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For my entire life I longed for love. I knew it was not right for me—as a girl and later as a woman—to want or expect it, but I did, and this unjustified desire has been at the root of every problem I have experienced in my life.
First let me offer my greetings to everyone reading Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. When I first learned about nu shu -- the women's secret writing -- I became obsessed. Back then there was very little written about nu shu. I found only two things about it on the Internet and a copy of a dissertation at UCLA. But whatever I found fed my obsession. Finally, I said to my husband, "There's only one thing I can do. I need to go to China and see what I can find." After I went to the villages that are in the novel, I had one night in a tourist hotel. A voice came into my head. It was so strong that I sat down right then and wrote what became the first chapter. Everything that this book is about is embedded in the first four pages, although I didn't know it in the moment. Love -- Lily's yearning for it and her failure to recognize it when she has it -- is at the heart of the novel.
Cristine Anthony Butler and 452 other people liked this
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In this way, she taught me how to endure—not just the physical trials of footbinding and childbearing but the more torturous pain of the heart, mind, and soul. She was also pointing out my defects and teaching me how to use them to my benefit. In our country, we call this type of mother love teng ai. My son has told me that in men’s writing it is composed of two characters. The first means pain; the second means love. That is a mother’s love.
Lily is speaking about her mother here. In this important first chapter, Lily introduces the Chinese written character for mother love. When I wrote Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, I thought I understood it. A daughter would look at her mother -- the person inflicting unbelievable physical pain in the name of love -- and see "mother love." But with my subsequent novels -- and my kids growing older -- my feelings about mother love have really changed. To me, as a mother, mother love is about how we take our children's pain and carry it in our hearts. Again, love and pain woven together to create mother love. You'll see a new flowering of this idea in Lady Tan's Circle of Women. Lady Tan follows a similar path as I have as a daughter, wife, and then mother--reflecting all the forms and stages of mother love.
Nancy and 115 other people liked this
I am still learning about love. I thought I understood it—not just mother love but the love for one’s parents, for one’s husband, and for one’s laotong. I’ve experienced the other types of love—pity love, respectful love, and gratitude love. But looking at our secret fan with its messages written between Snow Flower and me over many years, I see that I didn’t value the most important love—deep-heart love.
In English, we have one word for love. I can say I love to travel, I love hamburgers, I love my husband. We use one word to describe very different forms of love! I must admit that sometimes my husband says he thinks I love hamburgers more than I love him...and sometimes I do! (Ha! Not really.) Still, just one word for love. But the Chinese language has very different written characters to describe different kinds of love: pity love, respectful love, gratitude love. I bet you understand exactly what I mean by those. And then there's deep-heart love, which, as Lily points out, is the most important kind.
Lisa and 110 other people liked this
Even now, after all these years, it is difficult for me to think about Mama and what I realized on that day. I saw so clearly that I was inconsequential to her. I was a third child, a second worthless girl, too little to waste time on until it looked like I would survive my milk years. She looked at me the way all mothers look at their daughters—as a temporary visitor who was another mouth to feed and a body to dress until I went to my husband’s home.
One of the hardest parts of the book for me to write -- and there were a lot of them! -- were the sections where Mama and Lily interact. In ancient China, a girl was looked at as a worthless branch on the family tree, as someone being raised for her husband's family. On top of that, not all mothers love their children. And even though the culture told people how to feel about their daughters, not every parent could keep their emotional distance. This is one of the reasons Beautiful Moon had to die. I wanted to show how much a girl could be loved through the sorrow and loss that Uncle and Aunt feel for the loss of their daughter. Even though Lily is a fictional character, I still hurt for her and the realization she had in this moment.
Lynn and 27 other people liked this
I also understood that two Confucian ideals ruled our lives. The first was the Three Obediences: “When a girl, obey your father; when a wife, obey your husband; when a widow, obey your son.” The second was the Four Virtues, which delineate women’s behavior, speech, carriage, and occupation: “Be chaste and yielding, calm and upright in attitude; be quiet and agreeable in words; be restrained and exquisite in movement; be perfect in handiwork and embroidery.” If girls do not stray from these principles, they will grow into virtuous women.
I've used the Three Obediences aphorism in every book I've written, including the new one, Lady Tan's Circle of Women. This Confucian rule was intended to put a stranglehold on what women could do. Of course, Confucius didn't care much for women. Some of his other sayings include "An Educated woman is a worthless woman" and "A good woman will never take more than three steps out her front door." I'm not going to say that there wasn't oppression of women in China -- or was or continues to be oppression of women in other countries, including this one -- but it's also true that women have always found ways to subvert these rules, even if it's only through small rebellions or revolutions. As Lily's mother-in-law will say later, "Obey, obey, obey, and then do what you want."
