Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

As preparation for her life as a cultured wife, Lily learns nu shu, the secret women’s writing. While women are prohibited from learning official writing, or men’s writing, as Lily calls it, they have access through their female contacts to this secret women’s writing, of which many characters “are only italicized versions of men’s characters” (69). According to legend, it was created by a woman, Yuxiu, who felt lonely in her household, as a means of communicating secretly with her mother and sisters. Lily describes the act of writing as a “rebellion” (4).

The distinction between the oral and the written word becomes a significant narrative feature. Those women who are capable of both storytelling and writing appear to have an advantage over both the less educated and the more educated. Lily observes that her mother-in-law was so well trained in women’s writing that she seemed to have lost the ability to tell a good story. Lily, who has experience in both skills, is able to improvise when necessary, pretending to read Snow Flower’s wedding book to her friend’s new in-laws, while she is in fact changing the words on the fly to be more flattering to the family, and more supportive of Snow Flower.

The ability to communicate in writing is a means by which women are able to transcend the limitations of their gender, but it is also limiting. Because it is a skill shared mostly by more cultured women, there are a lot of poorer women who do not have access to this means of communication. Lily’s natal home, in which her mother does not know nu shu, but her aunt does, is a liminal space where Lily is able to experience both conditions at once. Lily’s learning to write becomes symbolic of her shift from the worthless daughter of a poor family to a woman of high status.