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Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
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Chapters 10-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: Hair-Pinning Days
Chapter 10 Summary: Truth
Immediately after her own wedding, Lily goes to Snow Flower’s home for her “Sitting and Singing” month. Expecting to find a grand household, Lily is confused to find a dirty house that was evidently once very rich but now smells terrible and is almost empty of furniture. She finds Snow Flower and her mother together in the upper chamber, poorly dressed, cold and hungry, and with no servants to tend to them.
Snow Flower tells Lily that her grandfather had been prosperous and built a wealthy and powerful household, but that her father had fallen victim to opium addiction and had sold everything to pay for his habit. Lily comes to realize that everyone around her had already known of her friend’s circumstances—Madame Wang, Mama, Aunt, and all the other adults in her family—but that no one had told Lily. Snow Flower goes on to reveal that their lautong relationship was a scheme by Madame Wang, who is actually Snow Flower’s aunt, to improve the girl’s prospects for marriage. She explains to Lily, “From you I learned what I needed to know for my new life” (123). When Snow Flower reveals that she is betrothed to a butcher, the lowest of all possible matches, Lily realizes that Madame Wang’s story at her own “Sitting and Singing” was actually meant for Snow Flower. Lily begins to feel betrayed, having been kept out of a secret that everyone else knew. Yet, she continues to love Snow Flower as her lautong.
In her new, elevated position, Lily does her best to contrive the appearance of a respectable wedding for Snow Flower, cleaning the house, hiring young women to act as her friends and help with the wedding preparations, bringing food from her own family to feed the guests. Examining Snow Flower’s dowry, Lily realizes that all the pieces she has been making during their visits together have been made from clothing Snow Flower had once worn. Snow Flower explains that the clothing had first belonged to her own mother. The dowry Snow Flower is making is being reused for the third time.
Madame Wang explains her actions to Lily, saying that she did what she could to help her niece, and reassures Lily that she was indeed special, not merely contrived as such in order to serve Snow Flower’s needs.
Lily meets Snow Flower’s in-laws when she delivers the third-day wedding book in place of Snow Flower’s elder sister. The in-laws are unkind and uncultured. They express disdain at the young girls’ literacy in nu shu. They demand that Lily read aloud what she has written for Snow Flower. Having written many private things to console her friend about her unhappiness at the marriage, Lily composes a new set of words on the spot, so that the family will not hear the negative things she has written about them.
Chapter 11 Summary: The Temple of Gupo
After Snow Flower’s wedding, Lily returns to her natal home, where she will stay until she gives birth to her first child. She is so angry about the secret that was kept from her, that she treats everyone in the family with a polite coldness. Her mother confronts her, and they have an argument, in which Lily accuses her mother of orchestrating the whole thing, not for Lily’s happiness, but in order to improve her own situation in life. Lily remains angry at her mother long after she softens towards the rest of her family. Lily has a reasonable relationship with her in-laws, and describes it as “not too bad, not too good, just the usual way” (140).
Because a new wife only has conjugal visits with her husband four or five times a year, a couple of years pass, and neither Snow Flower nor Lily has yet become pregnant. The next time the two girls see each other is when they attend the festival at the Temple of Gupo. Because of the changes in their financial circumstances, their conversation is slightly awkward, but they find common ground discussing their attempts to get pregnant. At the Temple of Gupo, they perform the relevant rituals and request that they both be blessed with babies before the following year. When Snow Flower writes to Lily some months later to say that she’s pregnant, Lily feels so humiliated that she is reluctant to tell her mother and her aunt. Nonetheless, a month later, Lily also becomes pregnant.
At the Temple of Gupo the following year, Lily and Snow Flower are both very close to their delivery dates, and they go to the Temple to offer thanks and to enjoy the company of other expectant mothers. When they say their prayers to ask for sons, Lily confesses, “I prayed that the goddess would not be too swayed by Snow Flower’s offering” (145), and asks that her own prayer be favored over that of her friend. That night, they sleep together as they did when they were children, but now each is touching the other’s belly, feeling the babies move inside.
Chapter 10 – Chapter 11 Analysis
As the truth about Snow Flower’s family situation is revealed, Lily is forced to dismantle many of the innocent views of the world that she has held up to this point in her life. Although she has always believed that Snow Flower was teaching her how to be a wife suited to a higher status than the one in which she grew up, she now learns that Snow Flower was actually improving her own marriage prospects through her contact with Lily. Already, we see a self-serving nature emerging. Madame Wang attempts to explain her dishonest actions, saying, “There is little a woman can do in this life to change her fate, let alone someone else’s, but—” (131). Lily interrupts the matchmaker to ask if she had been telling the truth about her own specialness. Even though Lily is already secure in her own future, she is still more concerned about herself than she is about her friend’s bleak prospects.
The combined experience of marrying into a powerful family and learning the truth about her lautong bring about a change in Lily and how she engages with others. Upon discovering Snow Flower’s family situation, Lily orders Madame Wang to run errands for her. Lily says, “I had never cared for her and now I liked her even less for her duplicity . . . (I now outranked her, after all.)” (128). When she argues with her mother, we get the sense that Lily has gained a new confidence, as she says of her mother, “She held my gaze, believing she could weaken me with her cold eyes, but I did not look away” (136). The change in her social status and her anger at having been deceived transform Lily into the proud and powerful woman she expects to become.
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