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Nüshu: A curriculum of women’s identity 
 

Julia T. Broussard 
Harvard Graduate School of Education, Boston, USA 

 
Introduction 
Rural women in Jiangyong County, Hunan Province, developed their own unique script called 
nüshu (女书), a phonetic form of writing different from Chinese script. Nobody is quite sure 
how or how long ago nüshu was invented; we only know that it existed before the twentieth 
century. Largely barred from learning to read and write Chinese script, the women of 
Jiangyong County taught nüshu to each other, passing the knowledge from generation to 
generation (Chiang, 1995, pp. 273-277; S. Liu & Hu, 1994). Chinese, and then western, 
scholars began studying nüshu in the 1980s, when it was already dying out. By that time only 
a small group of elderly women could still read and write nüshu. Scholars have examined 
nüshu from the perspectives of anthropology, linguistics, literature, literacy, and women’s 
studies (Chiang, 1995; Gong, 1990; Idema, 1999; Idema & Grant, 2004; F. Liu, 2001; S. Liu 
& Hu, 1994; McLaren, 1996, 1998, 1999; Silber, 1994, 1995; Zhao, 1992). I would like to 
examine nüshu from the perspective of curriculum theory.  

Nüshu, after all, was an educational practice: a group of women who made themselves 
literate and transmitted this literacy across generations. One of the core concerns of 
curriculum theory, shared with the humanities and social sciences, is the nature of 
subjectivity, or how a person experiences his identity in relation to lived experience. 
Educational processes impart much more than knowledge and skills; educational processes 
that learners experience help to shape identities (Greene, 1997; Pinar, 1994, 1998; Smith, 
1996). I draw on the work of one curriculum theorist in particular, Suzanne de Castell (1996), 
who examines the links between literacy and “self-formation,” as she terms it. My purpose is 
to explore how nüshu, in what is spoken and what is left silent, forms a curriculum that shapes 
experiences through which the women learn how to present and understand their identities.  

 To do this, I will look at nüshu texts and practices. The corpus of extant nüshu texts 
includes personal letters, adaptations of fictional stories, wedding laments, autobiographical 
ballads, and other writings. The autobiographical ballads recount the lives of this group of 
rural women. William Pinar (1994) has proposed the study and practice of autobiography as a 
means for uncovering “the architecture of the self.” Anthropologists have similarly analyzed 
what they term life narratives or “stories of self” to understand the relationship between 
schooling and selfhood (Eisenhart, 1995; Luttrell, 1996). Narratives about people’s own lives 
present, in what they say and do not say, a certain portrait of a life. The nüshu 
autobiographical ballads offer a unique perspective on how these women understand and 
choose to portray their own identities.  

Since nüshu is an oral literature, originally intended to be sung aloud for gatherings of 
women, not to be read from paper, an analysis of any nüshu texts is not complete without a 
corresponding analysis of nüshu practice. In fact, I will argue that together practice and text 
form a curriculum of identity, neither constituting a curriculum by itself. As for examining 
nüshu texts and practices, I first must acknowledge my limitations. I do not read nüshu and 
have relied on other scholars’ transcriptions of nüshu texts into Chinese script (primarily the 



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transcriptions of Zhao, 1992). I have not visited Jiangyong County nor observed any of the 
practices of nüshu. My knowledge of nüshu practices comes entirely from scholars who have 
visited Jiangyong and worked directly with the nüshu practitioners, namely Cathy L. Silber 
(1994; 1995), William W. Chiang (1995), and Liu Fei-Wen (2001). I rely mainly on Silber’s 
account of nüshu as it was practiced in Jiangyong County, which I describe below. 
Afterwards I will turn to the texts of three nüshu autobiographical ballads.  

 
The practice of nüshu 
I will begin by explaining the social background of Jiangyong County, then recount the larger 
practice of nüshu, and finally focus on the practices surrounding the autobiographical ballads.  

The women of Jiangyong County, in the twentieth century, led lives of hardship. Most of 
Jiangyong County’s residents eked out a living from agriculture. Many of the autobiographies 
paint a picture of the hard life of farmers, occasionally beset by drought and other calamities. 
Public health services in the county were negligent through much of the twentieth century; 
many women describe family members falling ill and dying, unable to pay for what medical 
treatment was available or receiving inadequate treatment. This period in China’s history saw 
a great deal of social upheaval. The Japanese army invaded Jiangyong; women describe 
fleeing to the mountains where they hid and family members dying at the hands of the 
Japanese. The nationalist government drafted the local men into their army; some women 
write about how their husbands or sons were forced to join the army, often to never be seen 
again or to return after many years. The land reform carried out in the 1950s by the 
communist government impoverished some widowed women who, unable to farm the land by 
themselves, had been renting out their farmland; labeled as “landlords” they often lost much 
of their land and thus their income. Women generally suffered more than men, due to the 
social order, and had little recourse against injustice. Married out to an unfamiliar husband, an 
adolescent girl found herself performing an enormous amount of labor for her new family. 
While the nüshu writings make clear that the women were well aware of how they suffered 
under a patriarchal system, they did not actively protest against this social order (Idema, 1999, 
p. 100; Silber, 1995, pp. 157-158). The social conditions under which they women lived are 
crucial to understanding what the women chose to say and, more importantly, not say in the 
texts they wrote and performed.  

The practice of nüshu typically began in adolescence. Girls usually began learning to read, 
write and sing nüshu as teenagers, often taught by a grandmother, mother, aunt, peers, or 
sister-in-law (Chiang, 1995; Silber, 1995). The practice was not secret; men knew about it, 
but did not participate in nüshu gatherings and showed no interest in learning it themselves 
(Silber, 1995, p. 7).  The ability to read and write nüshu carried some prestige in Jiangyong 
County, a rural and remote locality dependent on agriculture. One woman stated that when 
her father, a village doctor, saw that his women patients who knew nüshu were all “well-
cultured” (很有教养), he encouraged her, as a teenager, to learn nüshu (Li, 2003d, p. 12). 
Girls learned to read nüshu by repeating aloud the lines recited by a teacher (Chiang, 1995, p. 
68). One woman recounted how she learned to write nüshu: her grandmother would write the 
words on her hand and she would then copy them by writing them in the dirt while she was 
playing outside, but older girls and adult women would look at the words on paper and copy 
them (Li, 2003d, p. 24). Girls would also participate in informal gatherings, during which 
women would do embroidery together and sing nüshu.  

Formally, girls first used nüshu to write letters to their laotong (老同), their ritual siblings. 
Girls entered into laotong relationships with another girl of a similar class background (better-
off families with better-off families, poor families with poor families) and characteristics 



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(same age, pretty with pretty, not-so-pretty with not-so-pretty), and always from another 
village. These “matches” were usually arranged by their families, who could expect in return 
a certain amount of social prestige as well as mutual favors. Without having met the other 
girl, one girl would write a ritual letter to the other, composed in nüshu on a fan, and 
“propose” the match. The other would reply with another ritual letter. These letters expressed 
praise for their intended partner, how well matched they were as a couple, how approving 
their parents were, how much fun they would have visiting each other, chatting, and doing 
embroidery together, and how their match would last forever.1 Silber (1995) describes how 
the act of writing these letters to girls they had never met and reproducing socially-prescribed 
sentiments made girls “step into the subject positions” of these texts (pp. 68-69), inculcating 
them with social knowledge and inserting them into a cultural role. To a certain extent, the 
practice of entering laotong relationships – arranged by their parents, matched with someone 
they had not met, fulfilling social rituals – prepared these young adolescents for their 
upcoming marriages. These laotong matches rarely lasted after the girl was married; their 
social purpose fulfilled, the matches dissolved (Silber, 1995, pp. 62-89).  

Adolescent girls would also enter into sworn sisterhood relationships, called jiebai zimei 
(结拜姊妹), which always involved groups of more than two girls, usually about four or five, 
who were typically of the same or nearby villages. The girls formed these groups themselves 
informally, without writing nüshu letters. A group of sworn sisters would typically gather to 
do embroidery together, have slumber parties, and sometimes sing nüshu. Membership in the 
group required each to contribute a certain amount of rice, once at the formation of the group; 
her portion was sold when she married to buy wedding gifts for her. The formal sisterhood 
ended when the last girl married, although some girls would continue their friendships as 
adults.  

