WUNRN
International Mother Language Day – 21 February 2015
Modern Film that Includes Reference to Nushu Women’s Script of China.
SNOW FLOWER & THE SECRET FAN – Film Segment: http://www.foxsearchlight.com/trailer/152/trailer/
China – Nushu - A
Language by Women, for Women
Scholars try to
save unique Chinese script.
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Edward
Coty / The Washington Post Hu
Mei Yue teaches nushu in Pumei Village in south central China. |
Washington
Post
By
Edward Cody
PUMEI
VILLAGE, China - Nowadays, it would be called empowering women. But back then,
centuries ago, it was just a way for the sworn sisters of this rugged and
tradition-laden Chinese countryside to share their hopes, their joys and their
many sorrows.
Only men learned
to read and write Chinese, and bound feet and social strictures confined women
to their husband's homes after marriage. So somehow -- scholars are unsure how,
or exactly when -- the women of this fertile valley in the southwestern corner
of Hunan province developed their own way to communicate. It was a delicate,
graceful script handed down from grandmother to granddaughter, from elderly
aunt to adolescent niece, from girlfriend to girlfriend -- and never, ever
shared with the men and boys.
So was born nushu,
or women's script, a single-sex writing system that Chinese scholars believe is
the only one of its kind.
"The girls
used to get together and sing and talk, and that's when we learned from one
another," said Yang Huanyi, 98, a wrinkled farmer's widow who learned as a
girl and whom scholars consider the most accomplished reader and writer among a
fast-dwindling number of nushu practitioners. "It made our lives better,
because we could express ourselves that way."
Wispy, elongated
letters
Scholars and local authorities have taken renewed interest in the exclusive
language, trying to preserve it as the last women who are fluent reach the end
of their lives. Generations of women in the region once penned their diaries in
nushu, and the few journals that have survived offer a unique chronicle of
these private lives long ago. Today, young girls learn Chinese along with the
boys, so learning nushu has less appeal.
Nushu in some ways
resembles Chinese, if some of the characters were stretched and altered. But it
also differs in many respects. For example, according to researchers, the
letters represent sound -- the sounds of this region's Cheng Guan Tuhua dialect
-- and not ideas as in the Chinese ideograms that men studied and wrote. Nushu
was written from top to bottom in wispy, elongated letters in columns that read
from right to left.
Much remains
unknown about nushu. Its origins, reaching perhaps as far back as the 3rd
century, have been the subject of scholarly exchanges among a handful of
researchers in China and elsewhere. They know it was used in Hunan's Jiangyong
County, in south central China about 200 miles northwest of Guangzhou, and
believe it was limited to what is now Jiangyong's Shungjian Xu Township, which
includes Pumei and these days has a population of around 19,000 people. But
even that is not certain.
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What seems clear
is that nushu was fostered by the region's ancient custom of "sworn
sisters," whereby village girls would pledge one another fealty and
friendship forever. The tight sorority, which included growing up together in
cobbled village lanes and gathering with adult women to weave and embroider,
inevitably was shattered when the time for marriage came. Tradition dictated
that a bride go away to her groom's home -- and that is where nushu came in.
Three days after
the wedding, the adolescent bride would receive a "Third Day Book," a
cloth-bound volume in which her sworn sisters and her mother would record their
sorrow at losing a friend and daughter and express best wishes for happiness in
the married life that lay ahead. The first half-dozen pages contained these
laments and hopes, written in nushu that the groom could not read. The rest
were left blank for the bride to record her own feelings and experiences -- in
nushu -- for what would become a treasured diary.
The sworn
sisterhood tradition in this region has led some scholars to speculate that
nushu developed as a secret language for lesbians, according to Zhao Liming, a
literature professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing who helped bring nushu
to researchers' attention in the 1980s and is one of the foremost authorities
on it.
"But that is
not true," she said in an interview. "They just wanted a way to
express themselves." She added: "Women needed a spiritual life. They
could not write Chinese, but they wanted to express their feelings."
