FROM BEING TO BECOMING

NUSHU AND SENTIMENTS IN A
CHINESE RURAL COMMUNITY

ABSTRACT

In this article, I explore the sentiments of kelian (the miserable) that were accentuated in the Chinese literature written in a script called nüshu (female writing), which men could not read. Not known to the outside world until the 1980s when it was becoming extinct, nüshu was used for centuries by peasant women in Jiangyong County, Hunan Province, southern China. By examining the textual, contextual, and performative meanings of nüshu, I argue that sentiment is not only part of human phenomenological experience, but it also partakes in the way lives are defined, articulated, reflected, and reconfigured. In Jiangyong, sentiment was not merely a carrier of nüshu women's worldview or an embodiment of their existence as isolated and powerless beings in a Confucian - androcentric agrarian community. More importantly, it functioned as an energy flow that prompted inspiration and engagement - which these women needed to offset and transform their isolation and powerlessness. This research fills the void in understandings of peasant women's expressive traditions in rural China in the early 20th century. It also lends insights into the dialectical relations between human existence (perspective and lived reality, being and becoming, subjectivity and collectivity) and forms of emotional expression. [sentiment, women, expression, China, nüshu, song, intersubjedivity]

How many beautiful women die sad and with misfortune; How many of them shed tears throughout their lives ....
We read nüshu Not for official titles, not for fame, But because we suffer. We need niishu to lament our grievances and sentiments of bitterness ....
Each writing and each phrase is filled with blood, nothing but blood. When reading it,
No one would not say,

"It is truly miserable."

This verse was written by a village woman named Cizhu, who was born in the early 20th century in Jiangyong County, Hunan Province, southern China. As were the majority of peasant women born in Chinese androcentric communities prior to the Liberation of 1949, Cizhu was demed access to educatmn m which she could learn official Chinese hanzi characters. Accordingly, she was nearly denied the opportunity to be an active subject who wrote history. But, unlike women in other Chinese rural areas, she was able to learn a script developed by Jiangyong women who had preceded her, a script that men could not read, called nüshu, or "female writing." For centuries, Jiangyong women had been using nüshu to write in verse form the sisterhood letters, biographic laments, wedding literature, prayers, folk stories, and other narratives that documented their experiences and articulated their feelings. In contrast to the femal e- specific nüshu - a term that refers both to the script and to the literature written in it - Jiangyong women called official hanzi characters nanshu, or "men's writing."

Its female specificity has brought nüshu a reputation as women's "secret" writing, but this is erroneous. In rural Jiangyong, nüshu was widely visible and audible - nüshu was used by women of almost every age and on various occasions; in fact, it was meant to be heard and shared through chanting or singing. But men paid scant attention to nüshu sung performance or nüshu content, let alone made any effort to become literate in the nüshu characters. In other words, although nüshu may have empowered women by allowing them to express themselves and exchange viewpoints with one another, it is also evidence of women's failure to gain understanding or recognition from men. This distinctive female script was, thus, never acknowledged in imperial historical archives such as gazetteers, and it was unknown to the outside world until the 1980s, just as it was becoming extinct.

The predominant reason for nilshu's lack of recognition involves the interplay between Confucian gender ideology and moral concerns. According to Chinese historiography, women's "inner quarters" (Ebrey 1993)-the domain in which women's social and sentimental worlds were constructed-were defined as inappropriate for public gaze unless they exemplified or jeopardized social mores. A woman's life, for example, was recorded in Jiangyong's historical gazetteers mainly when it demonstrated the act of martyrdom or the virtue of chastity. Nüshu, by contrast, was not specifically intended for the articulation of moral values but was a genre for su kelian, or "lamenting the miserable," as powerfully exemplified in the verse cited above. In contrast to moral concerns, in Chinese historiography such sentiments were either considered unimportant and, therefore, were overlooked or were seen as disruptive and, thus, were discouragedunless they were mediated by proper rites or aesthetic transformation, as revealed in the Confucian expression, "Issued forth from emotions, but regulated by propriety" (fahu qing zhihu li). Because the significance of sentimentanchored and female - specific nilshu literature was always dismissed by Chinese male literati and historians, the "feminist messages" (Radner 1993) that were encoded in centuries - old nüshu have remained concealed and obscured. This article aims to reveal the undecoded messages in nilshu, specifically, the sentiments of kelian.

