Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

by Lisa See

  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.

  Remember how things were for my elder sister? She was sad to be leaving our home, but everyone believed she was going to a fair marriage. Her songs were neither too tragic nor too blissful, reflecting what was to be her future. I had had mixed emotions about my marriage. I too was sad to leave home, but I was excited that my life would change for the better. I had sung songs to praise my parents for bringing me up and to thank them for their hard work on my behalf. Snow Flower’s future, on the other hand, looked bleak. No one could deny or change that, so our songs were fill
ed with melancholy.

  “Mama,” Snow Flower chanted one day, “Baba failed to plant me on a sunny hill. I will live in the shade forever.”

  Her mother sang back, “Truly, it is like planting a beautiful flower on a pile of cow dung.”

  The three girls and I could only agree, raising our voices in unison to repeat both phrases. This is how things were: heavyhearted, but done in the traditional manner.

  THE DAYS GREW

  colder. Snow Flower’s younger brother visited one day and glued paper against the lattice window. Still, the damp crept in. Our fingers grew tight and red from the constant chill. The three girls were afraid to say much of anything. We couldn’t go on this way, so I suggested that we move downstairs to the kitchen, where we might warm ourselves by the brazier. Madame Wang and Snow Flower’s mother deferred to me, showing me once again that I had power now.

  Long ago I had made my third-day wedding book for Snow Flower. It was filled with lovely predictions about Snow Flower and her future, but these things no longer pertained. I started again. I cut indigo cloth for the outside, folded it around several sheets of rice paper, and stitched the binding with white thread. Inside the front leaf I pasted red paper cutouts into the corners. The first pages were for me to write my farewell song to Snow Flower, the next were for my introduction of her to her new family, and the rest were left blank so she could use them for her own writings and to store her embroidery patterns. I rubbed ink against stone and enlisted my brush to write the characters in our secret language. I made each stroke as perfect as possible. I couldn’t let my hand—so unsteady from the emotions of those days—mar the sentiments.

  When the thirty days were over, the Day of Sorrow and Worry began. Snow Flower stayed upstairs. Her mother sat on the fourth stair leading to the women’s chamber. Our songs had grown and developed by then. Despite the ominous threat of Snow Flower’s father’s anger at any noise, I raised my voice to chant my feelings and recommendations, such as they were.

  “A good woman should not detest her husband’s disadvantage,” I sang, remembering “The Tale of Wife Wang.” “Help lift your family to a better state. Serve and obey your husband.”

  Snow Flower’s mother and aunt echoed these thoughts. “To be good daughters, we must obey,” they sang together. Hearing their voices harmonizing together, no one could doubt the devotion and affection between them. “We must stay in our upstairs rooms, be chaste, be modest, and perfect the womanly arts. To be filial, we must leave home. This is our fate. When we go to our husbands’ homes, new worlds unfold—sometimes better, sometimes worse.”

  “We had our happy daughter days together,” I reminded Snow Flower. “Year after year, we were never a step apart. Now we will be together just the same.” I recalled things we had written in our first exchanges on the fan and in our laotong contract. “We will still speak in whispers. We will still choose our colors, thread our needles, and embroider together.”

  Snow Flower appeared at the top of the stairs. Her voice floated down to me. “I thought we would soar together—two phoenixes in flight—forever. Now I am like a dead thing sinking to the bottom of a pond. You say we will be together just the same. I believe you. But my threshold will hardly compare to yours.”

  She slowly descended, stopping to sit by her mother. We expected to see bitter tears, but there were none. She linked arms with her mother and listened politely as the village girls continued their laments. Looking at Snow Flower, I couldn’t help wondering at her seeming lack of emotion, when even I—as excited as I’d been to be marrying well—had cried during this ceremony. Were Snow Flower’s feelings just as confused as mine had been? She would miss her mother surely, but would she miss that vile father of hers or miss waking up each morning in that empty house, which could only be a constant reminder of everything that had gone wrong with her family? It was terrible to be marrying into a butcher’s home, but as a practical matter could it be worse than this? And Snow Flower was born a horse too. The galloping spirit that yearned for adventure was just as strong in her as it was in me. Still, although we were old sames, both of us born under the sign of the horse, my feet were always on the ground—practical, loyal, and obedient—while her horse spirit had wings that wanted to soar and fought against anything that might rein her in, despite having a mind that sought beauty and refinement.

  Two days later, Snow Flower’s flower-sitting chair arrived. Again she did not weep or struggle against the inevitable. She lingered for a moment in the piteously small crowd that had gathered and then stepped into the sparsely decorated palanquin. The three girls I’d hired didn’t even wait for the flower-sitting chair to go around the corner before they set off for their homes. Snow Flower’s mother retreated inside, and I was left alone with Madame Wang.

