While I love reading historic fiction, I usually stick to England, Turkey, Greece, Egypt, Italy, or France. But something about Lisa See’s “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan”, set in 19th Century China, caught my attention. I’ve only read one other fictional book set in Asia before this, and that was Golden’s “Memoirs of a Geisha”.
There were a lot of very interesting ideas in this book. One of which was the concept of a laotong, or “old same”, a friendship between two women of good status who will make good marriages in their futures. This bond is made when the girls are young, and are supposed to continue throughout their entire lives. A woman in 19th Century China was married out at a young age to become a member of her husband’s family, and as her husband often lived in another village, she would have to leave her family behind. So a laotong was supposed to be a constant presence throughout her life, who would suffer the processes of foot binding, marriage (in which women suffered poor treatment from their in-laws), and childbirth.
Lily and Snow Flower are laotongs. It was very common for laotongs to communicate through writing as they often lived to far away from each other to visit very often. In such communication, Chinese women (who were supposed to be obedient and subservient, and never complain) devised a way to talk to each other away from the prying eyes of men–they created their own language, that of nu shu. Nu shu was taught to young women of high status so that they could communicate with their laotong and their female family members, and was used to share female experiences with each other in a way in which males could not understand. It was also on outlet to make complaints. While many women wrote letters, poems, and the like to each other, Snow Flower and Lily devised a different way to share their experiences. They would send a fan back and forth to each other, writing and drawing on it each time, so that they would be even more connected as laotongs.
Foot binding also played a very large role in the first part of the book. Very tiny feet were ideal on Chinese women in the past, so young girls would undergo an excruciating process in which their mothers tightly bound their feet. This process involved bending the toes underneath the foot so far back that the bones would break and eventually re-set themselves into the desired shape of a lotus flower. The ideal end result was a three-inch-long foot. The ideal three inch, lotus-shaped foot was often thought of as erotic by men. This process was painful and often resulted in infection, which led to death in many cases. In the book, Lily’s younger sister suffers this fate. After reading “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan”, I did some research on my own on foot binding. I’m fascinated with the concept. Maybe it’s the anthropologist in me. The Chinese Communist government banned foot binding when they came into power. When Lisa See wrote this book, she used as an informant a Chinese women living in America, who had had her feet bound before it was banned. Many critics and historians agree that Lisa See’s portrayal of foot binding is very accurate. I’m looking forward to reading more of Lisa See’s books in the future.
