When 24-year-old Yulu Chen created a WeChat group known as Nüshu Sisterhood Chat, she anticipated solely a handful of shut mates to hitch.
Inside months, the group hit the social media platform’s 500-member restrict, prompting her to create extra teams.
Nüshu — which interprets to ‘girls’s writing’ in Chinese language — is an historic syllabic script derived from Chinese language characters and designed by girls, permitting them to speak secretly with out males understanding.
Girls noticed the chat as a secure house to share particulars of their lives.
“What stunned me probably the most was how shortly girls opened up,” Chen stated.
“Nüshu grew to become greater than only a language. It grew to become a means for us to share issues we didn’t really feel comfy to say elsewhere.”
There could possibly be as many as 1,000 Nüshu characters. Some writers and students have in contrast it to the footprints of birds or have known as it ‘mosquito writing’.
‘Script of tears’
Some students hint Nüshu’s origins again 400 years to a time through the Qing Dynasty, in China’s Hunan province, the place peasant girls had been remoted from public life and dwelling in secluded villages.
They had been barred from formal schooling and confined to their properties, usually with certain toes.
Foot binding was a apply carried out on younger women and girls to make their toes small. Small toes had been thought of lovely and an emblem of obedience and subservience.
Generally known as the ‘script of tears’, Nüshu empowered girls to speak and categorical their deepest emotions — sorrow over sad marriages, household conflicts and separation from family members.
A photograph of a kid’s certain toes, from China in 1918. The traditional apply of footbinding concerned breaking and tightly binding the toes of younger ladies for aesthetic functions. The apply was banned within the early 1900s however didn’t really finish till the institution of the Folks’s Republic of China in 1949. Credit score: Duke College Rubenstein Libra/Gado through Getty Photographs
Nüshu was initially scrawled on the bottom in wok ashes utilizing tree branches.
The characters are shaped with dots and three sorts of strokes — horizontals, virgules and arcs. These elongated letters are written with effective and thread-like traces, and skewed to suit a rhomboid form the place their Chinese language counterparts are sq..
The language is phonetic, with every character representing a syllable, whereas fashionable Chinese language is a logographic language, which means its characters characterize particular phrases.
Nüshu was used to put in writing poetry and songs on folding followers, embroidered on handkerchiefs, and even sewn into the collars and sleeves of clothes.
Creating secret areas
Mirroring its historic use, the group chats on fashionable China’s social media websites have grow to be intimate and secret on-line areas for ladies.
In these chats, girls and younger ladies focus on Nüshu lore and historical past, name out misogynistic behaviours in different on-line boards, and plan meet-ups and journeys to Jiangyong, the birthplace of Nüshu.
Generally, customers share private struggles — marital points, divorce and home violence, and focus on the challenges of being a lady in fashionable Chinese language society.
Yulu Chen practices writing in Nüshu for a documentary movie she produced.
“Solely girls are allowed to hitch,” Chen defined. “It’s a must to be invited by somebody who is aware of you, and you then report your voice as proof earlier than being added to the group.”
Nüshu group chats aren’t restricted to WeChat. Different platforms equivalent to QQ, Douyin and Little Purple E-book (RED) additionally host non-public teams the place girls collect to be taught, apply and focus on Nüshu.
These digital areas are monitored by the Chinese language Communist Get together, which as soon as sought to destroy cultural relics it deemed feudal — together with Nüshu books —through the Cultural Revolution within the Sixties.
Supply of power and energy
Chen’s curiosity within the secret language was piqued after transferring to Shanghai to check pictures.
“In China, there are only a few feminine photographers,” she stated.
“Individuals are usually stunned after I inform them what I do. They are saying: ‘Oh, there are literally feminine photographers?'”
Chen was exploring feminist themes for a college pictures venture when she got here throughout Nüshu on-line.
Realising it got here from Jiangyong, near her hometown in Hunan Province in south central China, she knew it was the fitting selection for her venture and travelled there.
However she found most Chinese language individuals weren’t accustomed to the script.
“After I requested individuals within the city about Nüshu, nearly nobody knew what I used to be speaking about,” she stated.
Jiangyong, a distant village from the place the Nüshu language is believed to originate.
Ultimately, Chen discovered a lady in her 80s who was one of many final dwelling inheritors of Nüshu.
She confirmed her Nüshu calligraphy and informed her tales of the ladies — together with her grandmother, who had been capable of write and sing Nüshu songs.
The extra Chen discovered about Nüshu, the extra she understood its twin which means — it introduced each ache and power to the ladies who used it.
“There’s a kind of energy in having the ability to relate to girls from tons of of years in the past by means of this language,” she stated.
“The problems girls face as we speak are very a lot the identical. I really feel highly effective figuring out this.”
Jia Yi Chen has expressed the ache of household secrets and techniques by means of her Nüshu-inspired artworks.
Processing ache by means of language
For 25-year-old artist, performer and photographer Jia Yi Chen, Nüshu helped her course of the ache of her upbringing.
Chen was born through the period of China’s one-child coverage, when boys had been valued over ladies.
Her mom gave beginning to her in secret.
On the age of 15, her dad and mom revealed that her grandmother had ready to throw her into the river at beginning as a result of she was a lady.
“My mom, who had simply given beginning and was very weak, ran to the river to choose me up so I might survive,” Jia stated.
“That’s one thing that sticks with you. It makes you’re feeling invisible, like your existence is irrelevant.”
The revelation led her to chop ties along with her father’s household and, ultimately, transfer to Edinburgh to pursue her creative profession.
Throughout her research of Chinese language artwork, she discovered about Nüshu, which prompted her to go to Jiangyong, the place she visited the county’s Nüshu museum and met with inheritors of the script.
In March 2024, she created a pictures exhibition in Edinburgh that includes Yao girls from Jiangyong, wearing conventional Yao clothes, with Nüshu characters drawn on their necks.
Jia Yi Chen makes use of a conventional Chinese language calligraphy brush to color Nüshu characters on her arms, which helps her course of her inside ideas.
She has additionally created a stay efficiency piece during which she makes use of a conventional Chinese language calligraphy brush to color Nüshu characters on her arms whereas reciting tales and sharing the historical past of Nüshu.
Doing so has allowed her to work by means of her emotions round what occurred to her.
“I wish to write it down on my physique within the type of Nüshu, however I don’t need my mum to know.
“Generally I need her to know, however different occasions I don’t.
“Identical to Nüshu, it’s a secretive and hidden language.”
