Lisa See - Snow Flower And The Secret Fan

I saw the routine of that household, in which two women lived in fear of the man who resided in a room on the ground floor. I experienced their hushed voices and the way they cowered reflexively when he called for them. And I saw the man himself, lying there in his stink and mess. Even in poverty, he was as petulant and quick to anger as a spoiled child. There may have been a time when he’d lashed out physically at his wife and daughter, but now he was just a drug-dazed creature who was better left alone with his vice.

I tried not to let my emotions show. Enough tears had poured in that house without mine being added. I asked to see Snow Flower’s bride-price gifts. In my mind I thought: Maybe this butcher family won’t be so bad after all. I had seen the silk pieces Snow Flower worked on. These people must be relatively prosperous, even if they were spiritually polluted.

Snow Flower opened a wooden chest and carefully laid out everything she had made on the bed. I saw the sky-blue silk shoes with the cloud pattern she had finished the day Beautiful Moon died. I saw a jacket that used some of that same silk on the front panel; then, in a neat row, Snow Flower propped five pairs of shoes of different sizes in the same fabric but embroidered with additional designs. This all looked familiar to me, and suddenly I understood why. These things had been fashioned from the jacket Snow Flower had worn on the first day we met.

My hands traveled over other items in her dowry. Here was the lavender-and-white material that had made up Snow Flower’s traveling outfit when she was nine, now recut and reshaped into vests and shoes. Here was my favorite indigo-and-white cotton weaving that had been slit into panels and strips to be incorporated into jackets, headdresses, belts, and decorations on quilts. Snow Flower’s actual bride-price gifts were minimal, but she’d taken pieces from her own clothes to create a unique dowry.

“You will make a remarkable wife,” I said, truly awed by what she had accomplished.

For the first time, Snow Flower laughed. I had always loved that sound, so high, so alluring. I joined in, because all of this was . . . beyond—beyond anything I could have imagined, beyond what was fair or right in the universe. Snow Flower’s situation and what she’d done with it was horrible and tragic and funny and amazing all at the same time.

“Your things—”

“Not even mine to begin with,” Snow Flower answered, as she gulped for air. “My mother recut her dowry clothes to make my outfits when I visited you. Now they are recut again for my husband and my in-laws.”

Of course! This had to be the case, because now I could remember thinking that a certain pattern seemed too sophisticated for a girl so young, or cutting loose threads from a cuff when Snow Flower wasn’t looking. I was stupider than a chicken in a rainstorm. Blood rushed to my face. I clasped my hands over my cheeks and laughed even harder.

“Do you think my mother-in-law will notice?” Snow Flower asked.

“If I was too blind to notice, then . . .” but I couldn’t finish because it was all too funny.

Perhaps it is a joke that only girls and women can understand. We are seen as completely useless. Even if our natal families love us, we are a burden to them. We marry into new families, go to our husbands sight unseen, do bed business with them as total strangers, and submit to the demands of our mothers-in-law. If we are lucky, we have sons and secure our positions in our husbands’ homes. If not, we are faced with the scorn of our mothers-in-law, the ridicule of our husbands’ concubines, and the disappointed faces of our daughters. We use a woman’s wiles—of which at seventeen we girls know almost nothing—but beyond this there is little we can do to change our fate. We live at the whim and pleasure of others, which is why what Snow Flower and her mother had done was so beyond. They had taken cloth that had once been sent from Snow Flower’s family to Snow Flower’s mother as a bride-price gift, been shaped into the dowry of a fine maiden, been reshaped again into clothes for a beautiful daughter, and now restructured another time to announce the qualities of a young woman marrying into the house of a polluted butcher. 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.

But so much more was needed. Snow Flower had to go to her new home with enough clothes to wear her entire lifetime. Right now, she had very little. My mind raced with things we could do in the month we had left.

When Madame Wang arrived for Snow Flower’s Sitting and Singing in the Upstairs Chamber, I took her aside and begged her to go to my natal home. “There are things I need. . . .”

That woman had been critical of me for so long. She had also lied—not to my family but to me. I had never cared for her and now I liked her even less for her duplicity, but she did exactly as she was told. (I now outranked her, after all.) She returned from my home several hours later with a basket of my wedding dumplings, some of the sliced pork my in-laws had sent, fresh vegetables from our garden, and another basket filled with cloth that I had planned to cut when I returned home. To see Snow Flower’s mother eat that meat was something I’ll never forget. She had been raised to be a fine lady and, as hungry as she was, she did not tear into the food as someone in my family might. She used her chopsticks to pull apart slivers of the pork and lift them delicately to her lips. Her restraint and control taught me a lesson I have not strayed from to this day. You may be desperate, but never let anyone see you as anything less than a cultivated woman.

I was not done with Madame Wang. “We will need girls for Sitting and Singing,” I said. “Can you bring Snow Flower’s elder sister?”

“Her in-laws will not let her come back to this house.”

I digested this fact. I had not heard that such a thing was possible.

“We still need girls,” I insisted.

“No one will come, Miss Lily,” Madame Wang confided. “My brother-in-law’s reputation is too bad. No family will allow an unmarried girl to cross this threshold. What about your mother and aunt? They already know the situation—”

“No!” I wasn’t ready to deal with them yet, and Snow Flower didn’t need their pity. What my laotong needed were strangers.

I had cash from my wedding. I slipped some of it into Madame Wang’s hand. “Do not return until you have found three girls. Pay their fathers whatever you think is the appropriate amount. Tell them I will be responsible for their daughters.”

I was sure that my new married status to the best family in Tongkou would be persuasive, yet I could just as easily have been talking out of my behind, for surely my in-laws had no idea I was using their position in this manner. Still, I could see Madame Wang weigh this. She needed to continue to do business in Tongkou and was just about to reap the long-term benefits of bringing me to the Lu family. She did not want to jeopardize her position, but she had already bent many rules to benefit her niece. At last Madame Wang worked out the equation in her mind, nodded once, then left.

A day later, she returned with three daughters of farmers who worked for my father-in-law. In other words, they were girls like me, except they had not had my special advantages.

I willed that month. I led the girls in their singing. I helped them find good words to write about Snow Flower—someone they knew not at all—in their third-day wedding books. If they didn’t know a character, I wrote it for them myself. If they dawdled in their quiltmaking, I took them aside and whispered that their fathers would be punished if they didn’t adequately perform the jobs they had been hired for.