by Lisa See
When I asked my mother-in-law to invite Snow Flower to my son’s one-month party, she said no. This slight is something people in our county consider a terrible insult. I was crushed and confused that she would do this but powerless to change her mind. The day turned out to be one of the most important and festive occasions of my life, and I experienced it without Snow Flower at my side. The Lu family visited the ancestral temple to place my son’s name on the wall with all their other family members. Red eggs—a symbol of life dyed red for celebration—were given to the guests and relatives. A grand banquet was served with birds-nest soup, salted birds that had been pickled for six months, and wine-fed duck stewed with ginger, garlic, and fresh red and green hot peppers. Through it all I missed Snow Flower horribly and later wrote to her as many details as I could recall, not thinking that they might remind her of the dreadful oversight. Apparently she accepted the lapse, because she sent a gift of an embroidered baby jacket and a hat decorated with small charms.
When my mother-in-law saw these, she said, “A mother must always be careful whom she chooses to let into her life. Your son’s mother cannot associate with a butcher’s wife. Filial women raise filial sons, and we expect you to obey our wishes.”
With her words I realized that my in-laws not only did not want Snow Flower to come to the party, they didn’t want me to see her at all. I was horrified, terrified, and, since I’d just had the baby, crying all the time. I didn’t know what to do. I would have to fight my in-laws on this matter, not realizing how dangerous it would be.
In the meantime, Snow Flower and I secretly wrote to each other nearly every day. I had thought I knew all about nu shu and that men should never touch or see it, but now that I lived in the Lu household, where all the men knew men’s writing, I saw that our secret women’s writing wasn’t much of a secret. Then it dawned on me that men throughout the county had to know about nu shu. How could they not? They wore it on their embroidered shoes. They saw us weaving our messages into cloth. They heard us singing our songs and showing off our third-day wedding books. Men just considered our writing beneath them.
It is said that men have hearts of iron, while women are made of water. This comes through in men’s writing and women’s writing. Men’s writing has more than 50,000 characters, each uniquely different, each with deep meanings and nuances. Our women’s writing has perhaps 600 characters, which we use phonetically, like babies, to create about 10,000 words. Men’s writing takes a lifetime to learn and understand. Women’s writing is something we pick up as girls, and we rely on context to coax meaning. Men write about the outer realm of literature, accounts, and crop yields; women write about the inner realm of children, daily chores, and emotions. The men in the Lu household were proud of their wives’ fluency in nu shu and dexterity in embroidery, though these things had as much importance to survival as a pig’s fart.
Since the men deemed our writing insignificant, they paid no attention to the letters I wrote or received. My mother-in-law was another story. I had to skirt the edges of her awareness. For now she didn’t demand to know to whom I was writing, and over the next several weeks Snow Flower and I perfected a delivery system. We used Yonggang to run between our villages to transport our notes, embroidered handkerchiefs, and weaving. I liked to sit at the lattice window and watch her. I thought, so many times, I could make the trip myself. It was not that far away and my feet were strong enough to make it, but we had rules governing such things. Even if a woman can walk a great distance, she should not be seen alone on the road. Kidnapping by low types was a danger, while reputations were under even greater threat if a woman did not have the proper escort—her husband, her sons, her matchmaker, or her bearers. I could have walked to Snow Flower, but I never would have risked it.
Lily,
You ask about my new family.
I am very lucky.
In my natal home, there was no happiness.
My mother and I had to be quiet all day, all night.
The concubines, my brothers, my sisters, and the servants were gone.
My natal home felt empty.
Here I have my mother-in-law, my father-in-law, my husband, and his younger sisters.
There are no concubines or servants in my husband’s home.
Only I fill those roles.
I do not mind the hard work.
Everything I needed to know came from you, your sister, your mother, your aunt.
But the women here are not like your family.
They do not like fun.
They do not tell stories.
My mother-in-law was born in the year of the rat.
Can you imagine anyone worse for someone born in the year of the horse?
The rat believes the horse is selfish and thoughtless, though I am not.
The horse believes the rat is scheming and demanding, which she is.
But she does not beat me.
She does not yell at me beyond what is customary for a new daughter-in-law.
Have you heard about my mother and father?
Within days of my falling into my husband’s home,
Mama and Baba sold off the last of their belongings.
They took the cash and slipped away into the night.
As beggars, they will not have to pay taxes or other debts.
But where are they?
I worry about my mother.
Is she still alive?
Is she in the afterworld?
I do not know.
Perhaps I will never see her again.
Who would have guessed that my family was so unlucky?
They must have done bad deeds in former lives.
But if they did, then what about me?
Do you hear any words you can tell me?
And you, are you happy?
