Exclusively used by women over generations, nüshu, women’s script, had remained a secret among women within the township of Shangjiangxu in Jiangyong County, Hunan Province, China, until the mid-1950s. Writings in nüshu are found on papers, paper fans, booklets, and some are embroidered on fabrics. The use of nüshu has died and it is no longer practised. I travelled into the region three times and visited some elderly women who shared with me their experiences of nüshu in embroidering, weaving, chanting and writing. I am recapturing here some accounts of these women, who developed their own means of creative communication asserting themselves. With their modest artefacts in nüshu, the women expressed their concerns, in turn defined for themselves positive terms in the contexts they lived. The rhetoric of the writing is interwoven with individual and collective memories, fragmentary and repetitive, recalling a dying culture which once united the women in an exclusive sisterhood, at the same time delivering a genealogy of their being, which was forgotten in history.