Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

Book Review by Zinta Aistars

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Random House, 2009
• Price: $17.00
• ISBN-10: 0812980352
• ISBN-13: 978-0812980356



As I began to read Lisa See’s meticulously researched novel based on 19th-century life in China, I was instantly transported to my girlhood days of reading Pearl S. Buck’s wonderful books about China (The Good Earth, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932; Peony; Pavilion of Women; A House Divided; and many others). I have always been very interested to learn about other cultures, especially those very different from mine, and Buck had early on introduced me to life in China, as seen through the eyes of women. Now, Lisa See reopened my eyes and brought me back to that adventure and all of its exotic intrigue.

Lily is the voice of the narrator, an 80-year-old Chinese woman recalling her life as a girl, then as a woman, in a culture that subjugated women and considered the female gender in general almost entirely worthless. The author shows us, helps us to feel and understand, what it meant to be a female in this particular time and place.

Lily is a child as the first scene opens, a little girl who is contemplating the cruel practice of foot binding that she is about to endure. This tradition, supposedly started by a Chinese empress who had a club foot and wanted other women to match her deformity (other variations on this tale include a Chinese ruler who thought the tiny feet of a dancer were so erotic that he wanted all Chinese women to have such feet, later called “lily feet”), was perpetrated for centuries, elevated to the erotic by Chinese men (one wonders why the male idea of eroticism so often seems to involve some form of forced control over women), and raised to the level of being a external sign of belonging to the upper class, of having grace and education. Indeed, lower classes were spared this horrendous practice.

Foot binding, as the author describes it, would begin as early as at the age of 3. Because it was the only way to have a marriageable daughter, mothers were often those who bound the feet of their daughters. The process began when the bones of the foot were still malleable, and the foot would be bound in ever tightening strips of cloth, and the little girls forced to walk back and forth, back and forth, on their bound feet throughout the day. Beneath that binding, toes were folded under the foot, so that walking would, usually over a period of a few days, effectively break the bones of the toes and curl them permanently under the foot. As the girl grew, the foot would become nearly folded in half, a deep cleft forming in its middle section. Since toenails continued to grow, often directly into the flesh of the foot, infection would result, sometimes leading to the girl’s death. Adult women with bound feet would hobble on these tiny stubs that were the size of a small child’s feet, but a few inches in length. The pain these girls and women had to endure from their crippled feet lasted a lifetime.

“Only through pain will you have beauty. Only through suffering will you have peace,” writes See of the thinking of that time.

It is interesting to contemplate how women today suffer pain for beauty in comparison to these 19th-century Chinese women. If we read these historic accounts aghast at what women were subjected to and even themselves encouraged one upon another, accepting these deformities as “beautiful,” one wonders at the contemporary woman on stilettos, which any podiatrist will attest cause foot, leg and spinal injury over time, or the cosmetic and plastic surgery, liposuction, Botox injections, and a long list of modern-day torments, on into eating disorders, to which women today subject themselves, all in the name of “beauty.”When looked at that way, we can hardly read about these girls and women with a sense of superiority—we’ve come a long way, baby? Or perhaps not so very long at all. If there is a lesson for women throughout history, we may yet have to learn it.

The narrator Lily writes about the companionship between women, about the special relationship she has with another Chinese girl, Snow Flower, who is her “laotung,” or “old same,” an allusion to two kindred spirits. In a male dominated world, women live segregated from others, much of their lives lived out in women’s chambers, out of the sight of men and rarely seeing daylight—until the men need them to do their household chores or perform (and that would be the correct word here) their wifely duties. The women show a different face among themselves, but another face entirely to their men. To their men, they are ever flattering and complimentary, ever serving their needs and fluffing their egos, soft and gentle and kind and sweet. In their intimate moments with their husbands, which are usually not intimate at all (Lily refers to this as “bed business”), women will do anything to make their men feel special and to keep them loyal, even as they withdraw later to their own chambers to trade horror stories. Girls are trained from birth to treat men with this external face of honor, while they are never allowed to forget that they themselves are completely without value outside of what they bring to a man’s world.

“My education in the upstairs women’s chamber began in earnest, but I already knew a lot. I knew that men rarely entered the women’s chamber; it was for us alone, where we could do our work and share our thoughts. I knew I would spend almost my entire life in a room like that. I also knew the difference between nei—the inner realm of the home—and wai—the outer realm of men—lay at the very heart of Confucian society. Whether you are rich or poor, emperor or slave, the domestic sphere is for women and the outside sphere is for men. Women should not pass beyond the inner chambers in their thoughts or in their actions. I also understood that two Confucian ideals ruled our lives…’When a girl, obey your father; when a wife, obey your husband; when a widow, obey your son’… the Four Virtues, which delineate women’s behavior, speech, carriage, and occupation: ‘Be chaste and yielding, calm and upright in attitude; be quiet and agreeable in words; be restrained and exquisite in movement; be perfect in handiwork and embroidery.’ If girls do not stray from these principles, they will grow into virtuous women.” (Page 24)

Set against this background, these women develop “nu shu,” a form of writing that is understood only by women. It is a secret code, and Lily and her laotung Snow Flower write messages to each other on a beautiful fan that they send back and forth to each other throughout their lifetimes. The author has researched here an actual secret code used a thousand years ago by Chinese women to communicate with one another. The messages were often poetic, artistically embroidered. Nu shu was often the only truth communicated in a women's world that otherwise was lived only behind masks.

