These are women. Hear them roar.

A Window on Women

History, that is, a written record, begins in China about 1000 BCE. There are really only two works that provide a rich and sufficient record of this China of three thousand years ago: The Book of Changes, or I Ching, a poetic collection of oracles dating from the eleventh to the eighth century BCE, and The Classic of Poetry, whose 305 poems range in date from the eighth to the fifth century BCE. In this latter collection, what concerns us here are the first 160.

In times when poetry is a primary entertainment medium, it provides the most vivid and authentic account of lived life, just as novels do for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Classic of Poetry is our best record of, and widest window on, earliest China. It is preponderantly a collection of folksongs. Further, the preponderance of these poems were evidently composed by women. The work songs, and particularly the songs that describe relationships, show an awareness of women’s feelings that one would hardly expect from a male writer from three thousand years ago.

A good analogy can be found in the pictorial rugs made to this day in Afghanistan, with their nearly journalistic depiction of everyday life. In ages where women are deprived of an active and independent role in society, they have often expressed themselves in disregarded arts such as folk music and weaving.

The only parallels to this treasury of ancient women’s literature which I am aware of are the Song of Solomon in the Hebrew Bible, and the Therigatha, a collection of poems by nuns of the earliest Buddhist community which are preserved in the Pali canon. Judaism and Theravada Buddhism share an ethical warmth and a generous humanism which made it possible for them to hear and value such voices.

Read Ottilee O’Malley’s post on the Chinese characters: Nasty Characters: Chinese Literature through the Lens of Feminism

Some of the Poems

Like a Rat

The road is sodden, soaked with rain.
You can’t deny that path’s too wet
for walking, dawn, or dewy eve.
I do not care to walk such roads.

The sparrow’s the avian emblem of love,
but that doesn’t mean his beak isn’t sharp.
Just such a lovebird’s pecking a hole
in my bedroom wall,
a sparrow nobly born.

Yes, I was promised to you in marriage,
but what will you gain by hauling me to court?
The judge may rule the contract stands,
but your house won’t be my prison,
your noble house
isn’t strong enough for that.

You gnaw your way through my home’s thick walls,
like a rat. What fine teeth you have,
surely you come of good stock!
Any rodent would be proud.

What will you gain, hauling me to court?
I follow the bailiff there, I must,
but when I leave it won’t be to follow you.

Three, Four, Five

Three, four, five
stars left in the east,
tiny, sparkling sharp
in a brightening sky.
Hurry, we leave when night does,
and dark’s departing, quickly now, hurry,
concubines of the duke,
arriving at dusk, departing at dawn,
wives, but not quite wives:
our fates are not the same.

Orion and the Pleiades
are now a faint sparkle of stars.
Hurry, we leave when night does,
and dark’s departing, quickly now,
hurry, concubines of the duke,
arriving at dusk, departing at dawn
with the bedding we brought,
our own quilts and sheets,
in our arms, wives,
but not quite wives,
our fates are not like theirs.

The River Jiang

The river Jiang accepts the streams that feed it.
Madame would not accept us.
Her own younger sisters,
married along with her to become
number two and number three wives.
She didn’t accept us,
but later she’d regret this.

The river Jiang allows islands,
many an island amid its waves.
Madame wouldn’t endure us,
younger sisters, the lesser wives.
But she’d learn to live with us in time.

The river Jiang forms branches, divides
its waters among the thirsty fields.
Madame didn’t pass us on
to her husband then, but now
she sends us in to him, with a grin,
whistling a song.

Cedar Boat

It drifts along, this cedar boat,
drifts as the current carries it;
I’m still awake, still can’t sleep,
I have my secret anxiety.
(There’s no secret here: they’re taking me
to a man and a marriage I hate.)
Poor me, there is no wine
could make this feel
like an idle pleasure trip.

My heart is not a mirror,
to swallow in silence whatever it has to see;
I’ve several brothers,
but I can’t count on their help here;
I come to talk, to complain, and they—
they just get angry at me.

My heart’s not a rock on the path
you can simply roll out of the way,
my heart’s not a mat
you can just fold up and set aside.
My station and my dignity?
Gradually, by degrees
things have worsened, infinitely.

My anxious heart is grieved, is grieved,
the rabble herd hate me for my pride;
already I’ve met with much suffering,
taken insults, and taunts.
Calm, rational words I tell myself,
but my heart, it pounds, it pounds.

The sun recurs, ever unchanging.
O moon, why do you go
shrinking down to a sliver,
counting down days to the day I dread?
Anxiety’s penetrated my heart,
a stain that nothing can wash away.
Calm, rational words I repeat to myself,
but I know I can’t flee, fly away.

They Beat the Drums

How loudly they beat the drums!
We soldiers brandish our weapons,
leap and practice our lunges.
We build up earthworks, dig trenches,
fortify the city Tsao.
I march off southwards with the troops,
lonely among a great mass of men.

We follow San Zih Jong
to pacify the lands of Chen and Song.
When San goes home, will we be left
here to guard the frontier?
That’s what worries my harried heart.

My wife will wonder, “Did he settle down
to live there? Did he lose the horse
that should have carried him back?
Is he searching for it, wandering
in some forest depth?”

She’ll think, “We made our vows for life,
till death, but now we’re so far apart,
my good man and I! We spoke the wedding oath,
clasped hands. We’d grow old together . . .

