See, Lisa. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan: A Novel. New York: Random House, 2005.
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is another random used-bookstore find. It is too newly published to appear on many of my lists and I don't keep track of new releases as well as I'd like. Likewise, this was my first exposure to Lisa See's writing. I'd never actually heard of her before despite her eight books, many of which were well received. I am impressed. See possesses a natural style and a gift for fluidly explaining cultural traditions to the unfamiliar.
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is about two young women bound together in a formal relationship that made them laotung (like a best friend for life) to each other. One, Lily, is from a poor farming family. The other, Snow Flower, is from a very wealthy family. The book tracks their relationship over the span of their lives and observes how it was complicated by the formalism of imperial Chinese culture.
While many of the aspects of Chinese culture and history See focuses on were somewhat familiar, I felt her account of the process of foot-binding was masterful. The explanation of nu shu, women's writing was intriguing. Overall, this was a fascinating read.
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