Abstract
FOR A HISTORIAN IN THE CHINA FIELD, writing biography is a natural. Life stories dominated imperial China's major historical works. The Chinese imperial elite was obsessed with remembering and recording lives: male and female, elite and commoner. These life stories were supposed to convey history's great moral lessons. The historian's job was to make sure the lessons were crystal-clear, and so most biographies were recorded in dramatic scenes, sparked with verbatim dialogue. It is impossible, as a historian working today, to resist the appeal of these stories. Their wit, empathy, and verisimilitude convey so much about individual character that, however idealized or one-sided a life story may be, the reader feels that on some level he has come to know that person. When in a recent research project I decided to set scenes as a way to organize my own biographical account of three generations of women in a nineteenth-century Chinese family, the results gave me unexpected insight into the explanatory power of this Chinese narrative strategy.
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