Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is set in nineteenth-century China and narrated by Lily, who was born on 5 June 1824, the fifth day of the sixth month in the third year of the Daoguang Emperor's reign. Lily is the daughter of a farmer in rural Hunan, and at the age of six the local matchmaker tells her family that her feet, if bound properly, will be flawless. In a society in which a woman's prospects are judged by the size and shape of her feet, that is good news for the household and years of pain for the girl. She lives through the reigns of four Qing emperors, and the novel is told in retrospect, opening in 1903 when Lily is eighty and looking back over her whole life.

During her childhood Lily learns nu shu, the secret script used by the women of the region, and she is matched with a laotong, or "old-same", from a more refined household: Snow Flower of Tongkou. The laotong bond is a chosen sisterly relationship that begins when the girls are seven and is understood to be closer and more enduring than a marriage, which is arranged for other purposes. The two of them carry that bond through their marriages, their households and their years as mothers.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan was published in 2005. The novel is told by Lily at eighty, looking back over a life that runs from a Hunan farm through marriage, motherhood and old age.