Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a 2005 novel by Lisa See set in nineteenth-century China. In her introduction to the novel, See writes that Lily, the narrator, was born on June 5, 1824—"the fifth day of the sixth month of the third year of the Daoguang Emperor's reign". The novel begins in 1903, when Lily is 80 years old. It continues on to tell the story of her life from birth, childhood, marriage, and old age. During her lifetime, Lily lives through the reigns of four emperors of the Qing dynasty: Daoguang (1820–1850); Xianfeng (1850–1861); Tongzhi (1861–1875); and Guangxu (1875–1908).

The University of Southern California China historian Charlotte Furth wrote that Western readers think of Chinese women simply as victims and focus on such problems as footbinding and arranged marriages, but that Lisa See's historical novels "follow the best feminist scholarship on women in the Ming-Qing period by tackling these stereotypes." In Snowflower and the Secret Fan and in Peony in Love, See "asks readers to imagine how a few such women might have found voices of their own within, rather than in opposition to, the Confucian social order, and how they found ways to self-fulfillment without flouting their culture’s fundamental values."

The novel received an honorable mention from the Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature.

Plot summary

In rural Hunan province called Puwei, a county in China, Lily is destined to become a laotong pair with Snow Flower, a girl of the same age from Tongkou. The laotong relationship is a sisterly relationship that is far stronger and closer than a husband and wife's. Lily's aunt describes it as a relationship "made by choice for the purpose of emotional companionship and eternal fidelity. A marriage is not made by choice and has only one purpose—to have sons." This relationship begins when the girls are seven and goes until adulthood when they are mothers.