Emily and 70 other people liked this
Mama yanked me out of the chair. The word pain does not begin to describe the feeling. My toes were locked under my feet so that my body weight fell entirely on the top of those appendages. I tried to balance backward on my heels. When Mama saw this, she hit me. “Walk!”
Many readers tell me that this entire foot binding scene is the most shocking and painful part of the book. I'm the mother of sons, and it's unimaginable to me that I could ever inflict this kind of pain on a daughter. But I don't live in the Qing dynasty. Foot binding was the one thing a mother could do to give her daughter a better chance at life. What were the other options? To work in the fields? Those women often didn't reach forty years of age. To be sold to become a concubine, courtesan, or prostitute? Not good options. Or to be sold to become what was called a "little daughter-in-law"? These were little girls as young as eight years old who were sold to other families to become servants. As they grew up, they became playthings for the boys and men in the household. So sad. If the only way a mother could give her daughter a better chance at life was by giving her a pair of perfectly bound feet -- so that the girl might be able to marry into a high-standing family and have a good life -- what would you do?
Wendee and 63 other people liked this
“Only through pain will you have beauty. Only through suffering will you find peace. I wrap, I bind, but you will have the reward.”
When I was a little girl, I had long hair. My mom would brush it. She was pretty unhappy back then and she could be pretty rough with the brush as she pulled it through my hair. Whenever I complained, she'd recite, "In order to be beautiful, one must suffer." Lily's mother is saying a variation of that. I bet most cultures have some version of it too, because look what we women do to our bodies or allow to have done to our bodies in the name of beauty. In Lady Tan's Circle of Women, I've taken this idea one step further to look at traditions related to pregnancy and childbirth. The question of who has control over a woman's body is as pertinent today as it was hundreds of years ago.
Kelly and 57 other people liked this
Foot size would determine how marriageable I was. My small feet would be offered as proof to my prospective in-laws of my personal discipline and my ability to endure the pain of childbirth, as well as whatever misfortunes might lie ahead. My small feet would show the world my obedience to my natal family, particularly to my mother, which would also make a good impression on my future mother-in-law.
People often ask me about the origins of foot binding. The first form of foot binding was said to have begun in China in the Tang Dynasty (618-907), when an emperor became entranced with a concubine who danced with silken ribbons on her feet. The other concubines, jealous of the attention she got from their august lord, started binding their feet with ribbons too. During the Qing Dynasty (1636-1911), this practice was taken to the extreme. Feet wrapped in silk were no longer enough to draw attention or praise. To be marriageable, a girl was expected to have tiny little feet. The ideal was the Golden Lotus, feet that are only 3-inches long.
Brenda Knight and 39 other people liked this
“A laotong relationship is made by choice for the purpose of emotional companionship and eternal fidelity. A marriage is not made by choice and has only one purpose—to have sons.”
Marriage in the past wasn't like it is today. Even here in the United States, marriages were often a matter of solidifying property and making alliances. Marriage was -- and still is to some extent --also very much about having children and building a family. In the past, even women in this country didn't have a lot of say or control over their lives. For example, there wouldn't be discussions around the dinner table about who was going to vote for which candidate, because women couldn't vote. Women didn't have much say about finances either. Shoot, women in this country couldn't even own property until 1839. (That year, New York state was the first to enact a law permitting women to own property.) All of this is to say that a lot of what we take for granted about married life -- it's a partnership, we talk about how we're going to pay our bills, what's happening with our kids in school, where we're going to go on vacation -- simply wasn't a part of marriage. And that's in the U.S.! So you can see how the laotong relationship in China -- and our female friendships in the United States -- were and are so important to us.
Wendy and 54 other people liked this
Anyone who says that women do not have influence in men’s decisions makes a vast and stupid mistake.
Ain't it the truth?!
Holly Macdonald and 56 other people liked this
Snow Flower was far prettier than I had imagined. Her eyes were perfect almonds. Her skin was pale, showing that she had not spent as much time outdoors as I had during my milk years. A red curtain hung down next to her, and a rosy-hued light glinted in her black hair. She wore a sky-blue silk tunic embroidered with a cloud pattern.
This is not a spoiler, but it is a hint to pay attention to the sky-blue silk tunic.
Kathleen and 56 other people liked this
