A Lens into Culture and History: A Chinese Peasant Woman Hu Xinkui's Life Narrative.

Using a Chinese peasant woman, Hu Xinkui's ..., as a looking lens, this article unfolds the socio-cultural change of rural China in the transitional period from around Liberation in 1949 up to 1978, and even into the twenty-first century, covering a wide range of issues regarding footbinding, child brides, forced conscription, bridal lamentation, communist collectivization, and a series of political movements such as land reform, the Great Leap Forward, the Socialist Education Movement, the Four Clearing-ups Movement, and the Poor and Lower-Middle Peasants Association. Hu Xinkui, born in 1934 in Jiangyong County of Hunan Province in south China, was a child bride who was promoted as a director of Women's Affairs after Liberation because of her suppressed inferior status. It was also because of the Liberation-implemented new marriage law that laid the foundation for her husband to divorce her in 1959, for the reason of her apparent infertility and lack of romance, as well as her concern for an unmarried brother, which preoccupied her to the detriment of her own marriage. She remarried in 1964 and retired from her active political life after she had children; since then she has committed herself to being an extremely hard-working housewife. With her husband being an active and honest party cadre (including being the deputy to the 9th Party Congress in 1969), she had to find every possible source to maintain the family finance in order to receive a great deal of visiting guests and peasants, at a cost of neglecting the education of her children, two of whom were addicted to gambling. Her life story manifests how an ordinary village woman engaged with local women's expressive traditions, called ...(women's script) and ... (women's song), and how her personal life changed along with the transformation of China. Also worth noting, the life history interviews with Xinkui were conducted in the company of her daughter and son-in-law, who have assisted my nüshu research for more than a decade -- and they had never learned about Hu Xinkui's past until then. Their participation throws additional reflective light on Xinkui's life experiences in China's changing rural context. With Hu Xinkui's life history as the axis, this article aims to draw attention to the life narrative approach as a tool for collecting ethnographic data and to bring about a rethinking of its use as a conceptual framework. Recognizing the possible limitations of life narrative in terms of its partiality, lapses, mistakes, and exaggeration, I employ narratives from multiple subjects and diverse resources (e.g., literary composition, local oral traditions, and historical documents) to open up the dialogical horizon of a life narration. I demonstrate that life history as a lived experience and an account of life not only speaks to a person's lifeworld; it is also an intertextualization of the voices of multiple subject-positions: narrating subject, addressee, researcher, and the embedded context. In the case of Hu Xinkui, her life narration not only encodes her history and historiography, but also manifests how the next generation, especially her daughter, decodes her story and writes it onto their own. Life narrative in this sense is a convergence of history and culture, whereby history continues and culture persists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]