by Lisa See
So when I ran out of things Snow Flower could do in her home, I questioned her about her time spent in mine. Wasn’t she happy to be with me? Didn’t she like the silk clothes I gave her? Didn’t she present the gifts the Lu family sent to her husband for our continued gratitude with enough deference that he would be pleased with her? Didn’t she appreciate that I had hired a man to teach reading and writing to boys her son’s age in Jintian? Didn’t she see that by making our daughters laotong we would be changing Spring Moon’s fate, much as mine had been changed?
If she truly loved me, why couldn’t she do as I had done—wrap herself in the conventions that protected women—to make her bad situation better? To all these queries she just sighed or nodded. Her reaction made me even more impatient. I stepped up my questions and well-considered reasons, until she surrendered, promising to do as I’d instructed. But she didn’t, and the next time my frustration with her was even more pointed. I didn’t understand that the bold horse of Snow Flower’s childhood had been broken in spirit. I was stubborn enough to believe I could fix a horse that had gone lame.
MY LIFE CHANGED
forever on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month of the sixth year of Xianfeng’s reign. Mid-Autumn Festival had arrived. A few days remained before our daughters’ footbinding began. This year, Snow Flower and her children were to visit us for the holiday, but they were not who came to my threshold. It was Lotus, one of the women who’d lived under our tree in the mountains. I invited her to have tea with me in the upstairs chamber.
“Thank you,” she said, “but I am in Tongkou to visit my natal family.”
“A family likes to welcome home a married-out daughter,” I replied, with the customary nicety. “I’m sure they will be happy to see you.”
“And I to see them,” she said, as she reached into the basket of moon cakes that hung on her arm. “Our friend has asked me to give you something.” She pulled out a long slender package, wrapped in a fragment of celadon-colored silk I had recently given Snow Flower. Lotus handed it to me, wished me good fortune, and swayed down the alley and around the corner.
I knew from the shape what I was holding, but I couldn’t fathom why Snow Flower hadn’t come and had sent the fan instead. I took the bundle upstairs and waited until my sisters-in-law set out together to drop off moon cakes to our friends in the village. I sent my daughter with them, saying she should enjoy these last few days outside while she could. Once they left, I sat in my chair by the lattice window. Hazy light filtered through the latticework, casting a design of leaves and vines across my worktable. I stared at the package for a long time. How did I know to be afraid? Finally, I peeled back one edge, then another, of the green silk until our fan was fully exposed. I picked it up. Then I slowly clicked open one fold after another. Next to the charcoal-ink characters we had written the night before we came down from the mountains I saw a new column of characters.
I have too many troubles, Snow Flower had written. Her calligraphy had always been finer than mine, the legs of her mosquito lines so thin and delicate that the ends wisped into nothing. I cannot be what you wish. You won’t have to listen to my complaints anymore. Three sworn sisters have promised to love me as I am. Write to me, not to console me as you have been doing, but to remember our happy girl-days together. And that was it.
I felt like a sword had thrust into my body. My stomach leaped at the surprise of it, then contracted into an uneasy ball. Love? Was she really talking about love with sworn sisters in our secret fan? I read the lines again, puzzled and confused. Three sworn sisters have promised to love me. But Snow Flower and I were laotong, which was a marriage of emotions strong enough to cross over great distances and long separations. Our bond was supposed to be more important than marriage to a man. We had pledged to be true and faithful until death parted us. That she seemed to be abandoning our promises in favor of a new relationship with sworn sisters hurt beyond reason. That she was suggesting that somehow we could still be friends literally took my breath away. To me, what she had written was ten thousand times worse than if my husband had walked in and announced he’d just taken his first concubine. And it wasn’t as though I hadn’t been given the opportunity to join a post-marriage sisterhood myself. My mother-in-law had pushed me very hard in that direction, but I had schemed and plotted to keep Snow Flower in my life. Now she was tossing me aside? It seemed that Snow Flower—this woman for whom I had deep-heart love, whom I treasured, and to whom I’d committed myself for life—did not care for me in the same way.
Just when I thought my devastation could go no deeper, I realized that the three sworn sisters she had written about had to be the ones from her village whom we’d met in the mountains. In my mind, I replayed everything that had happened last winter. Had they been conspiring to steal her away from me from that first night with their singing? Had she been attracted to them, like a husband to new concubines who are younger, prettier, and more adoring than a loyal wife? Were the beds of those women warmer, their bodies firmer, their stories fresher? Did she look at their faces and see no expectations and no responsibilities?
This pain was unlike anything I had felt before—plunging, searing, excruciating, far worse than childbirth. Then something shifted in me. I began to react not as the little girl who had fallen in love with Snow Flower but as Lady Lu, the woman who believed that rules and conventions could provide peace of mind. It was easier for me to begin picking at Snow Flower’s faults than to feel the emotions raging inside of me.
I had always made allowances for Snow Flower out of love. But once I began to focus on her weaknesses, a pattern of deceit, deception, and betrayal began to emerge. I thought about all the times Snow Flower had lied to me—about her family, about her married life, even about her beatings. Not only had she not been a faithful laotong, she had not even been a very good friend. A friend would have been honest and forthright. If all this were not enough, I let memories of the recent weeks wash over me. Snow Flower had taken advantage of my money and position to gain better clothes, better food, and a better situation for her daughter, while ignoring all my help and suggestions. I felt duped and immensely foolish.
