| Nushu - A Secret Code of the Sisterhood |
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| Features | |
| Friday, 02 October 2009 | |
The world's only single-sex writing systemThe story of Nüshu is uniquely fascinating in the history of the Chinese language: yet, for many, the word still means nothing. Now, as a once-secret script becomes a tourist moneyspinner, it's time for everyone to learn about Nüshu - the two thousand characters that make up the world's only single-sex writing system. This secret code has survived for seventeen hundred years, inspiring songs, poetry and journals of the most personal kind. And it was created by women denied the chance to read or write. In the third century, the men and women of Jiangyong, a rural county of central China's Hunan province, spoke a common dialect: Cheng Guan Tuhua. However, only men were taught to read and write - hardly surprising in feudal culture. In response, their wives and sisters, Yao peasants colonized by Han culture, created Nüshu. A literary freedom Usually misrepresented by the Western press as a secret language', Nüshu is actually a phonetic writing system that encoded the dialect both sexes spoke but which only men could study. For the Yao women of Jiangyong, Nüshu became literary freedom, a means of secret, uncensored expression otherwise impossible in Chinese culture. Linguistically, Nüshu resists generalisation. Although chiefly syllabic, Nüshu also incorporates logographic, iconic and punctuation elements to build a 20,000 word vocabulary. All of the 1800-2500 characters have an elongated appearance when compared to traditional Chinese characters. Surviving calligraphy is beautiful and almost diamond-shaped. Nüshu texts were written by women, for women; through Nüshu, women created sworn sisterhoods', ritualistic, highly emotional relationships that mirrored the brotherhoods' within patriarchal Chinese culture. From the start, Nushu was about eloquence and expression. Women wrote about their experience of marriage, imagining alternative fairytales wherein women left their ugly husbands or confronted reluctant fiancés with the full force of their anger. One song told of an eighteen-year-old girl forced to mother' her three-year-old husband. Most commonly, though, women wrote about each other. The joyous poems exchanged by sworn sisters morph slowly into the saddest and most famous Nüshu text of all: the 'third-day book.' These are elegies for a sister lost to marriage, inscribed in a book presented on the third day of marriage. Between the pages, a community of women reflect on the reality of their lives: "Now we sit together because our feelings are disturbed by the imminent marriage of one of our sworn sisters and we must write the third-day book. We cherish the days when we are together and hate losing one of our sisters. After she gets married it will be difficult to meet her so we worry that she will be lonely. For a woman, marriage means losing everything, including her family and her sworn sisters." With blank pages at the back, third-day books became wives' diaries, burned or bequeathed away from their husbands after their deaths. Some third-day books were even buried with their authors, to be shared with sworn sisters in the next world. Unsurprisingly, Nüshu has been, and continues to be, misrepresented by the Western press, for whom Nüshu is a forum for tired, exoticising fantasies of China as mysterious' and undiscovered'. The Cultural Revolution, by imposing standardized education and the widespread use of Mandarin, certainly imperilled all local languages: moreover, with women's education, the need for Nüshu diminished. Despite this, Nüshu has been the subject of academic research - in Asia, America and Europe - for nearly fifty years. A living language Most importantly, women do continue to read and write in the language. Between the Qing Dynasty and the 1949 Revolution, every Jiangyong village contained women familiar with Nüshu, even if this was not publically acknowledged. Inevitably, this generation is slowly passing away - in 2004, China Daily reported the death of Yang Huanyi, 98, as the loss of the last Nüshu speaker. Still, across Jiangyong, women continue to learn and teach the language, whether in the homes of their grandmothers, or in the $80,000 Nüshu Garden School, which opened in 2004. There's even a dictionary, published the same year by 78-year-old Nüshu user Zhou Shuoyi. But ultimately, Nüshu's survival may depend on its commercialisation. Outside academia and Jiangyong itself, Nüshu is still unknown. Enter the Nüshu Culture Village, which houses the school in Jiangyong's Pu Wei village, and which is clearly designed for tourists rather than students. With millions in Hong Kong dollars providing the funding, a new tourist infrastructure is building up in and around Pu Wei. Here, tourists can buy third-day books with handy Mandarin translations, as well as other bilingual souvenirs. Is this the bastardisation of tradition, or a necessary marriage of consumerism and culture? I take the pragmatic view. Nüshu's new diarists and songwriters will find Nüshu not via village traditions but via journalism like this and sites like dimsum: a media which reaches young people of Chinese heritage wherever they are in the world. If you are a writer, a student, or simply a young Chinese woman, here's a question for you: Nüshu needs new scholars. Could you be one of them?
Sophie Duncan
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