WARNING

Research for a novel took me into a county gazetteer. The section on persons ran to half a volume; reading it end to end, I could put names to fewer than ten.

It was a Jiajing-era woodblock, a photo-offset reprint, the strokes already blurred. The order was impeccably regular: geography first, then administrative history, then the fiscal chapter, then officials, and only after all that, persons and letters. The persons section was subdivided too — notable officials, local worthies, the filial and the righteous, exemplary women, sojourners, men of technical skill. I read page after page and felt a chill. A county of tens of thousands, and barely a hundred made it into that half volume. Most of them were women.

The entries for exemplary women follow a single mold: née So-and-so, wife of Such-and-such, aged so many years; her husband died; she kept her chastity so many years; she raised the orphan to adulthood; she died at such an age. The slightly more generous ones add a line: met bandits, refused, died. The most generous add another: cut flesh from her thigh to make medicine for her mother-in-law. And their names? Mostly just the surname. Not even a girlhood name. Zhang, Li, Wang — three Wangs on one page.

My first thought was simple: this is raw material for memorial arches, history making its second use of women. The judgment is not wrong. But the longer I read, the smoother it felt — smooth the way a ready-made slogan is smooth.

The man writing the gazetteer was not writing literature. He was keeping accounts. To report on moral instruction, a county needed a count of chaste widows; to report on relief, a figure for grain donated by righteous commoners; to report on achievement, the names of those who paid for bridges and roads. Superiors would check these things; the next magistrate would build on them. So the people who got in were rarely those who suffered most. They were the ones useful to the county, the ones who could be reported upward. The logic is cold, but it is honest: it says outright what it cares about.

There is something even plainer. Gazetteers were usually paid for by local gentry passing the hat. Whoever put up silver got recorded; whoever put up more got a short biography of his own. Those hundred names were chosen less by history than by the subscription list.

Yet I am unwilling to follow that logic to the point of erasing them. Widow Zhang held out forty years. Forty years is one night after another, and it has nothing to do with whether the gazetteer granted her an entry. She may truly have had no other road — but “no other road” is not the same as “she did nothing.” Writing them all down as victims looks like speaking for them. It is in fact a second time withholding her name.

Writing fiction, I have to invent names for people like her. Inventing them makes me uneasy: a fictional woman gets a name while the real one was called Widow Wang until she died. Eventually I made my peace with it. The name was never hers to earn; it was given by others. What I can do is not recover her name but write out those forty years, so that a reader does not come away thinking it is merely source material.

Our gazetteers look different now: résumés, social feeds, official accounts, year-end reviews. They record the same kind of thing — what can be cited. Which projects you ran, where you have been, whom you know. The part that is actually living — getting up early, enduring, doing one small thing for ten years — nobody records, and it cannot be recorded.

So I do not much believe in leaving a name behind. But I would not dismiss recording either. Without it, nothing at all remains. The person who writes stands in between: knowing full well that the record is a sieve, still pouring into it, hoping that one grain out of what falls through will be picked up by someone.

卜世 撰