Lisa See - Snow Flower And The Secret Fan

Into the Mountains

I STILL DID NOT KNOW WHAT HAD HAPPENED TO SNOW FLOWER and her family during the typhoid outbreak. In my concern for my children, in my duties to my mother-in-law, and in the joy of my husband’s return, followed by my father-in-law’s death and funeral, and finally by my husband and I becoming Master and Lady Lu sooner than perhaps we were ready, I had—for the first time in my life—forgotten about my laotong. Then she sent me a letter.

bq. Dear Lily,

I hear you are alive. I am sorry about your in-laws. I am sadder still to hear of your mama and baba. I loved them very much.

We survived the epidemic. In the early days, I miscarried—another girl. My husband says it is just as well. If I had carried all my children to term, I would have four daughters—a disaster. Still, three times to hold a dead child in your hands is three too many.

You always tell me to try again. I will. I wish I could be like you and have three sons. As you say, sons are a woman’s worth.

Many people died here. I would tell you things are quieter now, but my mother-in-law lives. She says bad things about me every day, turning my husband against me.

I invite you to visit. My lowly gate hardly compares to yours, but I long to put our troubles behind us. If you love me, please come. I want to be together before we begin binding our daughters’ feet. We have much to talk about in this regard.

Snow Flower

With my mother-in-law in the afterworld, I thought constantly of what she had told me about a wife’s duty: “Obey, obey, obey, then do what you want.” Without my mother-in-law’s watchful eyes, I could finally see Snow Flower openly.

My husband had plenty of objections: Our sons were now eleven, eight, and one-and-a-half, our daughter had recently turned six, and he liked me to be at home. I eased his concerns over several days. I sang to him to calm his mind. I gave each of the children projects, which soothed their father’s heart. I prepared all his favorite dishes. I washed and massaged his feet each night after he came in from roaming the fields. I attended to his below-the-belt area. He still did not want me to go, and I wish I had listened.

On the twenty-eighth day of the tenth month, I put on a lavender silk tunic I had embroidered with a chrysanthemum pattern appropriate for fall. I had once thought that the only clothes I would ever wear were the ones I had made during my hair-pinning days. I hadn’t considered that my mother-in-law would die and leave behind her untouched bolts or that my husband would make enough riches that I would be able to buy unlimited quantities of the very best Suzhou silk. But knowing I was going to Snow Flower and remembering the way she had worn my clothes when we were girls, I took nothing else for the three nights I would be away.

The palanquin dropped me before Snow Flower’s house. She sat waiting on the platform outside her threshold, dressed in a tunic, pants, apron, and headdress of soiled, worn, and poorly dyed indigo and white cotton. We did not go inside right away. Snow Flower was pleased to have me beside her in the cooling afternoon air. As she chattered on about this and that, I saw clearly for the first time the giant wok where the pig carcasses were boiled to remove their hair and loosen their skin. Inside the open door of an outbuilding, I glimpsed meat hanging from beams. The smell turned my stomach. But what was worse was the mother pig and her babies who kept coming up onto the platform, looking for food. After Snow Flower and I finished our lunch of steamed water grass and rice, she took our bowls and set them at our feet so the sow and her babies could eat what we’d left behind.

When we saw the butcher returning home—pushing a cart loaded with four baskets, each containing a pig stretched out full length on its belly—we went upstairs, where Snow Flower’s daughter embroidered and her mother-in-law cleaned cotton. The room was musty and gloomy. Snow Flower’s lattice window was even smaller and less decorated than the one in my natal home, though I could see through it to my window in Tongkou. Even up here we could not escape the smell of pig.

We sat down and spoke of what was foremost in our minds—our daughters.

“Have you thought about when we should start their footbinding?” Snow Flower asked.

It was right and proper for it to begin this year, but I hoped from Snow Flower’s question that she and I were of the same mind.

“Our mothers waited until we were seven, and we have been happy together ever since,” I ventured carefully.

Snow Flower’s face broke into a broad grin. “This is exactly what I thought. You and I had our eight characters matched so perfectly. Should we not only match our daughters’ eight characters but also match those eight characters to ours as much as possible? They could start their binding on the same day and at the same age as we did.”

I looked over at Snow Flower’s daughter. Spring Moon had her mother’s beauty at that age—silken skin and soft black hair—but her demeanor seemed resigned as she sat with her head down, squinting at her embroidery as she assiduously tried not to eavesdrop on her fate.

“They will be like a pair of mandarin ducks,” I said, relieved that we had come to such an easy agreement, though I’m sure we were both hoping that our matched characters would make up for the fact that the girls’ eight characters were not so perfectly in accord.

Snow Flower was truly lucky to have Spring Moon; otherwise she would have been left alone all day with her mother-in-law. Let me say this: That woman was still as biting and mean-spirited as I remembered. She had but one refrain: “Your oldest son is no better than a girl. He’s a weakling. How will he ever have the strength to slaughter a pig?” I thought something not befitting Lady Lu: Why couldn’t the spirits have taken her in the epidemic?

Our evening meal brought back tastes from my childhood before my dowry gifts began to arrive—preserved long beans, pigs’ feet in chili sauce, wok-fried slivers of pumpkin, and red rice. Every meal when I was in Jintian was the same in the sense that we always had some part of the pig. Pig fat in black beans, pig ears in a clay pot, flaming pig intestines, pig penis sauteed with garlic and chili. Snow Flower ate none of it, quietly eating her vegetables and rice.

After dinner, her mother-in-law retired for the night. Although tradition says that two old sames should share a bed when visiting—meaning the husband sleeps elsewhere—the butcher announced that he would not remove himself to other quarters. His excuse? “There is nothing so evil as a woman’s heart.” This was an old saying and probably true, but it was not a gracious thing to say to Lady Lu. Nevertheless, it was his house and we had to do what he said.

Snow Flower took me back upstairs to the women’s chamber, where she made a bed with some of her clean, though frayed, dowry quilts. On the cabinet she placed a low bowl filled with warm water for me to wash my face. Oh, how I wanted to dip a cloth into that water and wipe away the cares that played across my laotong ‘s features. As I thought this, she brought out an outfit almost identical to hers —almost, because I remembered when she had pieced it together from one of her mother’s dowry treasures. Snow Flower leaned forward, kissed my cheek, and whispered in my ear, “Tomorrow we will have all day together. I will show you my embroidery and what I have done on our fan. We will talk and remember.” Then she left me alone.

I blew out the lantern and lay beneath the quilts. The moon was nearly full, and the blue light that came through the lattice window transported me back many years. I buried my face in the folds where Snow Flower’s scent was as fresh and delicate as when we had been in our hair-pinning years. The memory of low moans of pleasure filled my ears. Alone in that dark room I blushed at things perhaps best forgotten. But the sounds didn’t go away. I sat up. The noises were not in my head but coming up to me from Snow Flower’s room. My laotong and her husband were doing bed business! My laotong may have become a vegetarian, but she was no Wife Wang of the story. I covered my ears and tried to fall asleep, but it was hard. My good fortune had made me impatient and intolerant. The polluted and polluting nature of that place and the people who lived there rasped against my senses, my flesh, my soul.