Formal use of nüshu occurred at the wedding of each member, when a girl’s sworn sisters, 
as well as her sisters, laotong, cousins, and elder brother’s wife, would compose sanzhaoshu 
(三朝书) or “third day letters,” ritual letters written in nüshu and elaborately decorated in 
cloth-bound booklets. Sanzhaoshu always expressed the writer’s sorrow and anger at losing 
her friend or sister to marriage, and typically also expressed the writer’s abiding affection for 
the bride, exhortations to the in-laws to forgive the bride’s shortcomings and her meager 
dowry, acknowledgement of the hard lot of women in marriage, and advice to the bride to be 
patient and endure. The letters were displayed publicly on the third day after the bride has left 
her parents’ home. The authors wrote sanzhaoshu before the key event that the letters 
describe – the tearful scene of the bride’s departure and the writer’s emotional reaction to the 
loss (Silber, 1995, pp. 89-94 & 116-131). Like the laotong letters, writing the sanzhaoshu 
places the authors in a “subject position.” The practice tells the writers and the bride herself 
how they will behave at the bride’s departure (Silber, 1995, p. 116). This literacy act creates 
an understanding and performance of self. The sanzhaoshu also, by virtue of being publicly 
displayed, conferred a socially-acknowledged identity upon the bride and her natal family; the 
greater the expression of loss over the bride, the greater her social worth (Silber, 1995, p. 
122). In this way, these nüshu texts and practices served a larger function of not only forging 
friendships among girls and women, but also upholding the local class structure.  

Cathy Silber (1995) writes that after marriage nüshu practice would decline among newly 
married women. Burdened with housework and childcare, and unwilling to risk offending her 
in-laws by writing about her hardships, women in this age group produced very few extant 

                                                
1  Lisa See (2005) has written an excellent novel illustrating, fictionally, a laotong match between two girls in 

Jiangyong County in the 19th Century and their continued friendship and conflicts in adulthood.  



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letters (pp. 135-136). Nothing prevented them from participating in nüshu practices, however, 
where they could still find some creative outlets. The nüshu adaptations of folktales were 
always an option. These tales typically feature female protagonists who transgress social 
norms or express greater agency in the nüshu version of the story than the character does in 
the canonical hanzi (Chinese script) version. Scholars have already studied these nüshu 
folktales at length (Chiang, 1995, pp. 78-80; Idema, 1999; S. Liu & Hu, 1994; McLaren, 
1996, 1999; Silber, 1995, pp. 163-189), so I will not dwell on this genre except to note that all 
nüshu practitioners, including newly married women, could gather to perform these stories 
and enjoy vicariously the transgressions and heroic behavior of the female characters. Nüshu 
practitioners of all ages could also write letters of congratulations, such as at the birth of a 
child, or letters of condolence, such as at the death of the relative, addressed to woman friends 
and female relatives, and letters of invitation, inviting friends and family members to attend 
some social event.  

Two genres that offered some space for the venting of one’s frustrations included prayers 
to local deities and letters of vituperation (Chiang, 1995, p. 86). Ostensibly the prayers to 
local deities, composed in nüshu and left in temples, were private, intended for the deity and 
beseeching the deity’s assistance, but were potentially public as anyone who visited the 
temple and could read nüshu might peruse the contents (Idema, 1999, p. 98). Extant prayers to 
deities and letters of vituperation are few in number (see Chiang, 1995 for a rough count; 
Silber, 1995, p. 142). Letters of vituperation were addressed to one person, someone who had 
wronged the writer and the object of the writer’s wrath; these letters are quite direct in their 
criticisms and resort to insults (Chiang, 1995, pp. 85-86; Silber, 1995, pp. 142-146). 
Nevertheless, the public venting of frustrations and airing of grievances occurred mainly 
through autobiographies, which were primarily, but not exclusively, written by older women 
and were only ever publicly performed in front of other nüshu women, never for the general 
public. Venting grievances in public might have led to reprisals from those accused.  

Many autobiographies recount ill-treatment by mothers-in-law. We can surmise that since 
elderly women composed these autobiographies their mother-in-law was long dead and they 
could afford to vent old grievances. Fewer recount abuse at the hands of their husbands, who 
also seem to be out of the picture, either through death or divorce, when the autobiography 
was composed. One autobiography recounts how a woman successfully sued for divorce from 
a husband who had been beating her and having affairs (Zhao, 1992, pp. 348-358). The 
majority of autobiographies recount the trials and tribulations of being a widow. The socially 
proscribed cult of widow chastity meant that widows were not supposed to remarry, 
especially if they had sons. Many women describe the loneliness and hardship of managing a 
household and farmland and raising their sons all by themselves. Yet, some women did 
remarry, particular those with daughters or no children. Often they remarried only to have the 
second husband also die or to find themselves mired in poverty. Some widows were forced to 
remarry by parents-in-law who stole their dowries. The women had little recourse against 
these injustices. For the most part, they do not blame the social order for stacking the deck 
against women. They see ill fate accrued in a previous life as the cause of most of their 
misfortunes. As noted above, social reform or even social commentary was not the aim of the 
nüshu practitioners.  

The autobiographical ballads, unlike letters of vituperation, were addressed to no one in 
particular and were intended to be sung by the author at nüshu gatherings where they evoked 
the sympathy of the listeners, although Chiang (1995) writes that women would read their 
own autobiographies and cry even when alone (p. 80). These ballads were written in the 
stylized heptasyllabic verse used for most of the nüshu writings and made heavy use of stock, 



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formulaic phrases (discussed more below). Each autobiography recounts one woman’s life 
(except number 18 in Zhao, 1992, pp. 358-366, which includes sections from other women's 
autobiographies). Because the ballads that survive extant were collected in recent years, they 
all record events that occurred in the twentieth century. The nüshu autobiographies they were 
not intended to excoriate an accused party in person. Instead, they recount the sufferings, 
misfortune, hardships and grief of an individual woman, and along the way they might 
mention that person or persons who caused her suffering, hardship or grief. Yet, their primary 
purpose is to tell a tale of woe and in so doing to create on representation of a woman’s life.  

The nüshu autobiographical ballads are essentially a form of lament. Scholars have 
studied women’s laments as a type of oral literature in other parts of the world (Bourke, 1993; 
Kerewsky-Halpern, 1981; Kononenko, 1994), including Chinese wedding laments in other 
parts of China (Blake, 1978; McLaren & Chen, 2000; Watson, 1996). Kerewsky-Halpern 
(1981) writes of Serbian women’s ritual laments: “… the act of lamenting serve[s] a vital 
function in maintaining continuity within the community. Lament is a verbal linkage of 
present to past, of living to dead, of the often perplexing enigmas of rapidly changing life 
ways to tradition” (p. 52). Establishing the community of nüshu writers and performers was a 
primary function of all of the nüshu writings. Yet, the autobiographical writings served a 
further function of recounting, explaining and defining the women’s subjectivities. Cathy 
Silber (1995) writes: 

 
The genre of autobiography provides not only a voice and a venue for the telling of one’s 
life story, but at the same time a template for self-understanding. By entering into the 
subject position provided by the autobiography, or even by identifying with the speaking 
subjects of autobiographies as readers or listeners, women were learning and passing on a 
certain understanding of their lives. (p. 146) 

 
It is in the “passing on” of that certain understanding of women’s lives that the curricular 
function of nüshu lies. These are tales of woe, not only written down, and not only performed 
before groups of women, but also taught to women, who in the process learned not only how 
to read, write and sing nüshu but also learned the stock phrases and metaphors they could use 
to describe their lives. They learned what life events they could include and what they could 
not include in their stories. When scholars began to collect nüshu texts, they found that 
women could not only recite their own autobiography but also other women’s 
autobiographies from memory. The majority of autobiographies published in anthologies 
today were written down from memory by two nüshu practitioners, Gao Yinxian and Yi 
Nianhua (Zhao, 1992, pp. 271-406). The learning process behind the autobiographies 
apparently included more than a one-time composition and a one-time performance.  

Unfortunately, since scholars did not begin investigating nüshu until the 1980s when it 
was already dying out and only handful of old women could still read and write it, all we 
know about how nüshu was passed on – how it was taught – comes only from scanty 
anecdotal evidence. No outsider actually observed a nüshu teacher instructing a nüshu novice. 
The descriptions of nüshu practices make clear, however, that starting as adolescents, girls 
would likely have observed older women performing their autobiographies, as well as other 
nüshu texts, at informal and formal nüshu gatherings. Silber (1995) reports that many elderly, 
illiterate women in Jiangyong could sing their unwritten autobiographies (p. 147). We can 
surmise that girls/women would have learned to sing and maybe to read and write the stock 
phrases and conventional expressions that comprise the bulk of most nüshu texts (these stock 
phrases are discussed more below). Once a large enough portion of those stock phrases was 



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memorized, the versification of an autobiography was relatively straightforward and easy. 
Herein lies one key part of the curricular nature of nüshu texts: the nature of these formulaic, 
metaphorical phrases enabled and constrained certain subjectivities within the 
autobiographical texts.  

Curriculum theory proposes that pedagogical processes instill more than academic 
knowledge; they also instill social norms and values necessary to maintain a certain social 
order, and these norms and values largely define acceptable identities for people within that 
social order. David G. Smith (1996) discusses how pedagogical action, and indeed any social 
action, entails a theory of identity; all action depends on who the actor thinks she is and who 
she thinks the other is in relation to her (p. 6). Suzanne de Castell (1996) looks specifically at 
literacy as pedagogical action. She writes that literacy is western culture’s “primary 
technology for the formation of the self,” that in fact textual practices cultivate subjectivity 
(pp. 27-29). Keeping in mind that nüshu was an oral literature tradition and that many 
illiterate women who could not write their autobiographies could nevertheless sing them, we 
should acknowledge that within nüshu practice oral literacy, meaning the ability to compose 
the spoken/sung, and textual literacy, the ability to compose the written, reinforced each 
other. Together both types of literacy provide the conventions for organizing the formulaic, 
metaphorical phrases of nüshu into a coherent narrative of a woman’s life and a 
representation of a woman’s subjectivity.  

The dual nature of nüshu literacy – that it was written and performed – indicates how the 
curricular function of nüshu resides both in its textual conventions and lived practices. The 
very nature of this forum – an article published in written form in an academic journal – and 
my own limitations – that I myself have never witnessed any nüshu practice but must rely on 
other scholars’ accounts of them – means that unfortunately I am giving short shrift to the 
lived practice of the autobiographical ballads. I do believe, based on scholars’ descriptions, 
that the practice of these ballads afforded women opportunities, for lack of a better term, for 
“positive” expressions of selfhood, despite the ostensibly “negative” nature – the strong focus 
on grief, suffering and hardship – of the content of these texts.  

Recitation of the ballads was evidently cathartic for the women.  Silber (1995) describes 
how on one occasion, while tape-recording her own chanted autobiography for Silber, a 
woman broke down in sobs and was unable to continue (pp. 149-150). Silber believes she 
could not go on because she lacked an audience of fellow nüshu women. The audience was 
necessary to validate the life of the author through sympathy and identification. Silber also 
believes, from the performances she witnessed, that a performer interrupting her own ballad 
to cry and give emotional speeches was common practice. In the words of one nüshu writer: 
“Even though women suffered endlessly/ They could use nüshu to express their feelings of 
pain” (Zhao and Gong, cited in McLaren, 1996, p. 412). Another nüshu writer, interviewed as 
part of a Chinese women’s oral history project, said: 

 
我要写我的痛苦，我的悲哀呀。(Li, 2003d, p. 56) 
I want to write my pain, my sorrow.2  

 
A central function of the practice of the nüshu autobiographical ballads is the explication, 
acknowledgement, and catharsis of that pain and sorrow through solidarity with other women.  

I argue, however, that beyond the cathartic function lies the curricular function. The 
conventions of the autobiographical ballad define an identity of I-who-has-suffered becoming 

                                                
2  All translations are the author’s, unless otherwise noted. 



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part of we-who-have-suffered through lament as a social practice and thus provided an 
emotional space in which “suffering” could transform into an occasion for identification, 
sympathy, and unity with others. The educational practice of nüshu – the learning of nüshu – 
promulgated these conventions, which in turn defined not only the autobiographical texts but 
also how a woman was supposed to represent her life in text and in performance. Yet, as we 
shall see in our analysis of the texts of three autobiographies, despite relying on the same set 
of conventions, these three women are able to craft quite different identities. The textual 
conventions may shape a certain range of allowable subjectivities, but the women ultimately 
shape the texts.  

 
Three nüshu texts 
My analysis will first focus on the common themes that appear in autobiographical ballads in 
general and then examine how three writers present themselves individually. Altogether I 
analyzed 32 nüshu autobiographical ballads published in Zhao Liming’s (1992) anthology. 
They tell the stories of 30 women.3 The three ballads that I have chosen to analyze are “Her 
Own Story of Sufferings by Gao Yinxian” (高银仙自述 可怜) (Zhao, 1992, pp. 273-277), 
“Huang Lianzhu of Baishui: Life is first bitter, then sweet” (白水黄连珠先苦后甜) (Zhao, 
1992, pp. 331-338), and “Her Own Story by He Huanshu of Baishui” (白水何焕淑自述) 
(Zhao, 1992, pp. 373-374).  I chose these three autobiographies because they demonstrate the 
range of allowable identities that these women could construct. 

Gao Yinxian, the author of the first ballad, was one of the most prolific nüshu writers of 
the latter twentieth century. She and Yi Nianhua, another prolific writer, were key informants 
about nüshu practices and transcribed from memory the majority of the nüshu texts now 
available in anthologies, texts that otherwise would have been lost. Her autobiography was 
written toward the end of her life, after scholars began investigating nüshu in Jiangyong 
County (Silber, 1995, pp. 161-162). Gao Yinxian’s autobiography demonstrates how a 
prolific and adept nüshu writer assembles the stock metaphorical phrases so common in nüshu 
ballads into larger and more intricate expression of selfhood. The autobiography of the second 
author, Huang Lianzhu, differs slightly from the norm in that it ends happily, as reflected in 
the title “First bitter, then sweet.” As laments, the majority of autobiographies end on tragic 
notes. Yet, some end relatively happily, with the author either reunited with a temporarily 
absent husband or happily remarried and now with children. This second ballad demonstrates 
how one writer constructs her self as experiencing “sweetness” at the end of her life. The 
author of the third ballad, He Huanshu, was apparently an adolescent at the time her 
autobiography was composed. Cathy Silber (1995) writes that autobiographies “were 
exclusively the province of old women” (p. 136), but I found that not to be the case. Several 
of the autobiographies included in Zhao’s anthology (1992) are written in an adolescent voice 
(namely, numbers 21, 23, 26, 27, 28, & 36). This third ballad indicates how an adolescent 
uses the nüshu conventions to express a self that is still in formation.   

To analyze these texts, I will first use narrative analysis and then return to curriculum 
theory. I will employ two sub-types of narrative analysis known as performative analysis and 
                                                
3  The ballads numbered 14, 27, 30 and 33 in Zhao’s (1992) anthology (which numbers the autobiographical 

ballads 1 through 36) are not autobiographies and are mistakenly included in that section. Number 33 is an 
embroidery song. Number 30 is a personal letter. (The line between personal letters and autobiographies is 
blurred, but this ballad is clearly addressed in response to someone else’s letter). Number 27 is a fictional 
story. I classify Number 14 as a biography, not an autobiography, since it tells the story of the narrator’s 
grandparents and parents and ends when the narrator is a young, orphaned child. The narrator does not 
describe herself as an actor in this story in any way.  



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thematic analysis (Riessman, 2003). Thematic analysis examines what is said, with particular 
attention to themes and metaphors. Performative analysis examines how the storyteller/writer 
performs or constructs her “self” for a listener/reader. Sociologist and narrative analyst 
Catherine Riessman (1993) argues that since narrative analysis “gives prominence to human 
agency and imagination, it is well suited to studies of subjectivity and identity” (p. 5). My 
purpose is to examine how these two women construct their identities through these texts and 
what this reveals not only about their subjectivities but also about the curricular practice of 
nüshu.  

