Editorial
Nüshu Resonance
A reading of the album through Jiangyong’s women’s script, then the official recording.
Nüshu (女书) means “women’s writing.” It is a syllabic script from Jiangyong county in Hunan, China. Women there used it to write to one another: letters, songs, and the books a bride carried to her new house. It records the local speech. It is not the standard Chinese character system used in official writing. The last women who had learned it in childhood died in the early 2000s. What remains is the script, the songs, and the studies of them.
Nüshu Resonance is OYOTTA’s album. It sits beside that history. It does not claim the script, and it does not claim the women who wrote it.