  “You must think me an evil old woman,” the matchmaker said. “But you should understand that I never lied to your mother or your aunt. There is little a woman can do in this life to change her fate, let alone someone else’s, but—”

  I held up a hand to prevent her from listing her excuses, because I needed to know something different. “All those years ago when you came to my house and looked at my feet—”

  “You’re asking me if you really were special?”

  When I said yes, she regarded me with hard eyes.

  “It is not so easy to find a potential laotong,” she admitted. “I had several diviners looking throughout the countryside for someone I could match to my niece. True, I would have preferred someone from a higher family, but Diviner Hu found you. Your eight characters matched perfectly to my niece’s. But he would have come to me anyway, because, yes, your feet were that special. Your fate was destined to change, with or without my niece as your laotong. And now I hope her fate has been changed because of her relationship to you. I told many lies, so she might have a chance at life. I will never apologize to you for that.”

  I stared into Madame Wang’s overly rouged face, considering. I wanted to hate her, but how could I? She had done the best she could for the one person who mattered more to me in the world than any other.

  SINCE SNOW FLOWER’S

  elder sister would not deliver the third-day wedding books, I went in her place. My natal family sent a palanquin, and in a short time I arrived in Jintian. No decorations or raucous sounds of a wedding band gave any hint that anything special was happening in the village on that day. I simply stepped out of my palanquin onto a dirt pathway in front of a house with a low-slung roof and a pile of wood against the wall. To the right of the door was something that looked like a gigantic wok embedded in a brick platform.

  A feast should have been prepared for my arrival. It wasn’t. The top women in the village should have greeted me. They did, but the coarseness of their dialect, even though only a few li from Tongkou, told me a lot about the unsavory quality of the people who lived here.

  When the time came to read the sanzhaoshu, I was ushered into the main room. On the surface, the house resembled my natal home. Drying chilies hung from the central beam. The walls were of rough unpainted brick. I had hoped these similarities to my home would be reflected in the people who lived there. I did not encounter Snow Flower’s husband on this occasion, but I did meet his mother, and she was a dreadful creature. Her eyes were set close together and her lips had the thinness that connotes a narrow mind and a mean spirit.

  Snow Flower came into the room, sat on a stool next to the display of her third-day wedding books, and waited quietly. Although I felt I had changed with marriage, she did not look different to my eyes. The women of Jintian clustered around the sanzhaoshu, running their dirty fingers over them. They talked among themselves about the stitching on the edges and the paper cutouts, but none of them said a word about the quality of the writing or the thoughts expressed. After a few minutes, the women took positions around the room.

  Snow Flower’s mother-in-law walked to a bench. Her feet had not been as badly bound as my mother’s, but an oddness to her gait
marked her class even more than the guttural sounds that spewed from her mouth. She sat down, glanced with distaste at her new daughter-in-law, and then focused her unfeeling eyes on me. “I understand you have married into the Lu family. You are very lucky.” The words were polite, but the way she spoke them suggested that I had bathed in offal. “People say that you and my daughter-in-law are well versed in nu shu. The women of our village don’t value this pastime. We can read it, but we believe it is better to hear it.”

  I thought otherwise. This woman was like my mother, illiterate in nu shu. I glanced around the room, sizing up the other women. They hadn’t commented on the writing because they probably knew very little of it themselves.

  “We have no need to hide our thoughts in scribbles on paper,” Snow Flower’s mother-in-law continued. “Everyone in this room knows what I think.” When uneasy laughter greeted this comment, she raised three fingers to silence her friends. “It would amuse us to hear you read my daughter-in-law’s sanzhaoshu. Estimations of my daughter-in-law’s worth coming to us from a big-house girl in Tongkou will be most appreciated.”

  Everything that woman said was a verbal sneer. I reacted as a seventeen-year-old girl might. I picked up the third-day wedding book that Snow Flower’s mother had prepared and opened it. I imagined her refined voice and tried to re-create it as I chanted.

  “I present this letter to your noble home on this third day after your wedding. I am your mother, and we have now been separated for three days. Misfortune struck our family, and now you marry out to a hard village.” As was the custom for a third-day wedding book, the subject shifted, and Snow Flower’s mother addressed the new family. “I hope you will show my daughter compassion for the poverty of her dowry. Even the top layer is plain. Please don’t mention it.” It went on in this way, talking about Snow Flower’s family’s bad luck, their fall from social status, and the poverty they now experienced, but my eyes swept right over these written characters as though they didn’t exist. Instead, I made up new words. “A good woman like our Snow Flower should fall into a good place. She deserves a decent family.”