Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

Warning: there are spoilers. Sorry, couldn’t help it.

  This book is set in 19^th century China. It’s about the life of two girls who become “old sames” a relationship that is supposed to be closer than marriage. As well as this relationship, it focuses on “nu shu,” a supposedly hidden language so Chinese woman can communicate without their men finding out, and foot binding. Sadly, I couldn’t contain my curiosity and researched foot binding just so I could understand better what the author was talking about. While it helped me understand the motives a little better, the process was described in the book in great and gory detail. It did not make for easy reading. This book involves not just the women’s daily lives but a few of the more harrowing moments of their lives.

  The narrator, Lily, begins by telling us about her last few days of freedom before her foot binding and introducing us to the rest of the cast of characters. Lily was from what could be considered a middle class family, while Snow Flower was at first portrayed to be from a slightly better family. While Lily marries into the upper class, it comes out that Snow Flower’s family is very poor because her father is an opium addict and Lily was the only person who was unaware of that fact. Snow Flower (because of her status) is forced to marry a butcher (an “unclean” class). This leads to all the problems with Snow Flower and the eventual estrangement of the two women.

  Lily gets a husband who learns to love her, healthy strong children, plenty to eat and a mother-in-law who at least respects her. While she is leading what is essentially a charmed life, Snow Flower is stuck with an abusive husband, a mother in law who hates her, and either miscarries or has sickly children. At first Lily is not aware of the problems but when she does learn of them, most of the advice she offers is along the lines of “figure out what are you doing wrong to make them do these things.” It’s the typical advice of someone who has never experienced abuse or having things go wrong for no reason. When Snow Flower finds some ladies in her own village who understand, she sends a badly worded letter to Lily. Lily reads it literally as Snow Flower doesn’t want to be “old sames” any more. That plus the lies about Snow Flower’s heritage, her breaking divine laws about sex, and not being able to deal with not being able to help her friend, lead Lily to publicly denounce her friend as someone unclean and never to be associated with. After that, the book skips ahead a few years to the consequences of Lily’s and Snow Flower’s actions. It does not end well for most of the people involved.

  Despite all the times I wanted to shake the characters for being idiots, I enjoyed this book. It reminded me a lot of Memoirs of a Geisha, in that it’s fiction but the characters and writing are so vivid even in the terrible parts that it feels like it actually happened.