368 t He y uan, m i ng, anD q i ng Dy na s t i e s
collection in relation to the production of a life history through poetry and read
examples of her autobiographical voice in selected poems.
Gan Lirou’s remarkable poetry collection is entitled Yongxuelou gao (Drafts
from the Pavilion for Chanting About Snow). As a programmatic and lifelong self-
representation by a woman, it epitomizes the many strands of autobiographical
practices in late imperial China. Gan Lirou’s autobiographical collection stands
both in contrast with and in complement to the many poetic texts by men and
women—whether comparably long or exceedingly short, whether complete or
fragmented and unfinished—each attempting to articulate and record some local
sense of subjectivity.28 The collection is remarkable not only for demonstrating the
sustained effort in self-writing that Gan Lirou made throughout her long life, but
also for the way she structured the collection to tell her personal history conceived
in the chronological frame of the paradigmatic life cycle of a Chinese woman in
the imperial era. Gan Lirou was keenly conscious of the changing roles in her life
course, which she recorded conscientiously in her poetry.
In a preface she wrote to her collection when she was seventy-three, Gan Lirou
indicated how she had been stringent in selecting poems from a lifetime of writ-
ing to form the text through which she wished to be known by posterity. She stated
that she had edited out half of her poems. This process of self-selection and cen-
sorship was effectively a means to shape her self-representation.
Gan Lirou arranged her poems in four chapters according to the stages of her
life—as a young daughter living at home with her parents and siblings, as a loving
wife and dutiful daughter-in-law after marriage, as a bereft widow bringing up
her children, and, finally in old age, as a contented mother living in retirement
with a successful son. She named each chapter accordingly, beginning with “Xiuyu
cao” (Drafts After Embroidering), which consists of poems from her maidenhood;
followed by “Kuiyu cao” (Drafts After Cooking), of poems from her married life;
“Weiwang cao” (Drafts by the One Who Has Not Died), of poems from her widow-
hood; and finally “Jiuyang cao” (Drafts by One Who Lives in Retirement with Her
Son), of poems written while she lived with her younger son after he had passed
the jinshi examination and obtained official appointment as a magistrate. Each
chapter title is meant to capture the most significant womanly “occupation” or
status for each phase: embroidering is a young girl’s work and training in feminine
skills, food preparation in daily life and on ritual occasions is the duty of a married
woman, the widow is the “one who has not died” (after the death of her husband),
and living in retirement with one’s son is a woman’s fulfillment in old age. As the
autobiographical record of her everyday and emotional life over time, this edited
collection of over 1,000 poems bears witness to the vital role that writing played
throughout the various stages of one woman’s life.
The first poem in Gan Lirou’s collection is a pentasyllabic quatrain, “On the Full
Moon.” Written at age six, it was a poetic exercise prompted and then probably cor-
rected and improved by her parents and elder siblings, a piece the poet treasured
and preserved as the opening poem in her collection: