She is One and All – Writing Nushu, Women's Script in an Autobiography

Abstract

Nushu, women's script, is believed to have been created and practiced exclusively by women in the Shangjiangxu Township, Jiangyong County, Hunan Province, China for some hundred years. Through a set of unique matriarchal scripts, these women developed a tradition of storytelling, orally in chants, in embroidery, and in written form. They had produced abundant records of their stories in the form of either a biography or an autobiography, which shows a valid representation of their genealogy, a vital condition informing women's identity. I am taking the form of an autobiography, an interdisciplinary practice, as a disrupting challenge of conventions to reveal fragments of the stories of some of these women I visited in the region. With a singular ‘she’ throughout the writing, I have attempted to resist from all patriarchal definitions and appropriations: she is fluid, she is in flux, she is multiple, and she cannot be fixed. She is one and all. She is fragmentary and a whole.