Snow Flower
Now that I knew this tragic news about Snow Flower’s parents, I began to listen more carefully to the household gossip. Word began to filter in from merchants and salesmen who roamed the county that they had seen Snow Flower’s parents sleeping under a tree, begging for food, or wearing dirty and tattered clothes. I thought often of how my laotong’s family had once been powerful in Tongkou and how her beautiful mother must have felt to be marrying into the family of an imperial scholar. Now look how low she had been brought. I feared for her with her lily feet. Without influential friends, Snow Flower’s parents had been reduced to the mercy of the elements. Without a natal home, Snow Flower was worse than an orphan. I believed it was better to have dead parents, whom you could worship and honor as ancestors, than parents who had disappeared into the transient life of beggars. How would she know when they died? How would she be able to provide a proper funeral, clean their graves at New Year, or appease them when they fretted in the afterworld? That she was sad and without me to hear her thoughts was hard for me and had to be unbearable for her.
As for Snow Flower’s last question—was I happy?—I wasn’t sure how to respond. Should I write about the women in my new home? My new upstairs chamber housed too many women who did not like one another. I was the first daughter-in-law, but not long after I arrived in Tongkou the second son’s wife came to live in the house. She had gotten pregnant right away. She was barely eighteen and cried nonstop for her family. She gave birth to a daughter, which upset my mother-in-law and made matters worse. I tried to befriend Second Sister-in-law, but she kept to a corner with her paper, ink, and brush, constantly writing to her mother and sworn sisters, still in her home village. I could have told Snow Flower about the unseemly ways Second Sister-in-law tried to impress Lady Lu by constantly kowtowing, whispering obsequious words, and maneuvering for position, while Master Lu’s three concubines bickered among themselves, their petty jealousies pinching their faces and turning their stomachs sour, but I dared not put these sentiments on paper.
Could I have written to Snow Flower about my husband? I suppose I could have, but I didn’t know what to say. I rarely saw him, and when I did he was usua
lly talking to someone else or engaged in important tasks. During daylight hours, he went out to survey the fields and oversee projects on the land, while I embroidered or did other chores in the upstairs room. I served him at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, remembering to be as demure and quiet as Snow Flower had been at my family’s table. He did not speak to me on those occasions. He sometimes came to our room early to visit our son or to do bed business. I assumed we were like any other married couple—even Snow Flower and her husband—so there was nothing of interest to write.
How could I answer Snow Flower’s question about my happiness when the main conflict I had in my life had to do with her?
“I admit you have learned well from Snow Flower,” my mother-in-law said one day, when she caught me writing to my laotong, “and we are grateful for that. But she is no longer a member of our village, nor is she under Master Lu’s protection. He cannot and should not try to change her fate. As you know, we have codes governing wives that have to do with war and other border disagreements. As female guests, wives are not to be harmed during feuds, raids, or wars, because we are seen as belonging to both our husbands’ villages and our natal villages. You see, Lily, as wives we have protection and loyalty from both places. But if something happened to you in Snow Flower’s village, anything we might do could lead to retaliation and possibly even an ongoing fight.”
I listened to Lady Lu’s excuses, but I knew her reasons were far more base. Snow Flower’s natal family was disgraced and she’d married a polluted man. My in-laws simply didn’t want me to associate with her.
“Snow Flower’s fate was preordained,” my mother-in-law went on, venturing closer to the truth, “and it does not meet yours in any way. Master Lu and I would look favorably on a daughter-in-law who decided to break contract with someone who is no longer a true old same. If you need companionship, I will remind you of the young married women in Tongkou to whom I introduced you.”
“I remember them. Thank you,” I mumbled haplessly, while inside I was screaming in terror. Never, never, never!
“They would like you to join a post-marriage sworn sisterhood.”
“Again, thank you—”
“You should consider their invitation an honor.”
“I do.”
“I’m just saying that you need to discharge Snow Flower from your thoughts,” my mother-in-law said, and finished with a variation of her usual admonition. “I don’t want memories of that unfortunate girl influencing my grandson.”
The concubines snickered behind their fingers. They enjoyed seeing me suffer. In moments like these, their status rose and mine fell. But other than this continued criticism, which the others relished and which frightened me deeply, my mother-in-law was kinder to me than my own mother had been. She followed all the rules, just as Snow Flower had said. “When a girl, obey your father; when a wife, obey your husband; when a widow, obey your son.” I had heard this my entire life, so I was not intimidated. But my mother-in-law taught me another axiom one day, when she was aggravated with her husband: “Obey, obey, obey, then do what you want.” For now, my in-laws could prevent me from seeing Snow Flower, but they could never stop me from loving her.
Snow Flower,
My husband treats me well.
I don’t even know where all our family fields are.
I also work hard.
My mother-in-law watches everything I do.
The women in my household are well educated in nu shu.
My mother-in-law has taught me new characters.