And then the strangest thing happened. An image of my mother came to my mind. I remembered that as a child I’d wanted her to love me. I’d thought if I did everything she asked during my footbinding, I would earn her affection. I believed I’d won it, but she had no feeling for me at all. Just like Snow Flower, she had looked out only for her own selfish interests. My first reaction to my mother’s lies and lack of regard for me had been anger, and I never forgave her, but over time I gradually stepped farther and farther away from her until she no longer had an emotional hold over me. To protect my heart, this was what I would have to do with Snow Flower. I couldn’t let anyone know I was dying from anguish that she no longer loved me. I also had to hide my anger and distress, because these were not good qualities for a proper woman.
I folded the fan and put it away. Snow Flower had asked me to write back. I didn’t. A week went by. I did not start my daughter’s footbinding on our agreed-upon date. Another week passed. Lotus came to my door again, this time delivering a letter, which Yonggang brought to me in the upstairs chamber. I unfolded the paper and stared at the characters. Always those strokes had seemed like caresses. Now I read them as daggers.
Why have you not written? Are you ill or has good fortune smiled on your door again? I began my daughter’s binding on the twenty-fourth day, just as you and I began ours. Did you begin on that date too? I look out my lattice window to yours. My heart soars out to you, singing happiness for our daughters.
I read it once, then set one corner of the paper into the flame of the oil lamp. I watched the edges curl and the words become smoke. In the coming days—as the weather cooled and I began my daughter’s footbinding—more letters arrived. I burned them too.
I was thirty-three years old. I would be lucky to live another seven years, luckier still to get seventeen. I c
ould not endure the sick feeling in my stomach for another minute, let alone a year or more. My torment was great, but I summoned the same discipline that had gotten me through my footbinding, the epidemic, and the winter in the mountains to help me. I began what I called Cutting a Disease from My Heart. Anytime a memory came into my mind, I painted over it with black ink. If my sight fell upon a memory, I drove it away by closing my eyes. If a memory came in the form of a scent, I buried my nose in the petals of a flower, threw extra garlic in the wok, or conjured up the smell of starvation in the mountains. If a memory grazed my skin—in the form of my daughter’s touch against my hand, my husband’s breath against my ear at night, or the feel of a limp breeze across my breasts as I bathed—I scratched or rubbed or pounded it away. I was as ruthless as a farmer after harvest, yanking out every last remnant of what last season had been his most prized crop. I tried to clear everything down to bare earth, knowing this was the only way I could protect my damaged heart.
When memories of Snow Flower’s love continued to torment me, I constructed a flower tower like the one we had built to ward off Beautiful Moon’s spirit. I had to excise this new ghost, prevent her from ever again preying on my mind or tormenting me with broken promises of deep-heart love. I purged my baskets, trunks, drawers, and shelves of gifts Snow Flower had made for me over the years. I sought every letter she had written in our lifetime together. I had a hard time finding everything. I couldn’t find our fan. I couldn’t find . . . let’s just say many things were missing. But what I found I pasted or placed in the flower tower; then I composed a letter:
You who once knew my heart, now know nothing of me. I burn all your words, hoping they will disappear into the clouds. You, who betrayed and abandoned me, are gone from my heart forever. Please, please leave me alone.
I folded the paper and slipped it through the tiny lattice window and into the upstairs chamber of the flower tower. Then I set fire to the foundation, adding oil when necessary to burn through the handkerchiefs, weavings, and embroideries.
But Snow Flower was persistent in her haunting. When I bound my daughter’s feet, it was as if Snow Flower were in the room with me, a hand on my shoulder, whispering in my ear, “Make sure there are no folds in the bindings. Show your daughter your mother love.” I sang to drown out her words. Sometimes at night I felt her imagined hand resting upon my cheek and I could not fall asleep. I lay there awake, furious with myself and with her, thinking, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. You broke your promise to be true. You betrayed me.
Two people bore the brunt of my suffering. The first, I’m ashamed to admit, was my daughter. The second, I’m sorry to say, was old Madame Wang. My mother love was very strong, and when I bound Jade’s feet you will never know just how careful I was, remembering not only what had happened to Third Sister but also all the lessons my mother-in-law had instilled in me about how to do this job properly, with the least chance of infection, deformity, or death. But I also transferred the pain I felt about Snow Flower out of my body and into my daughter’s feet. Weren’t my lily feet the source of all my pains and gains?
Though my daughter’s bones and disposition were pliant, she wept piteously. I could not stand it, though we had only just begun. I took my feelings and harnessed them, driving my daughter back and forth across the floor of our upstairs room, wrapping her bindings ever tighter on those days that her feet were rewrapped, and chastising her—no, crying bitterly at her—with what my mother had drilled into me. “A true lady lets no ugliness into her life. Only through pain will you have beauty. Only through suffering will you find peace. I wrap, I bind, but you will have the reward.” I hoped that through my actions I might reap a little of that reward and find the peace my mother had promised.