 
Common Themes 
All of the nüshu autobiographical ballads begin with stock phrases identifying the author as 
writer or narrator, frequently but not always pictured sitting alone in a room (an allusion to 
widowhood), often writing upon a paper fan (a common medium for nüshu writings), wishing 
to tell her tale of miseries:  
 
把笔修书双流泪 千般可怜人不知 (Zhao, 1992, p. 373)4 
Holding my brush to write this letter, two streams of tears flow./ Of the thousand 
hardships I’ve suffered, nobody knows.  

 
The story that follows proceeds from a self that is situated as if alone. No reference is made to 
the intended audience of sympathetic listeners, who would have been present when the author 
recited her ballad at a nüshu gathering. Stylistically the autobiographical ballads, within the 
corpus of nüshu writings, bear many similarities to personal letters, which also tend to open 
with these same stock lines (Chiang, 1995, p. 80). The autobiographical ballads are like open 
letters, written to make known the otherwise private sufferings borne by one woman. The 
phrase “nobody knows” (人不知) frequently follows a description of sufferings. The purpose 
of a lament as a literacy act (oral and written) is to make known – to take private sufferings 
and transform them into public empathy through the medium of words. 

To accomplish this, certain stock phrases of suffering and anguish are repeated throughout 
the ballads: knives cutting the heart (刀割心); gut-wrenching sorrow (肝肠断); crying all 
through the night (透夜哭); two streams of tears (双流泪); and anguish in the heart (气入心) 
(Silber, 1995, p. 157). Through metaphorical language, the ballads give the sufferings, 
misfortunes and miseries quite visceral form. The majority of metaphors use bodily sensations 
to make physical the narrator’s emotional experiences. The very visceral and physical 
qualities of these images bring the pain the narrators suffered into the present and given 
concrete form so that this pain can be explicated, acknowledged by sympathizers, and then 
released in catharsis, the process to repeat again.  

These stock metaphorical phrases serve several functions in nüshu. First, they facilitated 
learning. Learning to read, write and recite nüshu relied on rote memorization, and the 
repetition of stock phrases made memorization all the easier. Second, as mentioned above, 
many of the stock phrases give concrete form to the otherwise intangible emotions that are the 
focus of these laments. A woman feels grief, sorrow, frustration and “nobody knows” how 
                                                
4  As I noted above, I cannot read nüshu script and relied on Chinese scholars translations of these ballads into 

Chinese hanzi script for my analysis, and primarily for that reason I include the hanzi script, instead of the 
original nüshu script, in this article with my English translations. In addition, although most readers of East 
Asian origin will be able to read the hanzi, very few of these same readers can read nüshu. Finally, there is 
the ultimately practical reason that most word processing programs now can write hanzi, but no word 
processing program I am aware of can reproduce nüshu script.  



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she feels. The majority of the stock metaphors literally embody these emotions so others can 
know them. Finally, these stock phrases can be assembled and re-assembled with ease into 
larger metaphorical constructions of self. The vast majority of nüshu texts are written in 
heptasyllabic verse, meaning each line of poetry is composed of seven syllables. These seven 
syllables further break down into components of four plus three syllables. All the stock 
phrases mentioned above are three syllables, but some of them are easily transformed into 
four syllables. For example, “crying all night” (透夜哭) can easily become “crying all night 
for a (dead) son” (透夜哭子), which tacking on another three syllables at the end can then 
become “crying all night for a (dead) son and a (dead) husband” (透夜哭子又哭夫). As the 
deaths of sons and husbands qualify as the greatest tragedies in these women’s lives, this line 
and variations of it frequently appear in autobiographies. In this manner, a nüshu writer could 
assemble a series of metaphorically embodied phrases into a larger representation of her 
suffering self. Below, we shall examine how three writers accomplish this assemblage of 
metaphors to represent their selfhoods.  

 
“Her Own Story of Sufferings by Gao Yinxian” 
Gao Yinxian was one of the most prolific nüshu writers on record. Her autobiography shows 
a high degree of skill at not only using the traditional stock phrases but also going beyond 
these conventional stock phrases to create new series of metaphorical phrases that build upon 
each other to form a uniquely compelling portrait of her self.  

The central theme of Gao Yinxian’s autobiography is her complaint against her unfilial 
son. After raising him to adulthood, she finds herself abandoned by him, left to fend for 
herself: 

 
靠子望孙过时光 得知台身是没份 (Zhao, 1992, p. 273) 
Spending time relying on one’s son, expecting a grandson – / This share of happiness I 
realize my life is without.  

 
This situation is contrary to all cultural norms, which require sons in particular to care for 
their parents in old age, but Gao Yinxian has no recourse other than her words: 

 
高声不得骂下你 将到如今说来由 (Zhao, 1992, p. 273) 
A loud voice is not enough to curse you into submission. / That it’s come to the present 
situation, say the cause.  

 
“Voice” becomes the central metaphor in the ballad.  After the initial use of this metaphor, 
Gao Yinxian then proceeds to recount an episode (“the time in the front room”) when she was 
apparently recuperating. She never says directly from what she was recuperating, but reading 
between the lines the reader can surmise that her son apparently beat her. Silber (1995) writes 
of Gao Yinxian’s autobiography that she could not afford to be too specific about her son’s 
transgressions for fear of reprisal and therefore her “voice” is constrained in this text (p. 161). 
This “constrained voice” is transformed into a powerful image in the text. She writes of the 
time spent recuperating: 
 
起起前厅之时日 四十日身不起床 高声没得问下台 低声更加没得闻 
伯娘煮肉送上楼 接起伯娘一点恩 哪样咽得过喉头 (Zhao, 1992, p. 273) 



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Recalling the time in the front room,/ For forty days I could not get out of bed. / A loud 
voice would not do to ask myself. / A soft voice is even less likely to be heard. / My 
uncle’s wife boiled some meat and brought it upstairs to me,/ I received a little kindness 
from elder uncle’s wife./ How to swallow that food down my throat?  

 
In so much pain that she cannot get out of bed for forty days, she is cared for by an uncle and 
his wife, who feed her. What is left unsaid is that, were he filial as he should be, her son 
should be the one feeding her, not her uncle’s wife. That is the primary responsibility of a 
son, to feed and care for his elderly parents. In this passage, the voice that she cannot use fully 
then becomes aligned metaphorically with her throat, which is in so much pain that she can 
barely swallow food. A throat that cannot speak out the abuse she has suffered is the same 
throat that cannot take in the very sustenance that her abuser should be providing.  

The “voice” metaphor aligned with the “throat” metaphor, GaoYinxian then elaborates 
further on both metaphors. She first emphasizes that her son is not providing her with food:  

 
我今亦有亲儿子 郎叔伯娘奉茶汤 今日高声骂下你 (Zhao, 1992, p. 274) 
I now have nothing, my darling son./ My uncle and aunt offered tea and soup (to me)./ 
Today with a loud voice I curse you! 
In case anyone doubts that her son is not fulfilling his filial obligations, which Silber 
(1995) reports that apparently he did indeed fail to do (p. 161), Gao states: 
不信往看屋舍水 点点落地不差余 (Zhao, 1992, p. 274) 
If you don’t believe, then come see my living conditions./ The water drips on the ground 
leaving nothing to drink. 

 
The image Gao Yinxian creates is of herself left nearly empty of sustenance; even the water 
drips on the ground. After another reiteration of how she dares not speak in a loud voice, she 
then builds on this image of sustenance: 

 
一日吃我三腹奶 三日饮我九腹浆 娘奶不是长江水 娘奶不是树木浆 
背了抱了不算事 饮我四岁的骨浆 (Zhao, 1992, p. 274)  
Three times a day you drank my milk./ Nines times in three days you drank my juice./ 
Mother’s milk is not the water of the Yangzi River./ Mother’s milk is not the sap of trees./ 
I carried you, held you, does this count as nothing?/ You drank the juice of my bones for 
four years. 

