50 pages • 1-hour read
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
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Themes
Teng Ai - Mother Love
Lily talks of the traditional form of mother love, known as teng ai, which in the language of her people is “composed of two characters. The first means pain; the second means love. That is a mother’s love” (4). Because life in Lily’s society is so difficult for women, the way a mother raises her daughter must include training and preparation for the hardships ahead. Later in the novel, Lily expresses her belief that a mother’s love for her children is an emotion borne “out of duty, respect, and gratitude” (59). Embedded within this emotion, then, are the material concerns necessary for survival. A woman must be able to endure hardship, so that she will not be rejected by those who provide her with food and shelter.
Lily’s description of mother love, however, carries a sense of longing for a different, more organic form of love. With Snow Flower, she finds a love that does not inflict pain, but rather seeks to ease it, a love in which she is free to express desire and even have her desire satisfied.
Wealth and Worth
Throughout Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, there is the sense that every facet of life is a matter of financial or material concern. Lily longs to be loved in her family, but she understands that only sons are truly cherished because of their ability to contribute to the family’s wealth. Girls, on the other hand, are considered to be a drain on resources until they are able to produce a male child, as “sons are the foundation of a woman’s worth” (151). Lily says that the “Catching Cool Breezes” festival is a time of year that women look forward to, because they visit their families. She also points out the practical reason for this festival: that it is the time of year when resources are running low, and so the responsibility of feeding the women reverts back to their natal families. As a child, longing for the affection of her mother, Lily is delighted to receive a slap as punishment for having distinguished herself to the matchmaker, because “in one instant I had changed from being a worthless girl into someone who might be useful to the family” (23).
Gender Roles
In Lily’s society, gender roles are distinct and the rules are unbreakable. Men are the providers, the increasers of wealth. Women are only of value in as much as they can produce more male offspring. They are kept distinct and separate from one another. Men conduct business, learn to read and write, provide for their household, and work outside the home. Women remain inside, bear children, attend to housekeeping, and stay out of sight.
In the novel, we see many instances where individual characters subvert their gender roles, and engage in behavior that challenges the restraints imposed upon them. Madame Wang tells the story of a woman who is transformed into a man and is thereby able to bring good fortune on the lives of her family. In a sense, she is dramatizing her own situation. As a matchmaker, she must conduct business with men, in effect embodying the role of a man, and is thereby able to improve the lives of the young women for whom she finds matches. Conversely, the eldest son of Snow Flower, considered a poor prospect by his own family, learns whatever Lily is able to teach him. He is a man who is being trained in female knowledge, but through this initial training, he comes into an elevated social status in later years through Lily’s influence.
Storytelling
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a frame tale, a novel in which an old woman is dictating the story of her life to a younger woman. This structure, the story within the story, places the concept of storytelling at the center of the novel’s message. The fact that the narrator is dictating the story to the young woman who will write it down, demonstrates the significance of both mediums, oral and written. Lily asserts the importance of storytelling in her final paragraphs, as she reveals that she has recorded the stories of many women, because she believes their stories have value, even if the women themselves were not valued in their own day-to-day lives.
Both oral and written storytelling are prominent in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. Both mediums draw on set forms. Even Lily’s correspondences with Snow Flower follow a set formula, “since the very form of a married woman’s letter needed to include the usual complaints . . . without appearing ungrateful, no-account, or unfilial” (150). The form is required, in order that the listeners can know how to interpret the message of the story. Conversely, when the storyteller modifies the known plot or form slightly, listeners are given a signal that the storyteller has something new to say. Thus, when Lily tells Snow Flower’s son a story and modifies it slightly, she is attempting, through her break with tradition, to change the boy’s actual future, by showing him a new possibility.
Because women are expected to hide their emotions, as well as their bodies, from the world, they have limited means of communicating their experiences. Storytelling—that is, stories told about other people—becomes a means by which they can share experiences with one another without referring directly to themselves. As a girl, Lily often assumes the stories she hears to be directed toward her specifically. As she grows older, she recognizes that stories are shared among women as a means of communicating to one another that they are not alone in their experiences, that there are others who understand their struggles.
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