Secret language reveals hidden women's world
- Source: Global Times
- [22:05 March 21 2010]
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By HARVEY DZODIN
It must have been fate when I walked into the Yuanfen Gallery in the 798 Art District recently.
The exhibition on offer was about a truly fascinating topic, one that neither I, nor many of my Chinese friends, had ever heard of before: nü shu, a secret written and spoken language for women.
Yuanfen, which means fate, was started by David Ben Kay. David used to be a senior lawyer for Bill Gates but decided to leave what many would consider a dream job for his personal dream: creating a new media art space. You might say that David is an idealist who believes that the way to make a small fortune in the art business is to start out with a big one.
The concept of nü shu is all about fate as well, the fate of Chinese women in traditional society. While many of these customs across China died out less than a century ago, nü shu was still spoken by the Yao ethnic minority in the southwest of Hunan Province, until its last practitioner passed away a few years ago.
Nü shu arose in an era when women had no rights and no education. Upon marriage, always arranged, sometimes at birth or shortly thereafter, the relationships of these women with their family and friends were severed, and a woman was given a life sentence to a kind of semi house-arrest.
Nü shu was a secret language passed down from mother to daughter to share their few joys and many sorrows. It was used in letters, poems and embroidery among women in a family and by groups of "sworn sisters." Some scholars think these were a lesbian cult, but many others believe that the nü shu sisterhood was merely an outlet for feelings of sisterly love and sadness at having to marry and thereby sever previous close relationships and support systems.
These archaic practices, so utterly removed from life in modern China, when placed in the perspective of the long sweep of Chinese history, occurred only the day before yesterday. This kind of lifestyle that gave rise to nü shu certainly got me to thinking.
Some say nü shu was invented by a Song Dynasty (960-1279) emperor's concubine to communicate with friends outside the imperial court. No matter how it evolved, you have to admire the illiterate women who created the written characters of lines and dots, and the spoken language. They had a desire to communicate and share information, and more importantly to share feelings.
We say in English that necessity is the mother of invention. These mothers of nü shu gave birth to this special language which allowed them to express themselves without worry that their husbands would learn their inner thoughts, and communicate between themselves.
Long before Chairman Mao Zedong famously said that women hold up half the sky, nü shu has to be seen as a very early effort in the struggle for women's rights. We cannot call it "women's liberation" because it did not liberate women, but it gave them an important tool to brighten their lives.
I often wonder how my Chinese women friends would cope with the traditional lifestyle that gave rise to nü shu? I am not saying that life today is neither easy, nor simple. Clearly it is not.
But when women tell me how difficult it is to meet Mr Right, cope with parental pressure to marry and feel profound frustration that after 30, they are damaged goods and unmarriageable because they have passed their "sell by" date, I think how relatively easy they have it in China today.
When I think of the illiterate women with bound feet, taken from their family and friends from their home village to live in semi-prison conditions under the wardenship of both her husband and her new mother-in-law, I have scant sympathy for complaints about modern day mother-in-laws ruling the roost.
While women are not yet fully equal to men, many Chinese women have traveled vast distances from the times that gave rise to nü shu.
Their struggle continues but the need for a secret language does not.
The author is former director and vice president at ABC Television. He spends most of his time in Beijing now working on media projects. hdzodin@hotmail.com
