Lisa See - Snow Flower And The Secret Fan

bq. Snow Flower,

My son is here beside me.

My childbearing pollution days are not over.

My husband visits in the morning.

His face is happy.

My son has eyes that stare at me in question.

I can’t wait to see you at the one-month party.

Please use your best words to put my son on our fan.

Tell me of your new family.

I don’t see my husband very often. Do you?

I look out the lattice window to yours.

You are always singing in my heart.

I think of you every day.

Lily

Why do they call these rice-and-salt days? Because they are composed of common chores: embroidery, weaving, sewing, mending, making shoes, cooking meals, washing the dishes, cleaning the house, washing the clothes, keeping the brazier going, and being ready at night to do bed business with a man you still do not know well. They are also days filled with the anxiety and drudgery of being a young mother with your first baby. Why does it cry? Is it hungry? Is it getting enough milk? Will it ever sleep? Does it sleep too much? And what of fevers, rashes, bug bites, too much heat, too much cold, colic, not to mention all the illnesses that sweep through the county taking babies each year, despite the best efforts of herbal doctors, offerings on family altars, and the tears of mothers? Quite apart from the baby who suckles at your breast, you have to worry on a deeper level about the true responsibility of womanhood: to have more sons and ensure the next generation and generations after that. But during the first few weeks of my son’s life I had another concern, which had nothing to do with my daughter-in-law, wife, or mother duties.

When I asked my mother-in-law to invite Snow Flower to my son’s one-month party, she said no. This slight is something people in our county consider a terrible insult. I was crushed and confused that she would do this but powerless to change her mind. The day turned out to be one of the most important and festive occasions of my life, and I experienced it without Snow Flower at my side. The Lu family visited the ancestral temple to place my son’s name on the wall with all their other family members. Red eggs—a symbol of life dyed red for celebration—were given to the guests and relatives. A grand banquet was served with birds-nest soup, salted birds that had been pickled for six months, and wine-fed duck stewed with ginger, garlic, and fresh red and green hot peppers. Through it all I missed Snow Flower horribly and later wrote to her as many details as I could recall, not thinking that they might remind her of the dreadful oversight. Apparently she accepted the lapse, because she sent a gift of an embroidered baby jacket and a hat decorated with small charms.

When my mother-in-law saw these, she said, “A mother must always be careful whom she chooses to let into her life. Your son’s mother cannot associate with a butcher’s wife. Filial women raise filial sons, and we expect you to obey our wishes.”

With her words I realized that my in-laws not only did not want Snow Flower to come to the party, they didn’t want me to see her at all. I was horrified, terrified, and, since I’d just had the baby, crying all the time. I didn’t know what to do. I would have to fight my in-laws on this matter, not realizing how dangerous it would be.

In the meantime, Snow Flower and I secretly wrote to each other nearly every day. I had thought I knew all about nu shu and that men should never touch or see it, but now that I lived in the Lu household, where all the men knew men’s writing, I saw that our secret women’s writing wasn’t much of a secret. Then it dawned on me that men throughout the county had to know about nu shu. How could they not? They wore it on their embroidered shoes. They saw us weaving our messages into cloth. They heard us singing our songs and showing off our third-day wedding books. Men just considered our writing beneath them.

It is said that men have hearts of iron, while women are made of water. This comes through in men’s writing and women’s writing. Men’s writing has more than 50,000 characters, each uniquely different, each with deep meanings and nuances. Our women’s writing has perhaps 600 characters, which we use phonetically, like babies, to create about 10,000 words. Men’s writing takes a lifetime to learn and understand. Women’s writing is something we pick up as girls, and we rely on context to coax meaning. Men write about the outer realm of literature, accounts, and crop yields; women write about the inner realm of children, daily chores, and emotions. The men in the Lu household were proud of their wives’ fluency in nu shu and dexterity in embroidery, though these things had as much importance to survival as a pig’s fart.

Since the men deemed our writing insignificant, they paid no attention to the letters I wrote or received. My mother-in-law was another story. I had to skirt the edges of her awareness. For now she didn’t demand to know to whom I was writing, and over the next several weeks Snow Flower and I perfected a delivery system. We used Yonggang to run between our villages to transport our notes, embroidered handkerchiefs, and weaving. I liked to sit at the lattice window and watch her. I thought, so many times, I could make the trip myself . It was not that far away and my feet were strong enough to make it, but we had rules governing such things. Even if a woman can walk a great distance, she should not be seen alone on the road. Kidnapping by low types was a danger, while reputations were under even greater threat if a woman did not have the proper escort—her husband, her sons, her matchmaker, or her bearers. I could have walked to Snow Flower, but I never would have risked it.

bq. Lily,

You ask about my new family.

I am very lucky.

In my natal home, there was no happiness.

My mother and I had to be quiet all day, all night.

The concubines, my brothers, my sisters, and the servants were gone.

My natal home felt empty.

Here I have my mother-in-law, my father-in-law, my husband, and his younger sisters.

There are no concubines or servants in my husband’s home.

Only I fill those roles.

I do not mind the hard work.

Everything I needed to know came from you, your sister, your mother, your aunt.

But the women here are not like your family.

They do not like fun.

They do not tell stories.

My mother-in-law was born in the year of the rat.

Can you imagine anyone worse for someone born in the year of the horse?

The rat believes the horse is selfish and thoughtless, though I am not.

The horse believes the rat is scheming and demanding, which she is.

But she does not beat me.

She does not yell at me beyond what is customary for a new daughter-in-law.

Have you heard about my mother and father?

Within days of my falling into my husband’s home,

Mama and Baba sold off the last of their belongings.

They took the cash and slipped away into the night.

As beggars, they will not have to pay taxes or other debts.

But where are they?

I worry about my mother.

Is she still alive?

Is she in the afterworld?

I do not know.

Perhaps I will never see her again.

Who would have guessed that my family was so unlucky?

They must have done bad deeds in former lives.

But if they did, then what about me?

Do you hear any words you can tell me?

And you, are you happy?

Snow Flower

Now that I knew this tragic news about Snow Flower’s parents, I began to listen more carefully to the household gossip. Word began to filter in from merchants and salesmen who roamed the county that they had seen Snow Flower’s parents sleeping under a tree, begging for food, or wearing dirty and tattered clothes. I thought often of how my laotong ‘s family had once been powerful in Tongkou and how her beautiful mother must have felt to be marrying into the family of an imperial scholar. Now look how low she had been brought. I feared for her with her lily feet. Without influential friends, Snow Flower’s parents had been reduced to the mercy of the elements. Without a natal home, Snow Flower was worse than an orphan. I believed it was better to have dead parents, whom you could worship and honor as ancestors, than parents who had disappeared into the transient life of beggars. How would she know when they died? How would she be able to provide a proper funeral, clean their graves at New Year, or appease them when they fretted in the afterworld? That she was sad and without me to hear her thoughts was hard for me and had to be unbearable for her.