Affective Archiving and Girlhood Memory: An Autoethnography

This article returns to three diaries that I kept between 1992 and 1997 in a village in the Central Plains region of China and re-read in 2026, decades later. The entries record gestures and exchanges I had no conscious memory of, including a boy's visits to help harvest peaches, his loan of Dream of the Red Chamber, and my own responses to him. I call this process affective archiving: diary-writing that preserves feeling the writer cannot safely know as her own. In the moral world of 1990s rural China, the charge of 自作多情, or presumptuous feeling, made a girl's interpretation of a boy's attention socially dangerous. The article identifies three mechanisms: epistemic foreclosure, material displacement, and temporal suspension. It argues that the diary preserves an earlier split between writing and knowing, in which the hand could record what the self was not permitted to hold. A parallel erasure of exceptional achievement extends the mechanism's reach. The article contributes to life writing scholarship by distinguishing suppressed expression from foreclosed knowing: Rather than recording knowledge the girl consciously possessed, the diary became the only form in which such knowing could safely exist.