The opening chapters of Part 2 explore The Patriarchal Control of the Female Body by illustrating how older women internalize and violently enforce male-centric demands for lineage. In the Fong household, Maa Maa berates the wives for failing to produce a male heir and commands them to copy religious scriptures using their own blood mixed with ink. When Lady Fong hesitates, Maa Maa slices the side of her palm herself, declaring that only an offering of blood can “demonstrate [true] sincerity to the gods” (47). This brutal ritual literalizes the extraction of female vitality for the patriarchal family line. The women’s blood serves as a desperate offering to secure male heirs, reducing the wives’ physical bodies to raw materials for the family’s continuation. Maa Maa’s violence demonstrates how senior women uphold these oppressive structures, ruthlessly policing younger women to ensure the patrilineal system survives, while protecting their own place and power with it. This subscription is a symptom of abuse, too, and the women’s desperation to survive within an unjust system. These dynamics reflect the broader late-19th-century context in which a woman’s value was strictly determined by her reproductive utility, forcing wives to endure physical harm to maintain their precarious domestic status.

The absence of the main characters’ golden lilies in these chapters underscores both Little Flower’s and Linjing’s feelings of powerlessness. Without bound feet, both characters fear that their prospects will be severely limited, reiterating how physical aesthetics dictate a woman’s socioeconomic mobility. When the matchmaker Madam Hung inspects Little Flower, she recoils at the sight of her unbound feet, stating they are worse than natural feet. Even though Little Flower hopes marriage will free her from servitude, her body remains subject to strict market evaluation. Her mutilated but unbound feet mark her as neither a respectable lady nor a functional peasant, trapping her in a physical limbo. She must trade on her extraordinary artistic talent to be considered for a betrothal. Meanwhile, Linjing fears her future with an abusive Li mother-in-law, a betrothal she never wanted and which has consigned her to a life of undesired natural feet. These dynamics underscore how the traditional gender norms amidst the Qing dynasty made the prospect of genuine independence through marriage a narrow, highly conditional path determined by patriarchal beauty standards.

The recurring motif of embroidery functions as a site of creativity, retaliation, and liberation, deepening the theme of Craft and Labor as Pathways to Autonomy. Because the domestic sphere restricts the main characters’ agency, needlework becomes the sole arena where these young women can exert power. Linjing uses her aristocratic authority to punish Little Flower by forcing her to shred her carefully crafted two-year bridal quilt with scissors. Little Flower retaliates by exploiting her mistress’s color blindness, deliberately mislabeling silk threads. This sabotage causes Linjing to produce a pomegranate embroidery colored like “cooked pig’s blood, of bruises” (71). In such scenes, the characters are using their embroidery work either to elevate themselves or hurt each other. The girls’ more destructive behaviors reiterate how the patriarchal enclosure forces women into competition, preventing them from recognizing their shared vulnerabilities. At the same time, Little Flower’s marked embroidery talents also offer her an avenue out of her restrictive circumstances. By leaning into her personal craft, she both secures the position teaching sewing at the orphanage and convinces Madam Hung to find her a worthy match. In a world defined by restriction, Little Flower finds one way to assert herself and establish her agency.

The narrative uses Miss Hart and the underground Christian network to introduce ideological conflicts regarding Western intervention, complicating the characters’ avenues of escape. Miss Hart offers to smuggle Spring Rain to safety in exchange for devotion to Christ, but Spring Rain furiously rejects the offer. She cites Western involvement in the opium trade that caused her father’s addiction and her subsequent enslavement. This rejection highlights the fraught nature of foreign benevolence. While Miss Hart views herself as a progressive savior offering an escape from the indentured servitude system, Spring Rain recognizes the systemic exploitation behind this charity. The proposed sanctuary requires the complete surrender of cultural and religious identity. By weaving anti-slavery ideals with the destructive legacy of foreign imperialism, the text situates the characters’ personal struggles within a broader national crisis.

As Little Flower seeks to conceptualize her own escape, Linjing meanwhile designs her own path to security by altering her perception of Little Flower, which in turn initiates a shift in their power dynamic. After Little Flower calmly accepts the blame for the sabotaged embroidery without confessing, Linjing recognizes her maid’s unyielding resolve. Rather than dismissing her, Linjing decides she needs Little Flower’s “pluck and cunning” (81) and petitions her mother to make Little Flower her dowry handmaiden. Linjing abandons her outright contempt for her muizai when she realizes she can exploit Little Flower’s resilience to conceal her own color blindness from her future mother-in-law. Like Little Flower, she is seeking safety and agency in a system that disadvantages her despite her higher class. She uses Little Flower as a pawn in this plan. Instead of allowing Little Flower to marry and leave her, Linjing works to trap her out of self-preservation. This maneuver guarantees that Little Flower’s exceptional abilities will be absorbed into Linjing’s own marital assets.