 
Not only has her son now left her nearly empty of sustenance, but as a suckling child he took 
his sustenance from “the juice of her bones.” She has moved from the voice metaphor, to the 
throat metaphor, to the sustenance metaphor, and tied all of these metaphors together in the 
image of a mother greatly wronged by her son.  

Immediately after the passage above, she alludes to another incident that left her unable to 
get out of bed for 19 days. After describing her pain and anguish, she says: 

 
哪个我的心肝人 (Zhao, 1992, p. 275)  
How could you, my own flesh and blood?  

 
Mother and son come together in her words, in “voice” – “my own flesh and blood” 
(我的心肝人) – literally “my heart-liver person.” The expression is particularly poignant 



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because the accumulation of metaphors highlights the fact that they should be – but are not – 
together “as one flesh” in life.  

In the next part of the ballad, Gao Yinxian returns to the metaphor of voice. After a few 
more lines of asking questions to her son – “do you know that I don’t wear one yard of your 
cloth,” she then addresses her audience with a series of admonitions that stress the importance 
of how parents use words to teach children:  

 
子女上头要细心 就是子女不知事 细说细言教子女 骂骂打打不当行 (Zhao, 
1992, p. 275) 
Those of you with sons and daughters be careful./ Our sons and daughters do not 
understand matters./ Teach your children carefully with words,/ Not by lots of scolding 
and hitting.  

 
The admonitions about the correct parental use of voice continue for several more lines. 
Again, one metaphorical image is compounded upon another. Gao Yinxian is describing an 
ideal: mother and child should be linked through the flow of words – careful words, just as 
they were previously linked through the sustenance the flows from mother to child. Against 
this ideal, she is also alluding to its distortion: instead they are linked through scolding and 
hitting. Voice-words and body-sustenance connect mother and son, for better or for worse.  

The last part of the ballad dwells on how she has been left alone, an old person of no use, 
with nowhere to vent her rage: 

 
透夜不眠如刀割 眼泪四垂到天光 台想将身无出气 (Zhao, 1992, p. 276) 
Unable to sleep all night, like knives cutting./ I cry out my eyes until daylight./ Come to 
think of it, I have nowhere to vent my frustration. 

 
Here we see some of the more commonly used stock phrases, or slight variations on them, 
that are peppered throughout her narrative: “like knives cutting” (如刀割), instead of “knives 
cutting heart”; “unable to sleep all night” (透夜不眠), instead of “crying all night”; “cry out 
my eyes” (眼泪四垂), instead of “two streams of tears.” What distinguishes Gao Yinxian’s 
autobiography, however, is that she goes well beyond these stock phrases. She takes the core 
function of nüshu metaphors – the embodiment of intangible emotions – and crafts it into an 
intricate portrait of her own subjectivity in relation to her son. Her autobiography concludes 
with: 

  
只想老了是无用 千般可怜在心埋 不给四边人取笑 崽没孝顺在心愁 
今年年共八十八 还有世间几多年 (Zhao, 1992, pp. 276-277) 
Thinking of how I am an useless old person,/ A thousand miseries are buried in my heart./ 
I don’t want to be a laughingstock for others./ My son unfilial, it pains my heart./ This 
year I am eighty-eight years old./ I still have a few more years in this world.  

 
The desire to vent her frustrations caused her to speak out in this autobiography, but the fear 
of not only reprisals from her son but also other people’s ridicule tempers her voice. Part of 
her voice – perhaps the larger part of it – remains buried in her heart. The image of the mother 
who used her voice and body to raise her son becomes the image of an old woman, depleted 
of body and deprived of full voice, remaining alone in the world.  

 



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“Huang Lianzhu of Baishui: Life is first bitter, then sweet”  
The title “first bitter, then sweet” marks this ballad, and thus its author, from the very 
beginning as being different. In her dissertation, Cathy Silber (1995) analyzes another 
woman’s happily ending ballad also given the title “first bitter, then sweet” by Yi Nianhua 
who transcribed the ballad for its author (pp. 150-151). Apparently, in these two cases, 
whoever created the titles determined that the readers/listeners should know that the ballads 
are not typical laments. Nevertheless, I found in Zhao’s anthology more autobiographies with 
happy endings that were not set apart by their titles.  

Huang Lianzhu begins her story with a long and complicated genealogy. We might 
wonder why all this discussion of the infertility and deaths in the families of her father’s 
sisters and brother and her father’s father’s brother’s daughters and sons. Silber (1995) 
explains that the narrators of happily ending ballads would use the recitation of family 
genealogies to recount as much bitterness as possible, deliberately including anguish and 
misery suffered by relatives, in order to paint as woeful a picture as she could of her own life 
by extension (p. 148). However, even many tragically ending ballads contain long and 
convoluted genealogies. The storylines of nüshu autobiographical ballads tend to follow 
genealogy more strictly than chronology (Silber, 1995, p. 150), because for these women 
one’s genealogy in part defines one’s subjectivity. One is never a woman apart from being a 
daughter, wife or mother, and the greatest tragedies occur when one loses that status and 
becomes instead an orphan, widow, or childless woman. Through the recitation of the 
genealogy, the text serves to structure the narrator’s identity.  

After recounting how her aunt – her father’s father’s brother’s second daughter – had 
three sons only to have her husband die, then two sons die, and then be forced to depend on 
the labor of her only remaining young son to make ends meet, Huang Lianzhu says: 

 
细姨可怜讲不尽  (Zhao, 1992, p. 332) 
I could never describe all of Second Aunt’s suffering.  

 
Huang’s litany of the sufferings of this and other aunts, and later her litany of her own 
sufferings, serve to place her squarely within the conventions of this genre of women’s 
lament, despite her happy ending. Her recitation of her genealogy serves an additional 
purpose, however. She is eventually married to the eldest son of her father’s father’s brother, 
a cousin eight years younger than her, and the hardships she suffers and the happiness she 
eventually attains all occur within the context of this marriage. The genealogy places her in 
this context.  

So Huang Lianzhu is first a daughter, then a wife, and then her sufferings begin when she 
finds herself childless. After almost five years of marriage, she becomes ill, and the illness 
makes it difficult for her to do chores. Given that her husband had been nine years old when 
they married, her lack of children at this point in time is not entirely surprising, but the illness 
continues, as does her childlessness. Her sisters-in-law look down on her; her husband’s 
feelings for her turn sour. Her place in her husband’s home becomes unpleasant:  

 
身在房中无出气 只是回程去安身  (Zhao, 1992, p. 334) 
Inside the home I could not vent my frustration./ Only when I returned to my parent’s 
home did I feel at ease.  

Here she presents herself as one self inside her husband’s home – restricted, suffering, 
silenced – but as another self in her parent’s home – at ease and, by extension, free. Like the 
genealogy that defines her identity as a woman within a family, the home environment 



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defines, in part, her selfhood. For Huang Lianzhu the core metaphors that she employs to 
define her subjectivity are family and home.  

She next digresses into a discussion of her husband’s younger brother’s marriage, children 
and grandchildren, the blessings of which become more relevant later in her story. Then she 
goes into another digression about the unfairness of the draft in the pre-socialist era, how the 
authorities would take away too many men. This is the only place in the four ballads in which 
a woman gives any indication that life has indeed improved under a socialist society; the 
ballads otherwise portray a society full of hardship, even post-1949. Huang Lianzhu discusses 
the draft because her husband is taken away and does not return for thirteen years. Yet, he 
does return, coming back in 1949 when the new socialist society begins, and her life 
eventually turns “sweet.” Perhaps for this reason she can acknowledge social improvement 
within her ballad, whereas other women do not.  

Although she never states so but simply implies it, her husband’s thirteen-year absence 
becomes the reason she never has children. Almost as an after thought, she mentions that her 
illness is cured just before her husband is drafted and his feelings for her return. After all the 
details of how she had suffered due to her illness, this almost seems surprising, but she is 
simply following the conventions of nüshu lament, emphasizing suffering and de-
emphasizing the lack thereof. At any rate, despite being cured, she never bears a child, and 
her infertility becomes the essential characteristic of her ill fate.  