CONCEPT-
UALIZATIONS

Built on the anthropology of emotion that rebuts post-enlightenment Cartesian dualism (i.e., reason - emotion, mind - body, public - private), sentiment in this article is conceptualized mainly as a culturally constructed sensory perception through which a person receives and responds to the world, in terms of socialization or identity fabrication, and is influenced or exercises influence (e.g., Besnier 1995; Brenneis 1987; Fung 1999; Grima 1992; Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990; Potter 1988).4 Such a position is based on the recognition of the dual character of emotion as "embodied thoughts" (Rosaldo 1984), "an index of social relationship" (Lutz 1988), or "a way of interpreting and understanding the world" (Maschio 1998) and as an energy flow that prompts the inspiration as well as the engagement (see Abu-Lughod 1990; Reddy 1997) that make transformation possible and interactions intelligible. Acknowledging this dual character, I treat emotion or sentiment not as the final destination where voices settle but as an open field in which lives are articulated, given meaning, and recontextualized as a site at which one goes from being to becoming.

In the following analysis, I start with a nüshu story known as the "Tiger Incident," using it as a referential axis from which to unfold the first of the aforementioned dimensions of emotion - that is, how the genre of su kelian, or "lamenting the miserable," gave voice to Jiangyong peasant women's existence as vulnerable beings.5 Of the hundreds of nüshu stories I have collected during field trips to Jiangyong since 1992, the "Tiger Incident" is one of only two thus far identified that were also documented in local gazetteers written by male elites. This allows for a comparison of two narrations of the same event, not for the purpose of reducing narrative differences in terms of gender-for social class is also involved-but to provide an intertextual framework from which one can elicit "hidden transcripts" (Scott 1990) encoded in the sentimental genre of nushu.

According to Mikhail Bakhtin (1986), no text has ever simply existed by itself, but one text is always generated in relation to another. In other words, every text is an index referring to another spatial or temporal domain of messages (Duranti 1993), an intersection or dialogue among several writings (Kristeva 1980), or the product of an ongoing process of producing and receiving discourses (Briggs and Bauman 1995). This concept of "intertextuality" frees one from the confines of the literary format of text and opens up analytical visions to include multiple texts, context (personal experience, historical-cultural bearing, and generic implication), performance (reading, storytelling, singing, and commenting), and participants (reader, audience, and researcher). It is, thus, a useful perspective that helps one to track diverse paths along which meanings associated with a text multiply, detour, traverse, settle, or aim toward some end -a n approach that is of special benefit when the author is unidentifiable, as is the case for the vast majority of nüshu stories. In line with this thinking, in considering the second dimension of emotion - how it penetrates and configures women's lifeworlds - my approach is context and performance sensitive. Moreover, I textually examine nüshu with reference to local women's other distinctive expressive tradition, namely, the oral nüge, or "female song," which includes bridal laments, folk songs, and narratives. My responsibility as an ethnographer is to identify and weave together the potentially intertextually linked threads into a "web" (cf. Geertz 1973) acknowledging nilshu as a su kelian genre that allowed for the recontextualization of Jiangyong worn - en's existence.

Through the dual examination of sentiments expressed in nüshu and nüge, I endeavor to lend insight into twobodies of literature. First, I encourage reflection on the way in which Chinese women, although sharing a similar social structure, are diverse in geography and social class. Contemporary sinological research on female literature is largely concentrated on the urban centers, such as in the Lower Yangzi, or on members of the educated class, such as courtesans or literati, especially of the Ming - Qing era (1368-1911; e.g., Fong 2001; Ko 1994; Mann 1997; Widmer and Chang 1997). Nüshu - nüge, however, provide access to knowledge in an arena that remains underexploredthat is, rural women's expressive cultures in southern inland China between the late 19th century and the Liberation of 1949.

