Review of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

Page Turner has written an excellent review which relieves me of the need to write as much as I might have - please read it! (Find it in the posting below entitled, To Add to Your Reading on China. Thank you, H!) I appreciated this book and wish we could have made it more central to our discussion at the book club meeting. (This is the dilemma of choosing titles we haven't yet read...) Snow Flower brings so much to our theme of the year: women's roles and influences. Quoting Lily (the book's main character and narrator): "Anyone who says that women do not have influence in men's decisions makes a vast and stupid mistake." This book illustrates how women's struggle to define their femininity crosses all barriers of time and culture.

Page Turner has aptly discussed the theme of love, which is especially poignant set in a culture of honor and duty. Lily seems not to even recognize love and must learn, painfully, to value it. Through a series of events that lead to a crisis between Lily and her mother, and Lily's inability to forgive her mother, Lily attempts to hide her feelings, which she cannot understand. This, in turn, "set the stage for what happened later." As Lily writes, "I tried to keep an emotional distance from my mother - though on most days we were in the same room - by acting as though I'd matured into a woman and no longer needed tenderness. This was the first time I would do this - properly follow customs and rules on the outside, let loose my emotions for a few terrible moments, and then quietly hang on to my grievance like an octopus to a rock - and it worked for everyone. My family accepted my behavior, and I still looked like a filial daughter. Later I would do something like this again, for very different reasons and with disastrous results."

Another important theme in the book is the power of words. Learning about nu shu, the women's secret language, was fascinating! [This very real language has only recently died out and was used for over 1000 years!] When she is older, Lily realizes that nu shu is not secret from men, as she had been taught, but that "men just considered our writing beneath them." Men didn't think women had thoughts worth thinking about. How wrong they were! On the contrary, Lily comes to understand "that we learned ... songs and stories not just to teach us how to behave but because we would be living out variations of them over and over again throughout our lives." It is Lily's inattentiveness to the nuances of nu shu that bring about her greatest failure and cause her deepest regret.

It has already been pointed out how insignificant women were thought to be in 19th century China. I would like to know how the practice of foot-binding began, since it served to reduce women's scope of influence. But the women themselves had a part in the continuation of this culture of repression. Mothers bound their daughters' feet. There is a joke Lily explains about the use of cloth to make bride-price gifts and how Snow Flower's (Lily's laotong, best friend, “Old Same”) life was in a sense reshaped by the unusual reuse of this cloth. She ends the explanation by saying: "All of it was women's work - the very work that men think is merely decorative - and it was being used to change the lives of the women themselves."
Finally, I want to note that Lisa See has composed a beautifully-written story. She has gleaned from 19th century Chinese culture both humor and horror, information and wisdom. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is worth reading.