本文透過湖南省江永縣一個平凡農婦呼新奎的生命史敘說，來鋪陳中國 1949年解放前後，乃至集體時期（人民公社）與二十一世紀的文化變遷，包括裹小腳、童養媳、抽兵、哭嫁等習俗，以及解放後一連串的政治運動。藉此，一則籲請人類學界正視生命史作為資料蒐集工具所蘊藏的理論與方法論意涵；二則反思如何同時援引多重敘說文類，以避免生命史敘說「偏、失、誤、溢」之弊。蓋生命史訪談所標誌的並非僅止於敘說主體的個人生命感知，而是敘說主體、對話對象、研究者、乃至鑲嵌情境，彼此之間的共同織緯與交互論述。本文即以呼新奎為主軸，透過她的敘說以及她與女兒、女婿、老伴之間對話，開展出一個文化歷史場景：這個場景不僅映照出呼新奎的生命經歷，更映照出後輩子孫對「前人歷史」的理解與註解。生命史敘說於是成了歷史與文化的交匯點，從這個交匯點向外輻射，歷史因之脈脈長流，文化也因之賡續薪傳。

Using a Chinese peasant woman, Hu Xinkui’s呼新奎 , as a looking lens, this article unfolds the socio-cultural change of rural China in the transitional period from around Liberation in 1949 up to 1978, and even into the twenty-first century, covering a wide range of issues regarding footbinding, child brides, forced conscription, bridal lamentation, communist collectivization, and a series of political movements such as land reform, the Great Leap Forward, the Socialist Education Movement, the Four Clearing-ups Movement, and the Poor and Lower-Middle Peasants Association. Hu Xinkui, born in 1934 in Jiangyong County of Hunan Province in south China, was a child bride who was promoted as a director of Women’s Affairs after Liberation because of her suppressed inferior status. It was also because of the Liberation-implemented new marriage law that laid the foundation for her husband to divorce her in 1959, for the reason of her apparent infertility and lack of romance, as well as her concern for an unmarried brother, which preoccupied her to the detriment of her own marriage. She remarried in 1964 and retired from her active political life after she had children; since then she has committed herself to being an extremely hard-working housewife. With her husband being an active and honest party cadre (including being the deputy to the 9th Party Congress in 1969), she had to find every possible source to maintain the family finance in order to receive a great deal of visiting guests and peasants, at a cost of neglecting the education of her children, two of whom were addicted to gambling. Her life story manifests how an ordinary village woman engaged with local women’s expressive traditions, called 女書 (women’s script) and 女歌 (women’s song), and how her personal life changed along with the transformation of China. Also worth noting, the life history interviews with Xinkui were conducted in the company of her daughter and son-in-law, who have assisted my nüshu research for more than a decade – and they had never learned about Hu Xinkui’s past until then. Their participation throws additional reflective light on Xinkui’s life experiences in China’s changing rural context. With Hu Xinkui’s life history as the axis, this article aims to draw attention to the life narrative approach as a tool for collecting ethnographic data and to bring about a rethinking of its use as a conceptual framework. Recognizing the possible limitations of life narrative in terms of its partiality, lapses, mistakes, and exaggeration, I employ narratives from multiple subjects and diverse resources (e.g., literary composition, local oral traditions, and historical documents) to open up the dialogical horizon of a life narration. I demonstrate that life history as a lived experience and an account of life not only speaks to a person’s lifeworld; it is also an intertextualization of the voices of multiple subject-positions: narrating subject, addressee, researcher, and the embedded context. In the case of Hu Xinkui, her life narration not only encodes her history and historiography, but also manifests how the next generation, especially her daughter, decodes her story and writes it onto their own. Life narrative in this sense is a convergence of history and culture, whereby history continues and culture persists.