Writing Across Borders: Wu Qin's "A Letter from a Tehran Prison" as a Hidden Trans-national-cript in Global Resistance

Abstract

In early 2023, a text titled “A Letter from a Tehran Prison” circulated on the Chinese internet as the translated testimony of an Iranian political prisoner. The letter’s uncanny resonance among Chinese readers was later explained when its author, Wu Qin, revealed it as an account of her own detention in Guangzhou, disguised within an Iranian frame. This article argues that the letter operates as a hidden trans-national-cript: a transnational re-scaling of James C. Scott’s concept of hidden transcript. Drawing on Scott’s theorization of infrapolitics, it examines how Wu’s pseudotranslational allegory embeds China-specific micro-codes within a plausible Iranian context to evade censorship and invite oppositional reading. Informed by Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney’s theory of transnational memory, it then analyzes how the letter constructs a feminist counter-narrative and a shared space of entangled resistance, transforming personal testimony into a multidirectional practice of remembering beyond any single national boundary.