Furthermore, because the construction and circulation of knowledge cannot be separated from the means by which knowledge is expressed, I call attention to the dialectical relations between human existence and forms of emotional expression. Specifically, I argue that sentiment is not merely a carrier or marker of thought, power, or relationship but is also a flow of energy that acts on and engages the protagonists. Sentiment is not just part of human phenomenological experience but also plays an active role in the way lives are felt, articulated, and reflected. Sentiment in this sense is not reducible to any simple matter of discourse construction or voice articulation, and it cannot be replaced by any other expressive medium. From the researcher's perspective, this irreducible and irreplaceable quality suggests that sentiment enjoys a distinctive "excess of seeing" (Bakhtin 1990)that is, it possesses a unique horizon that exceeds the limits of one's viewing zone or analytical angle when positioned from a sentiment - insensitized perspective. 8 In this light, sentiment should not be discredited, trivialized, or mistaken as noise - a propensity of both Confucian and Western epistemologies - but should be utilized as a lens through which the otherwise unperceived existence of certain people may become perceivable.

PERFORMANCE, LINGUISTICS, AND SOCIAL SETTINGS OF NUSHU

Nüshu was discovered in 1982 by a Chinese scholar named Gong Zhebing while studying the Yao ethnic group in southern China. Gong learned about the female - specific writing system from a male informant, whose deceased aunt was a niishu user in Jiangyong County, located near the borders of Hunan, Guangxi, and Guangdong areas. Investigating further, Gong discovered that younger women knew little of this script and that older women had stopped using it during the Cultural Revolution (1966- 76), when niishu was condemned as "witches' writing." With the aid of a retired local official named Zhou Shuoyi, who did a preliminary investigation of niishu in the 1950s while compiling Jiangyong's post-Liberation cultural history,Gong (1991) not only found a piece of cloth on which was written a nüshu biographic lament, but he also located some women who could actually write in this script.9 Soon after, the female-specific writing was introduced to the outside world.

My first fieldwork trip to Jiangyong occurred ten years later (1992-93). 10 By that time, approximately five hundred pieces of niishu literature had been collected, transliterated, and published (Gong 1991; Xie 1991c; Zhao et al. 1992). Nevertheless, by the time of my arrival, all known niishu writers except one woman in her eighties had died (several others have since been identified).

The lack of active practitioners presented a serious challenge to my attempts to collect a diverse body of data, but nüshu's unique performance helped me to overcome this constraint to some degree. Although primarily considered a written system, nüshu required performance in the form of singing or chanting, making it interchangeable with local women's oral tradition, namely, nüge. Indeed, singing was the first step toward becoming nüshu literate, because users had to match sounds with the written graphs; after mastering the ability to read nüshu texts, it was easier to learn how to write the script. Before becoming fully proficient as a writer, a woman would approach and transmit written nüshu as oral nüge. After becoming proficient, she could transcribe nüge into nüshu text. As a result, a hierarchy existed among nüshu women - there were those who could read and write, others who could only read, and still others who were limited to singing and listening to nüshu stories. My primary informants fell into the final category; some had previously been completely nüshu literate but had lost their writing skills after the Cultural Revolution. Even so, these women, most of whom were over 50 years old, had observed the transmission and performance of nüshu in their families and had participated in the nüge tradition during girlhood, making them valuable resources in the reconstruction of textual and contextual meanings of nüshu - nüge. Because nüshu - nüge had fallen out of fashion as a result of social change brought about by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since the 1950s, my informants' accounts primarily reflect the viewpoints, performative contexts, and social settings of women born in rural Jiangyong from the late 19th to the first half of the 20th century.

