Dozens of generations of women from Hunan province wrote to each other in their own language about the anguish of marriage. For hundreds of years, the Nushu alphabet remained hidden from men's eyes
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Noshu wrote. The women wrote in rhymes about the hunger, the contempt and the hard work
For hundreds of years, the peasant women of the Hunan province in China went up to the Mount of Flowers temple, carrying in their hands sheets of rice paper on which their sufferings and sorrows are recorded in a secret script, the river was only for women - Noshu wrote. According to one of the popular beliefs, the secret alphabet was invented 2,500 years ago by the young bride of one of the emperors, who wanted to contact her friends, who remained outside the palace where she was imprisoned.
For dozens of generations, the Noshu alphabet, with its 1,500 signs, remained unknown and hidden from the eyes of men. But in the fifties, during the Cultural Revolution, the script was outlawed. Recently he came back and was discovered by four linguists: the two Chinese Zhao Liming and Gong Jing, and the two Japanese Toshiyuki Obata and Oriya Ando.
The need to invent the secret script testifies to the difficult situation of women in Asia, Zhao explained: "The first reason for the birth of the Noshu lies in the fact that the women were forced to remain in their ignorance. They were not allowed to go to school, and no one taught them Anzi, the Chinese script."
The other reason is the practice of forcing married life on the women, in which the women lived in conditions of almost slavery, separated from their families and subject to the control of the husband's family. In these harsh conditions, the women of the Jiang Zhong rope found solace in their secret language.
"When a young woman was given away for a wedding," says Oriya Ando, "her mother, her sisters and close friends, would sing songs in her honor in which they expressed the pain of the impending separation. However, after she moved away to the district where the husband lives, their voices died down. And so the reporter was born, which made it possible to preserve the relationship between the women."
One of the characteristics of the Noshu is the writing in rhymes, which indicates the oral origin of the script in the songs that the women sang when they worked together in spinning, sewing and shoemaking. The Noshu script was used to produce critical texts, in which the women described their hardships as married women and accepted hunger, abuse, the hard work imposed on them and the humiliating treatment they received. As one would expect from a women's letter, the secret writing marks were stamped not only on paper, but also on embroidered fans and clothes.
Unfortunately for Noshu, shortly after he was discovered and investigated in the fifties, the Communist Party outlawed him. The party apparently believed that the preservation of the writing was inconsistent with the party's claims about the new reality of women's liberation in China. But despite the claims of Mao Zedong's socialist regime, the practice of forced marriage has not taken root.
And when life continues on its traditional path, the traditional response to it is also preserved: one of the last women to use the Noshu script is Ae Yanshin, who was born in 1940. In the autobiography she wrote - ten pages including 2,828 typed letters, written in her son's school notebook - she describes the suffering that was her share in the marriage that was forced upon her.
Today, women's writing is no longer outlawed. Furthermore, in Shanjianshu and the neighboring villages, the residents are trying to make Nushu a magnet for tourists, and have even started teaching it in schools. However, apart from the scholars who came to Hunan to study the script, today there are only three women left in the province who are still able to write and read it.
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