“Ah, I’m left sighing, so far away,
I don’t know what keeps me living anymore.
Ah, I’m sighing and crying. Oh,
what if he’s not still true to me?”

Again Blows the Wind

Again and again blows the wind from the valley
bringing with it cold and rain.
I worked so hard to be who you wanted,
it wasn’t enough. You loathe me now.

A fool once gathered radishes and turnips,
took the top leaves, left the edible roots—
nothing to show for all his work.
The more fool I, who never failed
to live up to my good, blameless name;
I’d have followed you, loyal, till death.

Slow and slow I walk the road,
in my heart of hearts I don’t accept it’s true.
My own home’s near, not far at all,
yet when I had to leave, you escorted me
so little distance on my way.

Who says the lemon’s bitter?
To me it seems sweeter than a ripe pear now.
I know what’s bitter: seeing you feast
your new bride, glad to have her
as her family are to see her married off.

The river Jing runs muddy
where it joins the river Wei,
but when its flow slows, it’s clear to the depths.
You feast your new bride, and now it’s deeply
clear what you thought I was worth.

Don’t open my dam to net the fish
I raised in my full-stocked pool;
don’t empty my wicker fish-trap—
nothing I am or have would interest you.
Now I’ve lone leisure enough to pity
what my own future will be.

I never balked, whatever the hardship.
When I faced a river flowing deep
I rafted across, boated over;
if I came where the waters were shallow enough,
I’d swim it, stroke and float my way across.

Was something to be gained, had something been lost?
I sought and strove to get it.
When anyone at all had suffered
I never thought it beneath my dignity
to stop and help them out.

But for all that, I couldn’t make myself loved;
he treated me like an enemy.
My time with him has stained my reputation—
there’s never a market for shop-worn goods.

I comforted him when he was afraid,
nurtured him in want, ran to help
at each reverse and shock.
Now he’s flourished, made gains
and I’m like poison to him.

I still own much, enough for now,
enough to steer through winter’s want.
Today, he’s eager for his bridal feast
and all I have feels like poverty.

I have my rage, my fury,
I’ve plenty to ponder, but I won’t study
what’s past, what’s gone.
What I did for him I can do for myself,
this man, he came to me for help.

Meaning and Authorship

Confucius , who lived from the mid sixth to the mid fifth centuries BCE, knew the Classic of Poetry which preserves these songs, in more or less the form we have in hand today. He quoted it to support his moral philosophy. When Confucianism was made the official ideology of the state, in the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), the poetry classic developed a body of traditional commentaries which followed Confucius’ example more dogmatically than he ever intended. Every poem was explained as an allusion to this or that historical figure, with morally edifying conclusions. Any textual difficulty was explained fancifully away to arrive at the appropriate goody-goody pious sentiment. Later literary tradition, which included the earliest dictionaries (on which all the later ones were based) accepted the orthodox “Confucian” interpretations of difficult words and constructions. The text disappeared under the commentary, and the women’s voices, their experience and their strength, have been effectively censored for nearly three thousand years.

The same thing happened with the songs written by women which were compiled in the Song of Solomon. These poems, dating from the tenth to the fifth centuries BCE, became part of the Hebrew Bible when this massive anthology was first made canonical, probably sometime in the first century CE. Female authorship of the Song of Solomon was ruled out by the first line in the book which attributes it to that king. Rabbinic Judaism interpreted the text in terms of God’s love for Israel. The Christians followed suit, though for them it chronicled Christ’s love for the Church.

Historical and accurate readings of The Classic of Poetry begin in the nineteenth century with Western scholarship. Of the English translations available, the most scientifically researched and lexically accurate version is that by Bernhard Karlgren (1889-1978). This Swedish sinologist, whose researches tower above those of his fellows, published his translation and commentary in the 1940s and 50s. Karlgren is unique in resolving the lexical problems by comparing the puzzling words with appearances in other early texts. Karlgren’s work should be referred to by all students who wish a clear, literal rendering with philological notes. Arthur Waley’s translation is of course excellent and accurate, though not particularly enjoyable as poetry. Ezra Pound’s version is often exquisitely poetic, but without a real basis in the texts.

That Waley, Karlgren, and Pound, failed to grasp the meaning and authorship of these poems doesn’t startle. Men generally cease listening when a woman speaks.  That the standard work on women’s literature in China, The Red Brush, Writing Women of Imperial China, (2004), co-written by the redoubtable Beata Grant, does not mention The Classic of Poetry as a precursor of, or influence on, later poetry by Chinese women— is dispiriting.

The scholarly blindness to the graphic and unmistakable record of women’s lives we saw in the Chinese characters themselves is matched by a deliberate deafness to their voices in The Classic of Poetry. Modern academic scholarship maintains the fiction that The Classic of Poetry was written by men.

These are nasty women. Hear them roar.

© Ottilee O’Malley 2025

Works Cited

Featured Image: Dancing girl from a Tang dynasty tomb chamber, unearthed from the tomb of Zhishi Fengjie in Guodu Township, Chang’an County, Shaanxi Province, in 1957.

O’Malley, Ottilee. Woman in Chinese. Independently Published, 2024. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DLTYZ6ZD?ref_=pe_93986420_774957520