Secrets and the agony of a Chinese woman in Lisa See’s “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan”

For those who are interested in reading about culture and extraordinary settings, I reckon Lisa See’s “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan” would be the perfect choice. This novel takes us into the remote 19th century China where girls had their feet bound, meaning crushed to the size of lily flowers, in a ritual of beauty. Hope has no place in the girls’ lexicon. Neither poor nor rich, they have one permanent flaw; they are born females.

In 1832, in China’s Hunan Province, Lily is born in a farming family where life is simply ordinary in an ordinary village. At seven, her feet are bound and soon she is, together with other older girls and women, demoted to the second-story chamber of their household where women are kept like crippled birds in rooms with single windows and strictly no access to the outside world. These women’s lives are orchestrated by the men and they have no options to anything resembling a fully actualized life.

Due to Lily’s high feet in arch and potentially breathtaking, she has the potential to marry someone richer and hence, elevate her family’s status. She is also entitled to a second formal match, a lifetime best friend called a sworn sister or a laotong. According to Lily’s aunt, whom I believe represents the voices of other women during the era, a laotong relationship is made by choice for the purpose of emotional companionship and eternal fidelity whereas a marriage is not made by choice and has only one purpose – to have sons.

In the rural 19th century in China, education and scholarship was limited only to the male elite. Women are isolated from the day they had their feet bound, married out into a “stranger” husband and a “stranger” family, remained hopeless and miserable in their lives and subservient to their mother-in-law unless they bear the family sons. What they said and how they communicated was strictly official and they were also prohibited from learning the calligraphy of men. For that reason, the women developed a secret writing called nu shu. It was only through nu shu that they could write or speak from the heart amongst each other. Nu shu is believed to be a thousand-year-old language, the only one ever invented and sustained for the use of women, specific to the Hunan’s Province.

The first communication between Lily and her laotong, Snow Flower was inscribed on a fan in the code of nu shu. The secret fan later became the journal of their lives. From the novel, one can discover the tormented tortures and hideous cruelty of foot binding and the agony of walking on tiny feet that looked more like high-heeled shoes and also the captivating details of the lives of the women in China in the Confucian society.