In Ink and Tears: Memory, Mourning, and Writing in the Yu Family, Rania Huntington excavates the many passages in the writings of five generations of the Yu family, particularly the progeny of Yu Yue (1821–1907) and Yao Wenyu (1820–1879), in which one member of the family describes another family member. The work contains more than the “memory and mourning” of the title. Yes, death and reminiscence are recurring themes, and they often appear in formulaic, sentimental expression. Yet we also find intimacy and eccentricity (candle drippings, shopping lists, entombed teeth), glints of individual personality refracted through the hard facets of formalism. The genres of expression, and the improvisations on those genres, form what Huntington calls the Yu family's “elegiac inheritance,” the principal object of study of this book.

Huntington applies to this elegiac inheritance questions of both hermeneutics and history: analysis of what happens inside the texts as well as reconstruction of the real-world relationships of family members (sometimes only hinted at in their writings) and the circumstance that caused them to write of their relatives. The result is an intimate thicket of family dynamics. Huntington uses several devices to illuminate the tangles. Each chapter in the book highlights a different generation, beginning with Yu Yue's parents and ending with Yu Yue's and Yao Wenyu's great grandchildren, who include Yu Pingbo (1900–1990) the author of Yi (Memory). This chapter organization helps keep the reader oriented in time and space as the Yu family continues to be fruitful and multiply and extends from Hangzhou to Beijing. Numerous family trees also guide readers through the many layers of family connections.

In order to focus on the feelings the members of the Yu family express for each other, Huntington does not dwell on their official careers, nor on their scholarly output, their wealth, or their religious practices outside the context of mourning. Huntington describes her selection as focusing on “memory.” She follows most scholars in using the term to refer not only to internal acts of memorization or recollection, but also to objects and texts designed to preserve and inspire memories. This expansive notion of memory allows Ink and Tears to encompass a great deal of activity, but it can create confusion. “Memory” serves as a translation of the Chinese terms ji (to memorize, to make a record) and yi (to recollect) (xix). The English word also does the work of expressing Huntington's own understanding of the actions of historical figures. For the most part, Huntington's analysis and that of the Yu family seem in alignment, but on occasion there is a discordant slippage between emic and etic. For example, after the death of Yao Wenyu in 1879, Yu Yue built a house near her grave on Mount Youtai near West Lake in Hangzhou. Huntington writes:

The “remembered” here is tricky, for if Yu in fact wanted to be a god, he was expressing a desire for presence, not recollection. Given current scholarship, it makes sense to describe accounts of spirits as “memories” alongside tombs, texts, and other forms of commemoration, but surely most late-imperial people would have drawn a sharp distinction between encountering a god and remembering a relative. Similarly, Huntington describes dreams, paintings, and photographs as forms of memory, but it is not clear whether members of the Yu family would have described them that way. If “memory” serves both as the vehicle of scholarly analysis and as the translation of an actor's category, the richness of experience will inevitably create confusion.

But what richness! Huntington has identified a remarkable corpus, and she has delved into its workings with such originality that her book would defy almost any characterization. Through something close to interlinear commentary, Huntington identifies not only the meaning of the Yu family's writings but the history of how the words came to be and the fate of the manuscripts holding the words. We find the living searching for traces of the dead and writing about the search, thus creating (and sometimes also destroying) new traces that subsequent generations might seek. Family members are readers who become writers hoping to be read and remembered.

Huntington's concerns with gender form a particularly capacious leitmotif. As one might expect, the Yu family's inheritance did not give every member of the family equal voice. Indeed, one of the most oft-repeated gestures of the women of the Yu family is not memory, but destruction. Women of the Yu family tended to burn their own poetry. Destroying one's own writing may have been an act of modesty, of declaring one's commitment to private duty rather than pubic renown. Renouncing one's own work also enacted a gesture frequently enshrined in the writing of male members of the family. One of the most resilient literary conventions of mourning men in the Yu family was that of both celebrating this modesty and defying it by publishing anything that might still remain. In six cases, women's writing appeared only as framed in subsequent publication by their husbands (174).

Huntington takes up this uneven patrimony as part of her object of study. She is careful to explain how even relatively minor figures fit into family dynamics, and some may have played a different role in reality than they are afforded in prose. For example, Huntington devotes Chapter 3 (“The Grandson and His Wife”) to a work by Yu Biyun (1868–1950) called Poetic Records of the Chamber of Patterned Splendor (Xuanhuashi Shiji). Upon the death of his wife, Peng Jianzhen (1867–1894), Yu Biyun had collected any trace of her calligraphy, however ephemeral, written a poem with an introduction to each one, and published the entirety. His main themes were “the repetitions of daily life, the traces they leave behind, and all the lost and irreproducible moments evoked by those traces” (76). Yu Biyun included poetry devoted to Peng's shopping lists, her calligraphy practice, her letters, her records of expenses, and more. In one evocative passage, Huntington describes how Peng Jianzhen had glued rubbings from Tang stelae onto scrap paper to preserve them. After her death, Yu Biyun noticed that the dried glue contained her fingerprints, and he wrote a poem about the preservation of the past. Huntington writes movingly of this poem:

Huntington's arguments about this collection echo questions she raises throughout Ink and Tears. Given that the traces of Peng Jianzhen appear only as mediated by her husband, how do we gain a sense of her life? In this case, we can imagine her painstakingly organizing her household; other poems depict similar day-to-day concerns like learning embroidery. How do writers manage to incorporate such details into highly conventional and formalized modes of mourning? As outlined here, Huntington frequently returns to the idea that men tended to depict their wives as absence, as “gone,” and that device allowed Yu Biyun to create an unusual text while still conforming to conventions of a mourning husband. If there is a tension between Yu's attempts to describe his own grief and his efforts to depict his wife, how does Yu resolve that tension? As in this case, very often the husband (or father) portrays the wife (or daughter) in an act of honoring or preserving the past, allowing male and female roles to overlap even as the writing enacts gender differences. The specific ways in which writers addressed these themes might vary, but Huntington is persuasive in her argument that each writer, male and female, addressed a similar set of challenges with an inherited toolkit of literary devices.

The rhetorical move of reminiscence is in Huntington's analysis a forward-looking gesture of self-fashioning and an invitation for further imitation and improvisation. Yu Biyun read his grandfather, so when his wife died, Biyun turned to similar modes of expression. Yu Yue, Yu Biyun, and the other writers in the family knew they would be read again, and so tried to depict themselves in a manner worthy of emulation (a stylistic device they learned by emulating ancestors). Every figure in this book is in-between; each rhetorical move sits at the edge of a past represented in texts and a future being conjured in the act of writing. Members of the Yu family accepted the invitation of their ancestors to beckon to their descendants, to a wider reading public, and ultimately to readers of Huntington's book.Footnote ¹ History repeats itself because it provides a script into which others subsequently insert themselves

The quality of invitation lurks in Huntington's writing as well, and I found it difficult to resist thinking of my own family: whom I might mourn, who might mourn me. Huntington's own move in this direction is characteristically restrained: “The Yu family … have taught me much about the human capacity to cope with loss and change, and the power of quixotic projects of memory and collection. These have not been merely academic lessons” (x). In addition to its many scholarly achievements, Ink and Tears is a model of empathy, one that takes sentiment, grief, and love seriously. It is hard to imagine a situation in which they play no role, and so we would all do well to read Huntington's book for ideas of how we might deal with them in writing and in life.