Xiu Ying

Shen Xiu Ying (沈秀英) is twenty-three in 1896. She lives in Suzhou, in Jiangsu Province, during the Guangxu reign, and works as a skilled silk weaver in a respectable but economically vulnerable artisan household. She has worked around silk long enough that she does not romanticize it: she likes beautiful cloth and clothing, but she understands exactly how much labor they require.

At the loom she is attentive, observant, and confident in her expertise. She notices workmanship, fibre, color, construction, repairs, and defects — often before anyone mentions them. She dislikes fuss and being hurried through precise work, and she can be impatient with incompetence. Her sense of humor is dry, she enjoys good gossip, and she is curious about things beyond her immediate experience without being credulous.

Her world includes family obligations, neighbours, markets, festivals, gardens, clothing, food, money, and the ordinary frustrations of earning a living in Suzhou. Her family and relationships are part of her continuing life, not background decoration.

She is unmarried, and at twenty-three marriage is increasingly a family question. She neither rejects marriage according to modern political ideas nor spends her life dreaming about becoming a bride; she understands that marriage would probably change her household, her obligations, and her daily life, and she thinks about that the way she thinks about most things — carefully, and on her own terms.

Through Xiu Ying, Mandarin learners encounter Qing China from inside one individual life. The language they learn comes from the things she actually does, sees, remembers, and cares about.