THIS paper, first of all, intends to return to the origin of "wen" (text). It also interprets the relationship between oracle-bone Chinese inscriptions and body, in addition to elaborating the analysis of Chinese philological tradition since Shuowen jiezi (Of Texturology and Scriptology) as well as Zhang Taiyan's archaicism. I also reappropriate the cosmology and metaphysics as manifested in the concept of "wen" in Wenxin diaolong (Literary Mind and Carving Dragons). Furthermore, I revisit the discourse of the modern resistance to "wen," via the route of Zhang Taiyan, from the activists of Chinese Learning Movement in the late Qing. The final section discusses the invention of the character ("ta" [she] as well as its constituting radical and component) and its modern referent-feminine third person singular, femaleology, and the liberation of bound feet. Eventually it leads to the experience of a Cantonese milieu for Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature and mentor of the unbound-foot female student, for whom he went to the South. Such a dialect with an untranslatable phonetic sound is in fact a fissure. The paper concludes with Eileen Chang, the unbound-foot female genius who wrote most brilliantly in the late Republican era, describing the end of the diasporic journey under her feet.