I will show them to you when we next meet.
I do embroidery, weaving, and shoemaking.
I spin cloth and prepare meals.
I have a son.
I pray to the Goddess that one day I’ll have another son.
You should too.
Please listen to me.
You must obey your husband.
You must listen to your mother-in-law.
I ask you not to worry so much.
Instead, remember when we embroidered together and whispered at night.
We are two mandarin ducks.
We are two phoenixes flying across the sky.
Lily
In her next letter, Snow Flower mentioned nothing about her new family other than that her son had learned to sit. When she came to the end, she inquired again about my life:
Tell me about your meals and what is discussed.
Do they recite the classics when they eat?
Does your mother-in-law entertain the men with stories?
Does she sing to them to aid in their digestion?
I tried to answer truthfully. The men in my household discussed finances: what extra piece of land they could lease, who would till it, how much they should seek in rents, the cost of taxes. They had a desire to “get higher,” to “get to the top of the mountain.” Every family says these things at New Year, incorporating special dishes that invoke these wishes—knowing that this is exactly what they are. But my in-laws worked very hard to make them happen. It made for boring conversation that I did not understand, nor did I care to understand. They already had more than anyone in Tongkou. I could not imagine what else they could desire, yet their eyes never wavered from the top of the mountain.
I hoped that Snow Flower was happier now, conforming—as all wives must—to circumstances completely different from anything she had known before. Then, one dark afternoon as I nursed my son, I heard Madame Wang’s palanquin stop outside our threshold. I expected to see her come up the stairs. Instead, my mother-in-law entered the room and with a disapproving frown dropped a letter on the table beside me. As soon as my son was asleep, I pulled the oil lamp closer and opened it. I noticed right away that the format was different. With a feeling of trepidation I began to read.
Lily,
I sit upstairs and cry. Outside I hear my husband killing a pig. He compounds his violation of the pollution laws.
When I first married in, my mother-in-law made me stand on the platform outside the house and watch as a pig was killed so I could see where our livelihood comes from. My husband and father-in-law brought the pig to our threshold. He was carried upside down on a pole strung between my father-in-law’s and my husband’s shoulders. The pig was between them, crying, crying, crying. He knew what was coming. I have heard this many times now, because they all know what is about to happen and their cries echo through our village much too often.
My father-in-law held the pig down next to a large wok filled with boiling water. (Do you remember that wok outside my house? The one embedded in the platform? Below that is a place to burn coal.) My husband slit the pig’s throat. First, he collected the blood for blood custard, then he shoved the body in the wok. The pig was boiled to soften its skin. My husband asked me to scrape the hairs off the hide. I cried and cried, but not as noisily as the pig had done. I told them I would never watch or be a part of this pollution again. My mother-in-law condemned me for being so weak.
Every day I become more and more like Wife Wang. Do you remember when my aunt told us that story? I have become a vegetarian. My in-laws don’t care. It leaves more meat for them.
I am alone in the world but for you and my son.
I wish I had never lied to you. I promised I would always tell you the truth, but I don’t like you knowing of my ugly life.
I sit at the lattice window and look across the fields to my home village. I imagine you at your window looking back at me. My heart flies across the fields to you. Are you sitting there? Do you see me? Do you feel me?
Without you I am sad. I urge you to write or visit me.
Snow Flower
This was horrible! I looked out the lattice window toward Jintian, wishing that I could at least see Snow Flower. I felt terrible knowing that she was suffering and I couldn’t put my arms around her to comfort her. In front of my mother-in-law and the other women in the upstairs chamber I pulled out a piece of paper and mixed ink. Before I picked up the brush, I reread Snow
Flower’s letter. The first time I had taken in only her sadness. Now I realized she’d broken from the traditional stylized lines used by wives in their letters and was using her nu shu to write more candidly and forthrightly about her life.
With her bold act, I realized the true purpose of our secret writing. It was not to compose girlish notes to each other or even to introduce us to the women in our husbands’ families. It was to give us a voice. Our nu shu was a means for our bound feet to carry us to each other, for our thoughts to fly across the fields as Snow Flower had written. The men in our households never expected us to have anything important to say. They never expected us to have emotions or express creative thoughts. The women—our mothers-in-law and the others—put up even greater blockades against us. But from here on out, I hoped Snow Flower and I would be able to write the truth of our lives, whether we were together or apart. I wanted to drop the set phrases that were so common among wives in their rice-and-salt days and express my real thoughts. We would write as we had talked when we were huddled together in the upstairs chamber of my natal home.
I had to see Snow Flower and tell her things would be better. But if I visited her against my mother-in-law’s wishes, I would be committing one of the worst crimes possible. Sneaking around to write or read letters paled in comparison to this, but I had to do it if I wanted to see my laotong.
