"Snow Flower and the Secret Fan"

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005) is a beautiful novel.  Previously Lisa mostly used a third person narrator (not counting the two first person reflections in On Gold Mountain).  Now letting Lily tell her story as an eighty year old woman is powerfully effective.  (It is interesting to contemplate how the novel would read with Snow Flower as the narrator).

Clearly SF is about love in various forms – but especially the love that groups of women can feel for each other and the love between women in closer relationships such as laotong matches.  Foot binding and the use of nu shu as a form of communication between women are intimately related to these relationships.  (Since I was a boy, I have always been interested in codes and ciphers; nu shu is interesting to me in and of itself).

At the end of the novel, Lily says:  “I know a lot about women and their suffering, but I still know almost nothing about men.”  This is true for the novel also.  The reader participates in the inner lives of the women characters but knows the men only from the outside.  I would imagine that SF is extremely popular with women, partly because of the reason Lisa mentions in a note:  “On the surface we as American women are independent, free, and mobile, but at our cores we still long for love, friendship, happiness, tranquility, and to be heard.”  (I think of Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” here).

Although this is true, SF may be more important for men to read.  IMHO a large number of men would echo Lily’s words in reverse:  “I still know almost nothing about women.”  It is easy for men to forget how terribly most women have been treated in the past and many are even today.  In a world less dominated by rigid societal rules where women can choose whom they marry and can more easily escape from abusive relations, Snow Flower would blossom.  It is interesting to contemplate what Snow Flower’s life would be like were she to live in such a world.

The novel is very effective in depicting human suffering in many ways:  the terrible trek up the mountains to escape from the horrors of war; the painful return back down the mountain trail with dead bodies everywhere; the physical and psychological pain of foot binding.

The most powerful treatment of suffering, of course, is that which Lily and Snow Flower experience in their relationship.  It is tragic that Lily’s need for love and her inability to forgive what she considers to be acts of betrayal cause her to inflict harm on many people, Snow Flower most of all.  The scene in which Lily betrays Snow Flower by sharing all her private secrets to a group of women is extremely painful to read.  Her behavior is indeed despicable, especially because she is attacking a poor woman unable to defend herself from Lily’s attacks from a position of wealth and privilege.

As the book returns to the present, with Lily an 80 year old woman, the reader is finally able to understand Lily’s words at the beginning of the novel.  It is hard not to be deeply moved by Lily’s final words:  “But if the dead continue to have the needs and desires of the living, then I’m reaching out to Snow Flower and the others who witnessed it all.  Please hear my words.  Please forgive me.”  (I think of “Tears, Idle Tears” at this point).

SF is a fine novel that touches the heart.  It can be read over and over again as a source of insight regarding the complexities of the human experience.