• Abstract
  • Praise

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a bright hardheaded journey back to an era of Chinese history that is as profoundly moving as it is sorrowful. With the menstruum detail and deep resonance ofMemoirs of a Geisha, this lyrical and emotionally charged original delves into one of the most mysterious of human relationships: female friendly relationship.
Lily is haunted aside memories–of World Health Organization she erstwhile was, and of a person, foresightful gone, World Health Organization defined her existence. She has nothing but time now, as she recounts the tale of Snow Flower, and asks the gods for pardon.

In nineteenth-century China, when wives and daughters were foot-bound and lived in almost total privateness, the women in one remote Hunan county highly-developed their own secret codification for communication: nu shu ("women's piece of writing"). Some girls were paired with laotongs, "old sames," in hokey matches that lasted throughout their lives. They painted letters on fans, embroidered messages on handkerchiefs, and composed stories, thereby reaching out of their isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments.

With the arrival of a silk fan on which Snow Flower has composed for Lily a poem of introduction in nu shu, their friendly relationship is sealed and they become "onetime sames" at the cutter eld of vii. Every bit the years pass, through famine and rebellion, they reflect upon their artificial marriages, loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find comfort, developing a draw together that keeps their spirits viable. Simply when a misunderstanding arises, their lifelong friendship suddenly threatens to snag apart.

Advance praise for Charles Percy Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

"Lisa See has written her best rule book yet. Snow Flower and the Cloak-and-dagger Fan is achingly beautiful, a marvel of imagination of a real and esoteric world that has only newly disappeared. It is a story thusly mesmerizing the pages float away and the story remains clearly before us from starting time to end."
–Amy Tan, author of The Gladden Luck Club and The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings

"I was enchanted by this wondrous book–the story of a secret civilization of women, who actually lived in China not long-term past. . . . Magical, haunting fiction. Beautiful."
–Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Fifth Book of Peace

"Only the C. H. Best novelists can do what Lisa See has done, to bring to life-time not only a character but an whole culture, and a aesthesia so strikingly different from our own. This is an engrossing and completely convincing depicting of a woman formed past wretched affected upon her from her earliest years, and of the friendship that helps her to survive."
–Arthur Golden, writer of Memoirs of a Geisha

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