The concern with contextuality and performance not only expands the ethnographic basis of my research, but it also helps fill a void in existing nüshu scholarship. In addition to textual analysis, most contemporary niishuniige studies have centered on issues regarding nüshu's historical origins and linguistic features, particularly its relation to official Chinese hanzi characters. Researchers now commonly agree that nüshu differs from hanzi in two major ways, one graphic and one linguistic. First, whereas hanzi characters are square, nüshu characters are rhomboid shaped, using arcs, oblique lines, and slender strokes. Second, whereas hanzi ideographs represent meanings, nüshu characters may represent sounds as well as meanings - in the nüshu system, words that sound the same in the native dialect can be written the same way. Its phonetic characteristic made nüshu much simpler to learn than hanzi, because it could be followed easily during sung performance. Therefore, no formal classes were required; women could learn nüshu - nüge while doing needlework together or while participating in the singing sessions that were part of wedding ceremonies. At the same time, nüshu's dialect basis had encapsulated its circulation within a relatively small, if not hidden, confine, adding a mysterious undertone to this female - specific script.

This mysterious tone is reinforced by the still unknown origins of nüshu. According to one local legend, nüshu was invented between C.E. 1086 and 1100 by a woman named Hu Yuxiu, who was sent to the Imperial Palace to become a concubine of the emperor - not for her beauty but because of her reputed literary talent. A nüshu allegedly written by Hu describes her palace life:


I have lived in the Palace for seven years.
Over seven years,
Only three nights have I accompanied my majesty.
Otherwise, I do nothing ....
When will such a life be ended, and
When will I die from distress? ...
My dear family, please keep this in mind:
If you have any daughter as beautiful as a flower,
You should never send her to the Palace.
How bitter and miserable it is,
I would rather be thrown into the Yangzi River.


Lonely and distressed, Hu wanted to send messages home, but her status as an emperor's concubine was a barrier. According to the legend, she invented nüshu script as a means of getting around the court guards and censors, because the script only made sense when chanted in the Jiangyong dialect.

Hu's legend perfectly captures the spirit of nüshu as a vehicle for expressing lamentation. But like many folktales, this story cannot be confirmed, as no documents have been found to verify it. The earliest historical account of nüshu found to date was written in 1931-in it, nüshu was described as "fly - head - like tiny scripts" that "no man can read." 20 As for the original handwritten niishu, most older copies were destroyed by Japanese soldiers during World War II or by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution (Endo 1995, 1996); more recent ones were burned or otherwise destroyed after the deaths of their owners, because most families failed to see any value in keeping them.

Because of the lack of evidence, there is little agreement among investigators as to when and why nüshu was generated. Xie Zhimin (1991a, 1991b) has described nüshu as a residue of an ancient script as old as jiaguwen (bone and tortoiseshell inscriptions), created at least 1,000 years before the unification of the Chinese writing system in 221 B.C.E. In contrast, Chen Qiguang (1995) and Zhao Liming (1995) maintain that the nüshu script was derived from Chinese kaishu calligraphy, making it no more than 1,000 years old. And Gong (2001) argues that nüshu was not invented until the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). On the basis of my fieldwork, I can only trace the use of nüshu back 150 years or so - many of the elderly women I spoke with recalled the popularity of niishu among their grandmothers' and great - grandmothers' generations. A recently found coin made during the Taiping Rebellion (1851-64) was stamped with niishu-reading "women in the world are sisters in the family" (tianxia funu jiemei yijia) - further confirming the script's active use during the mid-19th century.

Zhao (1995) contends that nüshu evolved from women's weaving and embroidery traditions. (Nüshu were not only written on papers, fans, cloth, and handkerchiefs, but they were also woven into hand-knit belts.) But Chen (1995) and Tang Gongwei (1995) deny its female origin by suggesting that it may have been used initially as a secret communication system for purposes of political dissent, quite possibly by the Yao ethnic group. Yao are linked to nüshu in that Jiangyong has long been considered a major settlement area of this minority (Gong 1986; Hu 1970). Examples of the Yao's strong cultural influences in Jiangyong include belief in the panhu (giant gourd) deity and the female customs of weaving belts, participating in ritual sisterhood (or sworn sisterhood), and singing. The practice of delayed patrilocal residence, known as buluofujia - whereby a married woman does not move in with her husband until she is about to deliver her first baby - may also be Yao derived.