The occasion of her husband’s unexpected return gives rise to language that is rare in the 
nüshu laments: metaphors of joy and happiness. Typically in these ballads the most happy 
events are the birth of a son, the common metaphor for which is that a son is “like a treasure,” 
or a wedding, for which the metaphor “Red as a flower, green as a willow” describes the 
happy bride. Describing her husband’s return, Huang Lianzhu expands the metaphors of joy 
to include: 

 
两脚腾云快回家  
My feet flew like clouds in the sky, quickly back home.  
一见我夫心欢喜 可比见了宝与金 (Zhao, 1992, p. 336) 
As soon as I saw my husband, my heart rejoiced./ Seeing him was better than seeing 
treasure and gold.  

 
Such joyful expressions do not typically appear in the other three ballads. Huang Lianzhu 
may have suffered from illness and infertility, but her later adult life is indeed “sweet” and her 
voice shows it.  

Her story continues with the division of the family property among her husband and his 
two brothers. She implies that the youngest brother gets a smaller share because he is still 
young and unmarried. Her husband takes care of his youngest brother, however, and this care 
is returned when the youngest brother marries, has a son, and gives the son to her husband 
and herself to raise. Late in life, unexpectedly a mother, Huang Lianzhu expresses tenderness: 

 
伯郎伯娘顾孙子 可如公嬷引大孙 (Zhao, 1992, p. 338) 
We, older brother and his wife, took care of this nephew/ As if we were grandparents 
caring for our eldest grandson.  

Her story ends happily with the marriage of this adopted son, with all brothers married with 
children and even some grandchildren – blessings upon blessings upon blessings.  

One wonders if this ballad was ever performed and, if so, how it would have been 
received. Did Huang Lianzhu compose her autobiography to say “Yes, you may see me happy 



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now, but I did suffer before”? Or did the social world of nüshu women allow for dissimilarity: 
“Some of us have suffered intensely, but not all of us have”? Did Huang Lianzhu’s story still 
qualify as a lament because she acquired a son through adoption rather than by birth? 
Whatever the reason, she presents a self that pushes the boundaries of the genre without 
contravening its conventions – “include me, I am one of you, although I am different too.”  

 
“Her Own Story by He Huanshu of Baishui” 
This fourth ballad tells the story of mother and daughter entwined. It begins: 

 
自己修书纸扇上 娘女可怜落扇中 只恨我爷没在世 抛下娘女好凄凉  (Zhao, 
1992, p. 373) 
I write this letter myself on a paper fan,/ The misery of mother and daughter is found on 
this fan./ Alas, when my father departed from this world,/ He left us, mother and daughter 
behind, such a sorry fate! (Idema & Grant, 2004, pp. 553-554) 

 
The words “my father” establish that this story is told in the daughter’s voice. Otherwise, He 
Huanshu refers to herself using the pronoun “I/me” rather than the “we” of mother/daughter 
only two times in the ballad. This is clearly an adolescent’s voice. The narrator is evidently 
still living with her widowed mother. They suffer through hardships together, both rising at 
the crack of dawn, doing chores with no one to help them, cutting their own firewood, going 
hungry before the harvest, sleeping together on straw in the winter, and hardly making any 
money from selling pigs and chickens. They are a pair, a unit.  

Silber (1995) notes that the shifting between and the merging of voices is quite common 
in nüshu autobiographies. One of the more common merged voices is between widowed 
daughter and widowed mother (p. 156). Here we have an unmarried daughter occasionally 
merging her voice with her widowed mother and occasionally speaking in her own voice. The 
daughter is in the process of forming a subjectivity apart from her mother.  

The “I” of the daughter as distinct from the “she” of her mother next appears in reference 
to the missing brother:  

 
我娘生台无兄弟 到老年来靠哪个 (Zhao, 1992, p. 373) 
I am my mother’s only child, I have no brothers at all,/ So on whom can she rely when 
she grows old? (Idema & Grant, 2004, p. 554) 

 
The story continues with them as a unit again. They are pitied by others, who do not have as 
many problems as them. Due to a former life, they now both suffer. At this point, the story 
shifts point of view again. The recitation of woes gives way to a reflection on the speaker’s 
situation: 

 
跽在楼头透口气 望天疼惜拔乌云 只望乌云吹拔散 日出东方显显阳  (Zhao, 
1992, pp. 363-364) 
Sitting here in my upstairs room, I let out a heavy sigh,/ Hoping that Heaven will pity us 
and send away the black clouds./ I hope that the black clouds will all be blown away/ And 
the sun will emerge in the east revealing its light. (Idema & Grant, 2004, p. 554) 

 
This passage is clearly the narrator’s own voice, but the pronoun “I” is absent, as is typically 
the case in Chinese verse, nüshu verse no exception. She is alone, sighing in her upstairs 



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room, but alone by default, not by design. In her darksome despair, she hopes for relief 
symbolized by light. In the next passage, she is sitting by herself at the gate: 

 
谁知门前跽到黑 不见姐娘在哪方 知见百鸟树上跽 并没姐娘到眼前 (Zhao, 
1992, p. 364) 
Who could have known that I would sit before the gate till dark,/ I don’t see my mother – 
where could she be?/ I only see the birds roosting in the trees,/ But still cannot see any 
sign of my mother. (Idema & Grant, 2004, p. 554) 

 
The “I” pronoun is still absent in the Chinese, but the voice that looks for her mother is 
clearly the daughter’s voice. As readers we are left wondering what happened to her mother. 
In the next and final passage she says: 

 
自从姐娘生错我 不得欢盈过一时 请愿上天落大雨 娘女两个让水催 (Zhao, 
1992, p. 364) 
From the day my mother, alas, gave birth to me,/ I have not experienced a single moment 
of joy./ I pray to High Heaven to send down a terrible rain/ And drown us both, mother 
and daughter in its flood. (Idema & Grant, 2004, p. 554) 

 
In the phrase “alas, gave birth to me” the clear “I/me” pronoun makes its final appearance in 
Chinese. The separate individuality of He Huanshu is defined by her position within this 
family – a daughter without a father, a girl without a brother, the joyless one her mother – 
alas – gave birth to – the one who now wishes a flood would drown her and her mother 
together.  

The image of her sitting alone at the gate looking for her missing mother, followed by her 
wish for a flood to destroy them both, could be the anxiety of an adolescent contemplating 
possible separation from her mother and wishing to remain together even in death, or it could 
be the grief of an adolescent who just lost her mother and wishes she could join her in death: 

 
请愿上天落大雨 娘女两个让水催 (Zhao, 1992, p. 364)  
I would have preferred that High Heaven had sent down a terrible rain/ That had drowned 
us both, mother and daughter, in its flood. (Idema & Grant, 2004, p. 554) 

 
To a nüshu audience the meaning would have been obvious. They would have known whether 
she had lost her mother or not. Her last wish would have needed no explanation. The former 
reading – that she is merely experiencing separation anxiety – is the more likely interpretation 
given the conventional rules of Chinese verse. Yet, the poem, like her adolescent identity, is 
still unfolding, even though the words have come to an end. In comparison to the 
unambiguous litany of deaths, births and more deaths in the other three ballads, this ballad’s 
image of the young girl sitting and waiting for her mother is uniquely evocative, bringing the 
reader back to wait with her and see what resolution comes.  

 
The curriculum in the texts 
In these three autobiographies we see how the language of the texts, and in particular the 
metaphorical phrases, serves the construction of an identity. A nüshu practitioner, learning to 
read and perhaps write the common phrases that form a nüshu narrative, is also learning how 
to shape a representation of her self. Like the practices of composing laotong letters and third 
day letters (sanzhaoshu), the writing of an autobiography causes a woman to “step into a 



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subject position” or the subjective space that the conventional language provides (Silber, 
1995). Curriculum theorist Suzanne de Castell (1996) writes that identifying “the distinctive 
speech styles and genres of the classroom” will reveal how the selves constructed there are 
limited and shaped both by literacy conventions and by other people’s expectations (p. 29). 
While not occurring in a classroom space, nüshu instruction operates in much the same way. 
As for the selves constructed within nüshu, Cathy Silber (1995) cautions:  

 
Thus, while we can read these texts to learn something about the way these women 
interpreted themselves, we must also keep in mind that we are learning about the ways 
these texts interpreted these women. Just as many things happened in the lives of these 
women that never made it into their autobiographies because of generic conventions 
governing what sorts of events did or did not belong in such a text, so must we 
acknowledge the possibility that women could have other interpretations of their lives, 
interpretations that fell outside the bounds of the conventions of the genre. (p. 147) 

 
Some possibilities of alternative interpretations of these rural Chinese women’s lives can 
perhaps be seen in comparison to the self-interpretations that another group of rural Chinese 
women shared in an entirely different genre, but still a genre that is primarily 
autobiographical: oral histories.  

