Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

I just finished reading Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. What an excellent but incredibly painful story. It's set in China, I believe in the 19th century, and tells the story of two women, Lily and Snow Flower, who are linked together in a contractual friendship that is much like a marriage. They communicate for many years by means of a fan on which they write in nu shu, the women's secret language unknown to men.

Yet the book is ultimately about a failure to communicate. Both women go through some terrible suffering. The description of Lily's footbinding is excruciating and something that will stay in my memory forever, just as I have never forgotten the passages on how sausages were made in The Jungle. (They almost made a vegetarian out of me).

But Lily, born to a farming family that doesn't amount to much, has the good fortune to come through this ordeal with beautiful feet that make her marriageable to a young man of high status. She is also "matched" to a young girl of a good family (but one that has fallen on hard times) and they swear their lifelong allegiance to each other.

Sadly, that allegiance doesn't last a lifetime. Lily becomes somewhat spoiled and overly conventional as a result of her relatively easy life with her husband and in-laws. She still lives a life of oppression, forced to put everyone else first and herself last, but at least she isn't abused. Snow Flower, married off to a butcher (seen as a great defilement -- yet people eat meat), is not so lucky. Her mother-in-law reviles her and her husband, though he enjoys her in bed, beats her unmercifully when he is unhappy. Lily does not respond with her true feelings; even though she is writing in nu shu and could feel freer to express herself, she takes refuge in conventional responses to Snow Flower's heartfelt pleas for help.

And so, finally, when Snow Flower tells her that three sworn sisters are going to help her, Lily mistakenly believes that Snow Flower has betrayed their union, and she reacts just like a jilted wife, cutting off Snow Flower and burning her messages. Only when Snow Flower is dying does she come and show the friendship she should have shown all along. Then she learns the truth , that Snow Flower always loved her and never betrayed her. Lily writes as an old woman who has survived past 80 years old, practically unheard of for a Chinese woman of her times. She finally confesses her cruelty to Snow Flower and seeks through her writing to find forgiveness.

There is an element of eroticism in the relationship and as young girls on the threshold of adulthood Lily recalls an erotic and loving scene where they "write" nu shu characters on each other's bodies and then translate what they are writing into the first lines of a famous poem. It seems these relationships between women had a great deal of meaning for women who were strangers in their husband's households and had very little status unless they bore sons.

The book was a window into a world that no longer exists. I'm not sorry it has gone by the wayside, for footbinding and the other mistreatment of women in that culture were not something to be preserved. It's interesting, though, to learn a bit of hidden history and forgotten culture that the author, Lisa See, brings to us. She apparently traveled to remote places in China where foreigners had never before set foot in order to gather her information, and I'm grateful that she did. I highly recommend this book.