Inscribing Intimacy: The Fading Writing Tradition of Nüshu

"I chose a book on Nüshu, the secret script created and used by women in southern China, because it embodies resistance through language itself. For centuries, women who were excluded from formal education developed their own written system to share stories, grief, and solidarity. It is the only written language exclusively created and used by women." - Yicheng "YC" Sun [孙亦成]

Endo Orie's book is about nüshu, a unique form of writing that appeared in rural China in the modern era. As the book reveals, the date of its origin is under dispute. However, like Korean and Japanese writing systems, nüshu has a close connection to women since writing with Chinese characters was traditionally tied to patriarchal privilege. Women extrapolated new graphs from conventional Chinese characters, using them to record various aspects of their emotional lives. It ws a script created by women, for heartfelt communication between women. This is an unusually personal book, authored by Endo Orie—a well-known Japanese linguist with many books on gender and language. She stumbled upon the nüshu writing system while hiking in Hunan in the 1990s. Here she introduces narrating its discovery and mourning the way its original intimacies are fading away.