 
A missing dimension? 
The Twentieth Century Chinese Women’s Oral History Project collected narratives from 
more than 600 women all around China, rural and urban, mainly old but also young (Li, 
2003a, 2003b, 2003c, 2003d). A comparison of the content of the 32 extant nüshu 
autobiographical ballads to that of oral histories collected from rural women (sixteen in 
number)5 reveals a key dimension of rural women’s understanding of their selfhood that is 
present in the oral histories but absent in the texts of the ballads. That dimension is a stated 
sense of pride in their accomplishments and abilities: 

 
我那会识那善书（佛教的书）。。。我那时候猴（机灵）得很，能记下！我妈（婆

母）说，“唉，娃，你可怜的，人家屋里把你那么打骂得么，你把兴啥（什么）还

能记下。” 那是多少能记些。  - 库淑兰  (Li, 2003d, p. 303) 
At that time, I could read the scriptures (Buddhist) …. Back then I was quite clever. I 
could memorize it! My mom (mother-in-law) said, “Ah, child, you’re pitiful, being beaten 
and yelled at by people in the home, but you can memorize anything.” No matter how 
much, I could memorize some.  - Ku Shulan 
我纺的花织的布在咱那是第一名。。。。人家的布都卖不了，我的都能卖了，织得

好么，又细又白的。   - 姥姥   (Li, 2003d, p. 315) 

                                                
5  Please refer to the Appendix for a list of these sixteen rural women’s oral histories that I analyzed. The vast 

majority of the 600 women interviewed as part of the oral history project either originally came from urban 
areas or were describing their lives after they left the countryside for the city, including my friend’s mother-
in-law mentioned below. For my analysis, I compared the nüshu autobiographies, composed exclusively by 
rural women, to the oral histories of rural women who stayed in the countryside. I include the anecdote 
about my friend’s mother-in-law, although she was urban and her oral history was not among those I 
analyzed, because Chinese cultural conventions discouraging boasting transcend rural / urban boundaries 
and because the anecdote is such a wonderful example of a Chinese woman humbly taking pride in her 
accomplishments.  



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The patterned cloth that I wove was number one in our locality…. Other people’s cloth 
couldn’t sell, but mine would sell out. It was well-woven, both fine and white.  - 
Laolao  
我是出了名的好媳妇，我娘家一个叔伯哥说我，“２００块钱也雇不着这样一个好

伙计（长工）。”    - 荣妈妈  (Li, 2003d, p. 341) 
I was famous as a good daughter-in-law. An uncle on my mother’s side said of me, “For 
200 yuan you couldn’t hire such a good worker.” - Mother Rong  

 
Expressions like these are quite common in the oral histories of rural women collected as part 
of the Twentieth Century Women’s Oral History project. Expressions like these do not appear 
in the nüshu autobiographies that I found. The closest type of statement concerns public 
acknowledgement of the speaker’s/writer’s upright and moral behavior:  

 
红花兑如我亲生 四边之人多路见 得尽好名传四边 (Zhao, 1992, p. 295) 
I treated my stepdaughters like my very own children./ Everyone around saw this fact,/ 
And I obtained a fine reputation.  

 
Yet, the women never mention being skilled. Apparently the form of nüshu autobiographical 
ballad precludes outright expressions of accomplishment and skill. As “laments” the 
autobiographical ballads are “supposed to be” about gloom and doom, despair and longing, 
pain and suffering. The oral histories also contain plenty of descriptions of despair, suffering, 
pain and hardship, but they move back and forth between despair and accomplishment, pain 
and triumph to a greater degree than the nüshu autobiographies.  

I must acknowledge that the two genres – nüshu autobiographical ballads and oral 
histories – are quite different genres, produced under very different circumstances. The nüshu 
autobiographies were all produced by Jiangyong County nüshu practitioners for other 
Jiangyong County nüshu practitioners to validate their lives while still upholding the social 
structure under which they lived. The oral history project was instigated by Li Xiaojiang, an 
eminent professor of women’s studies in China, and carried out by various researchers who 
interviewed women across China with the purpose of documenting aspects of Chinese 
women’s lives that would otherwise be lost to history (Li, 2003a, 2003b, 2003c, 2003d). The 
oral history project, in other words, had a larger feminist agenda behind it; the nüshu 
autobiographies did not.  

This background agenda meant that, as a genre, the oral histories created conditions that 
permitted and even encouraged the women interviewees to speak about their skills and 
accomplishments through the particular questions and prompts that the researchers asked 
them. The grandmother-in-law of a friend of mine was one of the 600 women interviewed as 
part of the project. Her family knew that she had been a professional opera singer in her 
younger days but were surprised to learn details about her fame and success that emerged in 
her oral history but which she had always downplayed, even among close family members. 
The format of the oral history data collection – an “authority” asking specific questions about 
women’s lives and another “authority” writing down her story with the purpose of giving 
women a “voice” – meant that her fame and success could be voiced, despite Chinese cultural 
conventions discouraging boasting. When family members mentioned their surprise at her 
fame, my friend remembers that her grandmother-in-law remarked something to the effect 
that the oral history project editors had been kind when they interpreted her story, still 
verbally downplaying her success, but her face was beaming with pride at the time (Corinne 
McKamey, personal communication).  



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This example indicates the importance of genre conventions in encouraging or restricting 
certain expressions of self. As textual genres, the oral histories encouraged this type of self-
expression; the nüshu autobiographies did not. Yet, I also argue that, to a certain extent, the 
nüshu autobiographical texts do not need to contain expressions of skillful ability because 
opportunities for and expressions of the-self-as-skilled-and-accomplished were embodied in 
the practice of nüshu. As a unitary curriculum of identity, the practices and the texts of nüshu 
complement each other. In terms of skill in nüshu – whether singing, reading or writing – 
women would have provided social acknowledgment of each other’s abilities. Since nüshu 
was occasionally public, such as the displays of sanzhaoshu, they would also have received 
some acknowledgment from men and other community members.6 Also, the women 
interviewed for the oral history project were not interviewed by people claiming the same 
skill. For one or several Jiangyong women to mention their own skill in nüshu in their 
compositions – in the face of other women similarly skilled in nüshu – would have seemed 
boastful and even arrogant. Cathy Silber (1995) mentions the social norms for women in 
Jiangyong County discouraged boasting and encouraged self-disparagement (pp. 147-148). 
For all these reasons, women did not portray themselves as skilled or educated in any ability – 
nüshu or otherwise – in their autobiographies. Apparently the conventions of nüshu laments, 
and perhaps the prevailing social order, did not allow this type of textual self-interpretation. 
Women’s laments appear as a type of oral (and textual) literature in many different parts of 
the world perhaps because prevailing, patriarchal social orders deem acceptable women 
describing their selves as woeful and miserable; women describing their selves as skilled and 
educated is another matter.  

However, to say that women chose not to portray themselves as skilled and educated 
because they had to conform to the social order is an interpretation that removes agency from 
women. I would like to put forward an alternative interpretation that allows for agency on the 
part of the women who crafted these autobiographies. Suzanne de Castell (1996) writes that 
for many students confronted with literacy practices that overly and too strictly “normalize” 
the acceptably-presented self sometimes “the strongest voice is silence” (pp. 29-30) Students 
may have understandings of their selfhoods that they never choose to share publicly. de 
Castell further states: 

 
My argument here is that for many forms of subjectivity to survive, it is essential that they 
not be spoken at all, except with the most extreme caution, and under carefully crafted 
conditions of protection…. (p. 31)  

 
The alternative explanation is that for these nüshu women to not “write” the self-as-skilled-
and-accomplished, to not put this subjectivity into the texts, is actually an act of protection, in 
effect keeping the self-as-skilled safely lodged within the practice of nüshu where it can exist 
free of normalizing literacy conventions.  

