Snow flower and the secret fan by Lisa See

Author:Lisa See [Lisa See]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Histoire
ISBN: 9780812980356
Published: 2009-05-26T06:12:17+00:00

SINCE SNOW FLOWER’S

elder sister would not deliver the third-day wedding books, I went in her place. My natal family sent a palanquin, and in a short time I arrived in Jintian. No decorations or raucous sounds of a wedding band gave any hint that anything special was happening in the village on that day. I simply stepped out of my palanquin onto a dirt pathway in front of a house with a low-slung roof and a pile of wood against the wall. To the right of the door was something that looked like a gigantic wok embedded in a brick platform.

A feast should have been prepared for my arrival. It wasn’t. The top women in the village should have greeted me. They did, but the coarseness of their dialect, even though only a few li from Tongkou, told me a lot about the unsavory quality of the people who lived here.

When the time came to read the sanzhaoshu, I was ushered into the main room. On the surface, the house resembled my natal home. Drying chilies hung from the central beam. The walls were of rough unpainted brick. I had hoped these similarities to my home would be reflected in the people who lived there. I did not encounter Snow Flower’s husband on this occasion, but I did meet his mother, and she was a dreadful creature. Her eyes were set close together and her lips had the thinness that connotes a narrow mind and a mean spirit.

Snow Flower came into the room, sat on a stool next to the display of her third-day wedding books, and waited quietly. Although I felt I had changed with marriage, she did not look different to my eyes. The women of Jintian clustered around the sanzhaoshu, running their dirty fingers over them. They talked among themselves about the stitching on the edges and the paper cutouts, but none of them said a word about the quality of the writing or the thoughts expressed. After a few minutes, the women took positions around the room.

Snow Flower’s mother-in-law walked to a bench. Her feet had not been as badly bound as my mother’s, but an oddness to her gait marked her class even more than the guttural sounds that spewed from her mouth. She sat down, glanced with distaste at her new daughter-in-law, and then focused her unfeeling eyes on me. “I understand you have married into the Lu family. You are very lucky.” The words were polite, but the way she spoke them suggested that I had bathed in offal. “People say that you and my daughter-in-law are well versed in nu shu. The women of our village don’t value this pastime. We can read it, but we believe it is better to hear it.”

I thought otherwise. This woman was like my mother, illiterate in nu shu. I glanced around the room, sizing up the other women. They hadn’t commented on the writing because they probably knew very little of it themselves.

“We have no need to hide our thoughts in scribbles on paper,” Snow Flower’s mother-in-law continued.

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