Script of Rural Chinese Women Being Translated

Two women are spending long hours on the telephone, discussing unhappy marriages and the difficulties of caring for elderly parents. But the troubles are not their own.

Sarah Lantz and Stella Jeng Guillory are translating the writings of rural Chinese women who, centuries ago, devised a script they used exclusively among themselves.

“Nushu,” or “women’s writing,” is not a dialect of its own, but a completely different way of writing a Chinese dialect spoken in the mountainous region of central China’s Hunan province, Guillory said.

Men traditionally weren’t interested in the issues that women used the script to discuss, so they didn’t try to learn to read it.

Guillory and Lantz, who do most of their work on the phone because they live on opposite sides of Honolulu, expect to complete the first known English collection next spring.

“It’s not really poetry,” Guillory said. “It’s more like oral history in letters.”

Nushu chronicles the modest, homebound lives women led in a male-dominated society. The women used the script in letters they exchanged pledging emotional and financial support to each other as “sworn sisters.”

They also used it to record folk tales and current events. Some writings were embellished on fans and embroidered in scarves. When the women gathered, one read the writings aloud while several others worked.

“The gathering itself could be recreational--sitting together, singing together. It was entertaining,” Guillory said. “They read it over and over--and I think they really got strength from it.”

“It probably could be my grandmother’s life story,” said Guillory, 50, a native of China.

Only a handful of elderly women remain who personally used the slanted, balanced script of some 600 to 800 words. Scholars picked it up in the 1980s. Linguists at Beijing University and other schools in China are preserving Nushu, Guillory said.