Vertical lines of delicate Nüshu cover a replica Chinese fan. Created ZACK THOMAS
by women in the Hunan province, the mysterious script remained in use for perhaps 1,000 years.
Lost, Burned, or Buried The past and sad future of the Nüshu script The men of Jiangyong County, in the Hunan province of China, didn’t think much of the wispy, delicate writing of the women they lived with, didn’t much bother to listen when it was spoken or sung. In fact, according to Dr. Ann-Gee Lee, “If the men heard them singing it, they would know, ‘Oh, that’s just another woman complaining!’” And that was exactly the point. “If it was written, women could gripe all they wanted in their little diaries, and the men would look at it and say, ‘That’s just scribbling,’” says Lee, assistant professor at UAFS. “Men dismissed it because, ‘That’s not real men’s writing.’” But to women, that script, called Nüshu, was more than just a convenient way to complain. It was the only independence they could find in a world where men ruled and women, who were rarely allowed to learn to read or write the region’s primary language, 6
quietly obeyed. Despite—or maybe because of—their bound feet and confined lives, the women of Jiangyong invented their own written language and then kept it essentially secret from men for as much as a thousand years. In her office, Lee, who studies Nüshu, holds up a Chinese fan. Vertical lines of delicate, mosquito-leg writing fill one side. The flip side is marked with the heavy, masculine symbols of traditional Chinese. “Here is Chinese. Chinese was called Hanzi, which is men’s writing. And so Nüshu is literally ‘women’s writing.’” Nüshu’s origins are a mystery. “There are a lot of different myths,” says Lee. “One girl maybe snuck into her brother’s lessons and copied what he wrote, not really knowing how to write it. Or somebody created their own system as a way to rebel.” Women hid the script in plain sight on
embroidered cloth, painted fans, or weaving. Many passed a San Chao Shu, a cloth-bound scrapbook, to their married Jiebai Zhimei, or sworn sisters. In the 1930s and ’40s, when the invading Japanese discovered the mysterious script, they worried, rightly, that it could be used as a secret code and did their best to snuff it out. Later, in the 1960s and ’70s, Nüshu came into the crosshairs again. “Mao himself tried to suppress it,” says Lee. “There’s a story of a woman at a train station. The Red Guards saw she had all this writing and said ‘She’s a spy!’” Or a witch. The writing was burned, the woman arrested. Today, only a few scholars can still read and write Nüshu. It’s a dying language. A museum in Jiangyong houses a tiny collection of Nüshu artifacts. But most Nüshu was lost, burned, or buried with women who took their San Chao Shus to the grave. Maybe that was the plan all along, though. Because, as any Jiangyong woman knows, the best way to ensure your secret language stays secret is to hide it, of course. —Jaime Hebert
BELL TOWER summer 2013
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