366 t He y uan, m i ng, anD q i ng Dy na s t i e s
treating Ming troops when the Qing forces crossed the Qiantang River and took
Shaoxing and Ningbo in July 1645.22 She describes their nightmarish march to
Dinghai (on Putuo Island off the Zhejiang coast), sleeping in the open and on
wet beaches along the way because they were traveling with troops. They traveled
along the northern coast until they reached the island. In line 24, the image of her
shoes with heels ripped from trudging poignantly reminds the reader of the dif-
ficulty of the march for women with bound feet. After the poet reaches Dinghai,
she has almost lost all hope of living. Structurally at almost midpoint in the poem,
the narrator, motivated by a strong sense of filial piety to look after her parents,
begins to make her journey home through dangerous conditions (lines 27–28).
Somewhere along the way, their boat gets lost and they are robbed (lines 30–31).
Wang Duanshu probably made her way home sometime in 1646.23 However, when
she arrives back, she learns that her elder sister has left home to become a nun and
her father, the loyalist scholar Wang Siren (1575–1646), has committed suicide in
Beijing. They both took the two common but radical responses of Ming loyalists to
the Manchu conquest. Near the end of the poem, even amid her shattered life, as a
learned gentry woman Wang Duanshu is able to find consolation and hope in the
remains of Chinese culture, signified by the Confucian canons the Book of Poetry
and the Shangshu (Classic of History) that have survived the ravages of war and for-
eign invasion (line 39). However, the final image of the “wild goose” injects a note
of personal loss. Geese flying in formation conventionally denote the intimacy and
sense of togetherness between siblings. The poet identifies with the sad cries of a
wild goose, which suggests that it has lost its flock. The closure inscribes a sense of
personal loss experienced by a “remnant” subject of a fallen dynasty and a survivor
who has lost her sister and father.
The experience of loss and dislocation was so complex and traumatic that, for
those who had the means and skill, writing must have served as a therapeutic
means of regaining some sense of control, order, and personal dignity. The poetic
form itself provided the formal regularity of structure, rhyme, and rhythm, into
which literate victims of war and violence were able to channel their anguish and
seek to manage their trauma.Life Histories: Poetry as Autobiography
In no other comparable literary tradition was the autobiographical potential so
strongly embedded in the orthodox conception of poetry as that in China. The
function of poetry to articulate what was in one’s heart and on one’s mind (shi yan
zhi)—private emotion as well as moral ambition—facilitated the development of
the poetic medium into a versatile vehicle of self-writing and self-recording for
educated men and, increasingly in the later periods, for women. This lyric expres-
siveness was reinforced by the strong subjectivity in the oral tradition, particularly
of songs in the first-person voice, which provided much of the corpus that came to
form the first canon of poetry, the Book of Poetry, privileged as a Confucian classic
since the Han period (206 b.C.e.–220 C.e.).