Nüshu and sworn sisterhood reflect the hardships and joys of rural Chinese women throughout several eras. In the most difficult times, women created an entire new language and created a small, safe community to protect themselves and the next generation. After enduring through generations of pain, Jiangyong women have created a legacy of resilience and beauty.