Most important to
the women who learned it, sometimes memorizing letters written on the palms of
their hands because of a lack of paper, nushu liberated them from illiteracy.
The way nushu came
to light some 20 years ago also has been clouded in competing theories.
Lin Lee Lee at the
University of Minnesota has written that a Jiangyong County woman visiting
relatives in Beijing in 1982 astounded them by singing and then writing a
language and script they could not understand. The relatives passed along their
amazement to scholars, she said in a conference presentation, and research into
the strange female writing system began.
But Zhou Shuoyi,
78, a self-described countryside intellectual who lives in nearby Yongzhou
city, said he knows better, and he explained why.
'Educate the
Girls'
One of his ancestors, a grandmother six generations back, wrote a poem entitled
"Educate the Girls." The poem, handed down from generation to
generation, was translated into nushu by some local village women, he said, and
his aunt brought the nushu version to his father's house sometime in the 1920s
as a subject of curiosity.
Zhou's father, a
schoolteacher, was impressed by the strange writing he could not understand and
urged the young Zhou to investigate. Later, working for the Jiangyong County
cultural department in the 1950s, Zhou said he discovered a number of elderly
peasant women still mastered nushu. A speaker of the Tuhua dialect, he was also
able to get a whiff of what nushu was about -- and what a cultural discovery
there was to make.
"At that
time, many grandmothers could sing it, write it and read it," he said in
an interview, sipping green tea, smiling with satisfaction and arching his
bushy black eyebrows under a flat golfer's hat. He added, "In society at
that time, there was injustice between men and women, and women needed this
language as a way to express themselves."
After further
research, Zhou reported his findings to authorities in Beijing. But by then the
Cultural Revolution had convulsed China. As an intellectual, Zhou said, he was
branded a rightist and forced to halt his work. Red Guard zealots destroyed the
nushu documents he had painstakingly accumulated.
"But the
stuff in here could not be burned," he smiled, pointing at his head and
its tufts of white hair.
So in 1979, when
calm had returned, Zhou said he went back to work at a local museum and resumed
his interest in nushu, eventually learning to read and write.
Zhou collected
more samples and broadened his understanding of the little-known phenomenon. In
1982, he said, he wrote a book about the region's culture, including a section
on nushu. When the Hunan provincial government published the book, scholars
from relatively nearby Wuhan, from faraway Beijing and eventually even from
abroad started dropping by. Nushu had been discovered.
"Now a lot of
people are studying it and a lot of people come here to ask about it," he
said.
Zhao said that
over the last 20 years she has guided a number of graduate students, Chinese
and foreign, in studying nushu at Tsinghua. Estimates of its contemporary
vocabulary range from 670 to 1,500 words. A dozen of Zhao's students recently
started compiling them in a dictionary. The students include three young men,
she specified with a smile.
But aside from
scholars, Zhao and Zhou said, fewer than 10 people can fluently read and write
nushu. Yang, the 98-year-old, has little time left. Several other women in
Jiangyong County who can read and write, or at least read, also have neared the
end of their lives.
'Like a flower'
Local authorities nevertheless have seized on nushu's cultural value, and on
its tourism potential. An $80,000 school and museum went up last year here in
Pumei, where Hu Mei Yue, 42, visits every Saturday to teach nushu to whoever
among the village girls shows up for class.
Hu, who learned
from her grandmother, the late Gao Yinxin, also embroiders bags and handkerchiefs
with nushu writings to sell to tourists, who people here hope will start coming
soon to see what they have baptized "Pumei, Nushu Cultural Village."
"It's very
interesting, and Gao Yinxin left this valuable thing for our village,"
said Hu Linyin, 10, a Pumei girl who recited nushu poetry and tried to puzzle
out the writing under teacher Hu's direction during a session Saturday.
"I don't know
how people can write like this," remarked a classmate, Hu Cui Cui, 12, who
said she can read about 200 words and write a few. "Each word is like a
flower."