ABSTRACT
Qiu Jin, is a name that evokes a constellation of topoi, imageries, modes of memories, patterns of feelings, and genres of lives in the textures of modern Chinese history and historiography. The tragedy of a talented woman; an unlikely monument of an epochal and abortive modern revolution; a female with a gentle figure and bound feet who made dynamite and used swords; a born member of the gentry elite beheaded by the elite powers; a physically absent mother remembered into textual immortality by her daughter and other young women; a traveler amid uncharted waters at the turn of the twentieth century whose life story became part of modern Chinese vocabulary and gave rise to endless occasions for social commemorations and literary envisionings. Writing and remembering Qiu Jin, it feels, is a passage that stirs and never settles.