Under the guise of wanting the best for Jade, I spoke with other women in Tongkou who were binding their daughters’ feet. “We all live here,” I said. “We all have good families. Shouldn’t our daughters become sworn sisters?”
My daughter’s feet came out nearly as small as my own. But before I knew the final outcome of that, Madame Wang paid me a call in the fifth month of the new lunar year. In my mind, she had never changed. She had always been an old woman, but on this day I looked at her with a more critical eye. She was far younger than I am now, which meant that when I’d first met her all those years ago, she was forty years old at most. But then my mother and Snow Flower’s mother were dead by that age—give or take—and had been considered long-lived. Thinking back on it, I believe that Madame Wang, as a widow, did not want to die or go to another man’s home. She chose to live and fend for herself. She would not have succeeded if she had not been exceedingly smart and business-minded. But she still had her body to contend with. She let people know she was unassailable by wearing powder to cover what beauty may have lain in her face and dressing in gaudy clothes to set her apart from the married women in our county. Now, in what I guessed must have been her late sixties, she no longer had to hide behind powder and garish silk. She was an old woman—still smart, still business-minded, but with one flaw that I knew too well. She loved her niece.
“Lady Lu, it’s been too long,” she said, as she plopped down in a chair in the main room. When I did not offer tea, she looked around anxiously. “Is your husband here?”
“Master Lu will be home later, but you get ahead of yourself. My daughter is too young for him to negotiate a marriage match.”
Madame Wang slapped her thigh and chortled. When I didn’t join in, she sobered. “You know I am not here for that. I have come to discuss a laotong match. This business is for women only.”
I slowly began to tap the nail of my index finger against the teak arm of my chair. The sound was loud and unnerving even to me, but I did not stop.
She reached into her sleeve and pulled out a fan. “I brought this for your daughter. Perhaps I can give it to her.”
“My daughter is upstairs, but Master Lu would not consider it proper for her to see something that he has not examined first.”
“But, Lady Lu,” Madame Wang confided, “this is in our women’s writing.”
“Then give it to me.” I reached out my hand.
The old matchmaker saw my hand shaking and hesitated. “Snow Flower—”
“No!” The syllable came out harsher than I intended, but I could not bear to hear that name spoken. I calmed myself, then said, “The fan, please.”
She reluctantly gave it to me. Inside my head I had an army of brushes with black ink, obliterating the thoughts and memories that kept popping up. I called upon the hardness of the bronzes in the ancestral temple, the hardness of ice in winter, and the hardness of bones dried out under an unrelenting sun to give me strength. In one swift movement I opened the fan.
I understand there is a girl of good character and women’s learning in your home. These were the first characters Snow Flower had written to me so many years ago. I looked up and saw Madame Wang’s gaze upon me, watching for my reaction, but I kept my features as placid as the surface of a pond on a still night. Our two families plant gardens. Two flowers bloom. They are ready to meet. You and I are of the same year. Shall we not be old sames? Together we will soar above the clouds.
I heard Snow Flower’s voice in every carefully drawn character. I snapped the fan shut and held it out to Madame Wang. She did not take it from my outstretched hand.
“I think, Madame Wang, there has been a mistake. The eight characters of these two girls do not match. They were born on different days in different months. More importantly, their feet did not match before binding began, and I doubt they will match when they are done. And”—I waved my hand idly to take in the main room—“family circumstances do not match. All of this is common knowledge.”
Madame Wang’s eyes narrowed. “You think I don’t know the truth of these things?” She snorted. “Let me tell you what I know. You have severed your bond with no explanation. A woman—your laotong—weeps in confusion—”
“Confusion? Do yo
u know what she did?”
“Speak to her,” Madame Wang went on. “Don’t disrupt a plan that was agreed upon by two loving mothers. Two girls have a bright future together. They can be as happy as their mothers.”
I couldn’t possibly agree to the matchmaker’s suggestion. I was weak with sorrow, and too many times in the past I’d let myself be taken in—diverted, influenced, convinced—by Snow Flower. I also couldn’t risk seeing Snow Flower with her sworn sisters. My mind was already tormented enough imagining their whispered secrets and physical intimacies.
“Madame Wang,” I said, “I would not bring my daughter so low as to match her to the spawn of a butcher.”
I was intentionally spiteful, hoping the matchmaker would abandon the subject, but it was as though she hadn’t heard me, because she said, “I remember the two of you together. Crossing a bridge, you were mirrored in the water below—same height, same size feet, same courage. You pledged fidelity. You promised you would never be a step apart, that you would be together forever, never separated, never distant—”
I’d done all of those things with an open heart, but what about Snow Flower?
“You do not know of what you speak,” I said. “On the day your niece and I signed our contract, you said, ‘No concubines allowed.’ Do you remember that, old woman? Now go ask your niece what she has done.”
I tossed the fan into the matchmaker’s lap and turned my face away, my heart as chilled as the river water that used to run over my feet. I felt that old woman’s eyes on me, weighing, wondering, questioning, but she did not have the will to go on. I heard her rise unsteadily. Her eyes continued to bore into me, but I did not waver in my steadfastness.
