Lisa See - Snow Flower And The Secret Fan

Even now, looking back at those months of spring and early summer, I see how blithely happy I was. I had my family and I had my laotong. As I said, I moved forward. This was not the case with Snow Flower. She did not regain the weight she had lost. She picked at her food—a few grains of rice, two bites of vegetable—preferring instead to drink tea. Her skin became pale again, while her cheeks refused to fill out. When she came to Tongkou and I suggested that we visit her old friends, she politely declined, saying, “They wouldn’t want to see me” or “They won’t remember me.” I nagged her until she agreed she would come with me next year to the Sitting and Singing ceremony of a Lu girl here in Tongkou, who was Snow Flower’s second cousin twice removed and my next-door neighbor.

In the afternoons Snow Flower sat with me as I did my embroidery, but she gazed out the lattice window, her mind elsewhere. It was as though she had jumped off the cliff after all, on our last day in the mountains, and was in a soundless fall. I saw her sadness but refused to accept it. My husband warned me several times about this. “You are strong,” he said one night after Snow Flower had returned to Jintian. “You came back from the mountains and you make me more proud every day with the way you manage our household and set a good example for the women of our village. But you—and please, do not get angry with me—are blind when you look at your old same. She is not your same in every way. Maybe what happened last winter was too much for her. I do not know her well, but surely you can see she puts a brave face on a bad situation. It has taken you many years to understand this, but not every man is like your husband.”

That he would confide this to me embarrassed me deeply. No, that’s not right. Rather, I was irritated that he dared to interfere in the inner-realm affairs of women. But I did not argue with him, because it wasn’t my place. Still, in my own mind I had to prove him wrong and myself right. So I looked more closely at Snow Flower when she next visited. I listened, really listened. Life had degenerated for Snow Flower. Her mother-in-law had cut back on her food, allowing her only one-third of the rice required for subsistence.

“I eat only clear porridge,” she said, “but I accept it. I’m not so hungry these days.”

Far worse, the butcher had not stopped beating her.

“You said he wouldn’t do it again,” I protested, not wanting to believe what my husband had seen so clearly.

“If he assaults me, what can I do? I can’t fight back.” Snow Flower sat across from me, her embroidery lying in her lap as limp and wrinkled as tofu skin.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

She answered with a question of her own. “Why should I trouble you with things you cannot change?”

“We can shift fate if we try hard enough,” I said. “I changed my life. You can too.”

She stared at me with mouse eyes.

“How often does it happen?” I asked, trying to keep my voice calm but frustrated that her husband was still using his fists against her, angry that she accepted it so passively, and hurt that she hadn’t confided in me—again.

“The mountains changed him. They changed all of us. Don’t you see that?”

“How often?” I pressed.

“I fail my husband in many ways—”

In other words, it happened more often than she cared to admit.

“I want you to come and live with me,” I said.

“Desertion is the worst thing a woman can do,” she responded. “You know that.”

I did. For a woman it was an offense punishable by death by her husband’s hand.

“Besides,” Snow Flower went on, “I would never leave my children. My son needs protection.”

“But to protect him with your own body?” I asked.

What response could she give?

I look back now and see with the clarity of eighty years that I showed far too much impatience with Snow Flower’s despondency. In the past, whenever I had been unsure of how to react to my laotong ‘s unhappiness I had pressured her to follow the rules and traditions of the inner realm as a way of combating the bad things that happened in her life. This time I went further by launching a campaign for her to take control of her rooster husband, believing that as a woman born under the sign of the horse she could use her willfulness to change the situation. With only a useless daughter and an unloved first son, she should try to get pregnant again. She needed to pray more, eat the proper foods, and ask the herbalist for tonics—all to guarantee a son. If she presented her husband with what he wanted, he would remember her worth. But this was not all. . . .

By the time the Ghost Festival arrived on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, I had peppered Snow Flower with many questions that she should have understood were suggestions for her to improve the overall situation. Why couldn’t she try to be a better wife? Why couldn’t she make her husband happy in the ways I knew she could? Why didn’t she pinch her cheeks to bring back the color? Why didn’t she eat more so she would have more energy? Why couldn’t she go home right now and kowtow to her mother-in-law, make her meals, sew for her, sing to her, do what she had to do to make that old woman happy in her old age? Why didn’t she try harder to make things right? I thought I was giving practical advice, but I had nothing like Snow Flower’s worries and concerns. Still, I was Lady Lu and I thought I was right.

So when I ran out of things Snow Flower could do in her home, I questioned her about her time spent in mine. Wasn’t she happy to be with me? Didn’t she like the silk clothes I gave her? Didn’t she present the gifts the Lu family sent to her husband for our continued gratitude with enough deference that he would be pleased with her? Didn’t she appreciate that I had hired a man to teach reading and writing to boys her son’s age in Jintian? Didn’t she see that by making our daughters laotong we would be changing Spring Moon’s fate, much as mine had been changed?

If she truly loved me, why couldn’t she do as I had done—wrap herself in the conventions that protected women—to make her bad situation better? To all these queries she just sighed or nodded. Her reaction made me even more impatient. I stepped up my questions and well-considered reasons, until she surrendered, promising to do as I’d instructed. But she didn’t, and the next time my frustration with her was even more pointed. I didn’t understand that the bold horse of Snow Flower’s childhood had been broken in spirit. I was stubborn enough to believe I could fix a horse that had gone lame.

MY LIFE CHANGED forever on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month of the sixth year of Xianfeng’s reign. Mid-Autumn Festival had arrived. A few days remained before our daughters’ footbinding began. This year, Snow Flower and her children were to visit us for the holiday, but they were not who came to my threshold. It was Lotus, one of the women who’d lived under our tree in the mountains. I invited her to have tea with me in the upstairs chamber.

“Thank you,” she said, “but I am in Tongkou to visit my natal family.”

“A family likes to welcome home a married-out daughter,” I replied, with the customary nicety. “I’m sure they will be happy to see you.”

“And I to see them,” she said, as she reached into the basket of moon cakes that hung on her arm. “Our friend has asked me to give you something.” She pulled out a long slender package, wrapped in a fragment of celadon-colored silk I had recently given Snow Flower. Lotus handed it to me, wished me good fortune, and swayed down the alley and around the corner.