By Subraj Singh

PEOPLE read because books have the ability to take them to places they have never been to before. Books show us locales we have never seen, cultures we have never experienced, and they also sink us into the personal histories of characters; of people we never knew existed. Lisa See’s historical novel, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, is one such novel. It transports us completely back to China in the 1800s, and from the details about the lives of both Chinese aristocrats and Chinese common-folk that See offers to us, it is quite clear that this is one of those novels that is only made more rich because of the large amount of research that the writer has done in order to be able to present to her readers a world that many of us will never have the opportunity to experience.

BEST FRIENDS
The novel tells the story of two best friends, Lily and Snow Flower, who, according to Chinese tradition, are much more than mere best friends. They are what the Chinese refer to as “laotong”, a relationship built on the tenets of friendship and sisterhood that is supposed to be stronger than the marriage between a man and woman.
A good portion of the book investigates the relationship between this particular pair of laotong, chronicling how they met and came to be laotong; their communication with each other, using a secret women’s language called “Nu Shu”; their childhood experiences and, eventually, their individual marriages and separation from each other.
The novel is noted for its graphic presentation of the footbinding process, but, I suppose, this is all a part of that ability of books to introduce you to things you’ve never known about or experienced.
Footbinding is the process where young girls have the bones in their feet broken, folded and strapped in order to make them smaller, as small feet were considered especially beautiful at the time in ancient China. The ideal bound feet were called “Golden Lotuses”, and were around three inches in length.
See’s ability to present this horrific process in the gorgeous world of her novel tells us that even in the most beauteous of circumstances, there is always some pain and sadness lurking beneath.
However, See’s female characters manage to overcome the process of footbinding, as women in China have done for ages, and continue on with the story of their lives, footbinding receding to just another obstacle that the Chinese woman in those times simply had to deal with.

SEPARATE WAYS
If See’s scenes of footbinding are painful, though, then her scenes of the way the pair of laotong, Lily and Snow Flower, drift apart from each other, and the way their close relationship becomes frayed; tinged by misunderstanding, jealousy and hate, is even more painful to read.
Lily comes from a poor family, but because of her tiny feet, she is able to enter a marriage of wealth and prosperity. Contrastingly, Snow Flower, whose family was once wealthy and is now penniless, is forced to marry an abusive butcher.
It is from this point in the novel that the relationship between the pair of laotong changes, as Lily and Snow Flower depart on their respective pathways in life, moving further and further away from each other until fate eventually forces them on the same path once again.