We can never know exactly why the nüshu practitioners of Jiangyong apparently chose to 
downplay or simply not include the self-as-skilled in their autobiographical ballads. They may 
have chosen not to portray the self-as-skilled for all of these reasons: because they did not 
want to boast in front of their peers, because the acknowledgement of the skill was embodied 
in the practice and so was unnecessary in text, because the culture discouraged it, and because 
the textual silence afforded them strength. Yet, when compared to self-interpretations that 
appear in the Chinese women’s oral histories, we can sense in the absence of the self-as-
                                                
6  Novelist Lisa See (2005) portrays quite well the sense of pride that her fictional women characters found in 

their ability to read, write and perform nüshu.  



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skilled in the nüshu women’s autobiographies both how influential the normalizing genre 
conventions governing self-representation can be and how women nevertheless found room to 
maneuver around them. 
 
Conclusions 
Anne McLaren (1999) argues that in nüshu “one can indeed hear ‘women’s voices’, not so 
much as individuals, but as a collectivity who transmitted their beliefs and perspectives in a 
highly ritualised verse medium” (p. 177). The emphasis in the curricular nature of nüshu 
autobiographical practice on attainment of an identity through the conventional expression of 
anguish and grievance would certainly seem to encourage a collective identity, and 
undoubtedly realizing a collective identity through expressed anguish and grief was an 
essential feature of the this practice of lament.  

Nonetheless, in my narrative analysis of these autobiographies, I am most struck by two 
seemingly contradictory characteristics of them: first, by how unique each ballad voice is and, 
second, by how the silence between the ballads’ textual lines also speaks. These ritualized and 
formalized autobiographies share the very individual voices of individual women. Their 
authors may well find meaning and moral support as part of the larger subjectivity of nüshu 
practitioners, and they may well have incorporated aspects of that subjectivity through their 
adoption of conventional forms and phrases, yet the collective identity has not erased their 
quite apparent individualities. Even a woman whose life has a happy ending, and even an 
adolescent still forming her identity, can find a subjective space within this otherwise highly 
conventionalized genre. However, beyond this textual subjective space lies a performative 
space for silence, a space in which the parameters on socially-prescribed agency are 
potentially loosened and relaxed.  

The very nature of silence means that we can never know for sure what alternate 
interpretations of their lives these women chose to omit from the written record – such as the 
self-as-skilled-and-educated – and how that omission came to shape the subjectivities 
presented within, but a close analysis reveals that these texts are not wholly shaping these 
women. The women are at least in part shaping the texts, both in terms of how what they say 
and what they do not say in the texts. The agency of each in this process is evident in her 
unique voice and her unique silence. In the double-sided process of shaping and being shaped 
lies the power of the nüshu curriculum to explicate, acknowledge and express a woman’s 
identity.  
 
 



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Response to reviewers 
I wish to thank my two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and helpful commentaries. 
Some of their comments have been incorporated in this revision of my originally submitted 
article. Specifically, I have tried to clarify and strengthen my central thesis that what is left 
silent and not explicitly incorporated in the nüshu autobiographical ballads is as crucial as 
what is stated in these texts in shaping how these women presented and understood their 
identities.  

Reviewer B asks “how do these texts both contest and reinforce the social norms of the 
time?” In this draft, I’ve tried to clarify that in many ways nüshu actually helped uphold the 
local patriarchal order by normalizing Jiangyong County’s class structure and gender norms 
within its textual and social conventions. In her dissertation, Cathy Silber stresses the point 
that the women did not use nüshu to protest against the patriarchal order. Silber emphasizes 
this fact to contradict press reports of nüshu that she feels sensationalized the women’s script 
as “secret” and “feminist” in nature. Although nüshu was never about social reform, Silber 
also makes clear that the women did take pride in their accomplishments as nüshu 
practitioners and forged a sense of solidarity with other nüshu women that helped them deal 
with the injustices that they experienced as women. Based on Silber’s descriptions, I feel that 
nüshu’s overt textual and social conventions – i.e. the nature of the stock metaphorical 
phrases and the practice of same class girls being matched as laotong – helped reinforce local 
social norms, whereas the lived practices – i.e. the opportunity for women to “voice” their 
own autobiographical ballads and the solidarity and catharsis that women could experience 
when performing nüshu – permitted a certain amount of contestation of the local social order.  

For anyone interested in learning more about nüshu, I highly recommend Lisa See’s novel 
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, which follows the lives of two fictional nüshu women in 
Jiangyong County in the 19th Century from childhood through their elderly years. Reviewer C 
kindly mentions this novel as a resource. I first encountered and read this book just after 
submitting this article. Lisa See conducted extensive research on nüshu and the social and 
historical background of these women, including a visit to Jiangyong County, before writing 
her novel, and I feel that it quite richly captures what these women’s lives were probably like 
circa the mid 1800s. Yet, Lisa See is fictionally filling in a silence in much the same way that 
I am academically filling in a silence in this article.  

In this regard, Reviewer C is absolutely correct in her observation that “we can never 
know what that silence means.” I hope that I have made clear that this article does not present 
“conclusions” but rather speculations or possible interpretations about what the silence around 
the self-as-skilled in the nüshu autobiographical texts may mean. Ultimately, what it actually 
means, we simply cannot know. Nevertheless since, historically, texts have frequently failed 
to document the lives of women and other marginalized groups, attending to silences – what 
falls outside written or performed texts – is a key aspect of feminist methodology and of 
curriculum theorizing. My aim with this article is to attend to a silence – the silence of self-as-
skilled – that I personally sense in the autobiographical ballads based on my concurrent study 
of Chinese women’s oral histories (in which this silence does not occur) and open this silence 
and its surrounding texts to scholarly attention.  

This brings me to the final comments made by both reviewers – namely asking what this 
study of nüshu offers to contemporary curriculum studies. The study of nüshu provides many 
parallels to numerous examples of how marginalized and suppressed people in many parts of 
the world have developed their own curriculums of silence, texts, and lived practices to forge 
identities and promote their own education. Rather than, in this article, draw some explicit 



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parallels to a few of these curriculums as examples, I prefer simply to open this larger subject 
to discussion with TCI readers. 



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Appendix 
 
List of Rural Women’s Oral Histories Selected from Oral History Project Volumes 
 
Name Location in books Age (at 

time of 
interview) 

Province 

Huang Shunxing 
黄顺兴 

2003d 文化寻踪 pp. 115-134 90 Guangdong 

Ku Shulan 
库淑兰 

2003d 文化寻踪 pp. 301-331 79 Shaanxi 

Rong Mama 
荣妈妈 

2003d 文化寻踪 pp. 333-343 83 Shandong 

Feng Daniang 
冯大娘 

2003d 文化寻踪 pp. 352-361 80 Shaanxi 

Wang Mama 
王妈妈 

2003d 文化寻踪 pp. 362-367 70 Guangxi 

Yang Guiying 
杨桂英 

2003c 亲历战争 pp. 485-487 69 Shandong 

Hou Xueying 
侯学英 

2003c 亲历战争 pp. 492-497 66 Shandong 

Li Fenglan 
李风兰 

2003c 亲历战争 pp. 497-508 66 Shandong 

Huang Fagui 
黄发桂 

2003c 亲历战争 pp. 14-19, 158-163 80 Jiangxi 

Chen Yingqiao 
陈应桥 

2003c 亲历战争 pp. 163-165 83 Anhui 

Yang Yafang 
杨亚芳 

2003c 亲历战争 pp. 165-172 77 Anhui 

Lu Fengjiao 
芦风娇 

2003c 亲历战争 pp. 139-150 79 Hunan 

Lin Renqin 
林任勤 

2003c 亲历战争 pp. 145-150 83 Hunan 

Sun Huaying 
孙华英 

2003c 亲历战争 pp. 152-156 88 Hunan 

Yu Miaolan 
喻庙兰 

2003c 亲历战争 pp. 156-158 83 Hunan 

Lao Lao 
姥姥 

2003a 独立历程 pp. 302-322 >90 Henan 

 
 



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