It is summer, and that means reading.
Lo, the stacks at the local library. They beckon me with their non-electronic spines. Lo, the luxury, binge-quality indulgences of quantity, wandering, and unaccountable time. These piles, they free me from domesticity, repetition, and my kid's tweener eye rolls. They free me from aimlessness and duty, the two end stops of my summer to-do tire swing.
Sheer pleasure to choose and just wonder. And such a chance at serendipity, courtesy of the Free Book Exchange, arrived last week in the form of Lisa See's book Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. In the world of first person narratives, seven-year-old Lily speaks in the tone I imagine a melancholy (not mourning) dove might: truthfully, in minor key, and with keen vision. She will break hearts, this one.
The story takes place in nineteenth-century China, and opens in the voice of an elderly Lily, a widow who recalls the painful lessons of footbinding, the language of nu shu ("secret-code writing used by women in a remote area of southern Hunan Province"), and the purpose of her narrative. She is resigned but not defeated. And though the love she longed for in her life was never felt, she comes to see that it may have been her inability to know, to feel this love, that was her greatest impediment. And it sets the stage for the story to become the path for reclaiming the deep-heart love not rendered.
I have just started the book and am only into the second chapter, entitled "Milk Years." And I love Lily.Yet I hate the world she is born into, a world where women's feet are broken, where marriage is akin to property exchange, where work boils over, where obligation and tradition freeze girls' lives into numb obedience.
And I tell my daughter some of these things. Not all, but some. She balks at footbinding. She resists family hierarchy. She goes back to her Sailor Moon graphic novel and sips her box juice.
I go back to my book, touch the sturdy binding, and turn the page. I invite you to join me here, to respond, to write and to sit in warm company at this electric table.
With a toast of the coffee cup and more to come,
Jo
