Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See
259 pages
Published 2005
Read from December 8 to December 10
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
In the review for my previous Lisa See novel, China Dolls, I groused about how artificial and Mad Libs-ish I found literary fiction's reliance upon "secret traumas leading to horrible betrayals" between friends as an engine of plot and conflict. Left unstated in that review was my doubt that feelings could become so fierce and passionate in a "mere" friendship. High emotions and bitter conflicts I could well understand within the context of family -- I could write a whole series of novels rooted in the bad feeling and betrayals I knew growing up within an abusive situation. Equally well could I sympathize with the heartbreaks and confusion of romantic love and sexuality, of which I've also experienced plenty. Intense, passionate friendship is a blank space on my emotional map, however. I didn't have the opportunity to make childhood friends, and during the hormonal tumult of adolescence, I was living in a car, as far removed from the social passions of high school as can be imagined.
In the months since that review, however, I've had time to think and to reject my prior attitude. Just because I don't have any particular experience with intense friendship doesn't mean that it's an invention or affectation of literary authors. Openness toward and acceptance of the experiences of others is a paramount virtue, and I have to admit that my instinctive attitude was arrogant and lacking in empathy.
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan turns upon another such misunderstanding between passionately attached friends, one more elegantly and believably rooted within the lives and personalities of its two tragic leads than was the case, I felt, in China Dolls (which was an effective and affecting book in its own right). Snow Flower made me bawl more freely than any book I can summon from recent memory, in fact. And that doesn't even get into the authoritative skill See brings to sympathetically depicting a culture and an outlook that would be, to most of her readers, unfamiliar at best, repugnant and vicious at worst. Scenes graphically detailing the process of footbinding were intense enough that I had to put the book down every couple of paragraphs to cringe and shudder, yet See depicts customs and assumptions and daily life with humanity, tenderness, and feeling.
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