Following the mass migration of Han Chinese into the Hunan area from the north during the Tang - Song period (618-1279), the original Yao inhabitants were separated into sinicized groups living in upper Jiangyong and unsinicized groups living in the mountains and in lower Jiangyong (Wu 1991). This spatial distribution reflects the economic geography of Jiangyong. Surrounded by mountains about two thousand meters high, Jiangyong was connected to the outside world during imperial times mainly through two courier roads (Jianngyong xianzhi 1995). One went from Jiangyong to Dao County, in Hunan, linking upper Jiangyong, where the Xiao Water of the Yangzi River flowed, to Han Chinese cultural and political centers in the north. The other went from Jiangyong to Gongcheng, in Guangxi, through which lower Jiangyong, cut through by the Tao Water of the Pearl River, was integrated into the Yao - Miao - Zhuang minority region. Nüshu was first discovered, and circulated in, upper Jiangyong, where migratory Han and sinicized Yao lived.

Most Yao-associated customs have been sinicized, that is, transformed by and subject to Confucian patriarchal principles-especially gender ideologies. For example, the Yao are renowned for singing shan'ge (mountain songs), the major medium through which young people flirt with the opposite sex or find partners. But in the nüshu - nüge area of circulation, where arranged marriage was the norm, women were not allowed to perform this genre because it was thought to violate female decency. Buluofujia (lit., not falling into the husband's family) is another example of sinicization. The Yao buluofujia allows a female to find her own lovers before cohabiting with her husband, but within the nüshu - nüge community, such pre- or extramarital affairs were never permitted. Indeed, all of the nüshu - nüge women I met came from communities marked by adherence to the Confucian patriarchal complex - patrilineality, patrilocal village exogamy, and a village - based agrarian economy. In this setting, women were defined in terms of an "inner" or "domestic" persona, as opposed to the "outer" or "public" persona reserved for males. Specifically, prior to 1949, women had no property rights beyond their dowries, which occasionally included farmland. Except those born into gentry families, women were usually illiterate in terms of standard hanzi characters. In part because of the practice of footbinding, only women from extremely poor families worked in the fields. Concubinage was common, especially when a first wife failed to bear a son within the first few years of marriage.

In Confucian - or Han - oriented upper Jiangyong, nüshu and nüge were tightly integrated into local women's major life events. Before marriage, young girls made sisterhood pacts and wrote niishu letters to each other (Silber 1994). Brides performed nüge laments as their weddings approached, and their peers or female relatives sometimes wrote niishu wedding literature, called "sanzhaoshu" (third-day-books), as bridal gifts (Liu 2000; Zhao 1995). After marriage, women relied on nüshu and niige as sources of personal strength whenever they felt vulnerable and lacked male support. Those wanting offspring wrote niishu prayers to fertility deities, and widows composed biographic nüshu - nüge laments to assuage their frustration and sadness and to evoke sympathy from the secular world (Liu 2001).

Married or single, some Jiangyong women may have used nüshu to transmit folk stories originally written in hanzi - many of which were too long to easily memorize and recite (cf. Idema 1999; Liu and Hu 1994; McLaren 1996; Silber 1995). Others composed nüshu - nüge narratives to comment on extraordinary events they had observed. One very popular narrative, for example, describes an 18-year-old girl who killed the three-year-old boy with whom she was forced into marriage. In the story the girl complains, "Washing his feet and putting him to bed, only to be awakened by his cries for breast-feeding at midnight. 'I am your wife, not your mother!' " (Zhao et al. 1992:512). The tale that is the focus of the following analysis, the "Tiger Incident," is another example of nüshu narrative.

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