As we watch the relationships of these women unfold—the mothers and daughters, the aunts and grandmothers, the female matchmakers, the sisters and laotung, it is clear that most of these women know real love only in their circles of women, while outside of these circles all is harshly enforced tradition and rule. As Lily grows into a young woman and marries, her mother-in-law advises her to “obey, obey, obey, and then do what you want.” The nu shu secret writing is one means of that quiet independent spirit that keeps these women alive in such a cruel world. Their bonds give them strength, companionship, courage to endure, shared wisdom. In one scene between Lily and Snow Flower as young girls first becoming aware of their own physical beauty, we see the only real eroticism among the many “bed business” scenes in the novel. Together, they discover their bodies and their sensuality, even though it is clear they are heterosexual women … the point taken is that this was the only way some of these women ever knew a truly intimate touch, one given out of mutual love. Most never knew a loving touch at all.

The novel traces the lives of Lily and Snow Flower as the two intersect, grow close, and then again grow apart. False pretenses come to light, “white lies” prove to have very dark consequences, real identities are revealed, and the differences between the upper and lower classes develop chasms between even the closest friends. The author examines the repercussions of violence between intimate partners, but also the occasional budding of true feeling between a woman and a man—yes, against all odds, that occasionally happens.

When all cultural differences and historical details are brushed aside, it can be sobering to realize how many of these human interactions and behaviors thrive even today. Women are still objectified, still suffer for beauty, and still wear masks to gain popularity with the opposite gender. Abusive behavior transcends generations, and painfully often—it is women themselves who break the spirit of the next generation. Domestic violence is at epidemic levels, as current statistics show that the least safe place for a woman to be today—is in her own home. Along with all that dark reality, however, other things still hold true, too—the unique communion of women, the power of redemption, the remarkable endurance of the human spirit, and the human need for intimacy no matter how many masks we wear to get through the day.

Lisa See has written a fascinating historical novel that shines a light on modern society even as she writes about ancient history. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is but one of many novels the author has written about the Chinese culture. The book is thought provoking, entertaining, moving, worthy of deeper discussion, expertly written and thoroughly researched, and, like any good book, entices the reader to want to learn more.


~for The Smoking Poet, Summer 2010 Issue

Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Anything by Geneen Roth

Book Review by Zinta Aistars

Hardcover, 224 pages
Simon and Schuster
Price: $24.00
ISBN13: 9781416543077







The United States has become the poster nation for overweight people, and, quite possibly going hand in hand, we have also increasingly become a nation of obsessions and addictions. The reasons, I suspect, are varied and many, arguably from living in a society that has lost sense of its values, to living in a society bombarded with convenience everything, including poor quality foods with a long list of chemical additives and preservatives, many of which studies have shown can lead to increased appetite, to possibly so many pollutants in our air and earth and water that our bodies are becoming chemically out-of-whack in efficiency of using food, to a simple lack of physical activity or even sleep deprivation.

Geneen Roth lists an impressive publishing history on her book jacket, but no credentials in the fields of science or psychology. Indeed, this is the one notable lacking in this popular book, and one which is a major one. As much as I enjoyed reading this Oprah-blessed book, I kept wishing for something more solid, cited cases and studies, observed and noted results, tie-ins to scientific expertise, but found none.

There, we’ll get that out of the way—my one gripe. The author is otherwise an accomplished one, with eight prior books on similar topics, on which she has based many workshops and retreats. She has written for The Huffington Post, Good Housekeeping, and O, The Oprah Magazine. And she has appeared on 20/20, Good Morning America, The View, NPR, and other much-watched shows. Roth knows how to market herself, and that's not a bad thing. Certainly the idea of this and her other books are very marketable. One might say, we are hungry for solutions to our national weight crisis.

Clearly there is an emotional factor (among other factors) to overeating among American women. Most anyone has experienced eating out of stress, nervous tension, anxiety, depression, or some other emotional upheaval. This is the area into which Roth delves, exploring how our eating habits correlate with our emotions. Of the connection to God (note the title of the book) or “everything,” I am not sure, but Roth makes the general point that how we eat is how we do everything. If we respect our bodies, perhaps therein lies our connection to God—disrespect for our bodies, or the objectification of women in general, as Roth points out, translates into disrespect toward God and the divine temple (our physical bodies) He created for us to inhabit. If we are unhappy or out of balance emotionally, she says, our bodies show it.

Roth’s book opens on a scene of one of her workshops, where women gather to understand how their emotional selves connect to their physical selves, food being the connecting thread between the two. Food, Roth writes, can become our tool of obsession, our means of self-denial, our manner of evading the emotions we cannot bear to face. Food is a way to deaden the pain.

“I’ve been abandoned and betrayed by who and what really matters and what I’ve got left is food.” (Page 6)

It’s an interesting theory. Food as drug, as crutch, as mask, as buffer against emotional pain. For women, food is often a means of coping with relationships gone bad. Reading the book, I recalled a wise woman in my own life telling me that I was “carrying the weight of my emotions” during a time when I was deeply unhappy in a dysfunctional relationship. For the first time in my life, I was struggling with weight, and I knew the truth in her words—I was using food to fill the void inside, to deaden pain, to build a buffer between myself and my partner, a man who had turned out to be a serial cheater with an addiction to pornography. I found myself in an emotionally battering nightmare. The hit to my self-respect, especially on such a physical and intimate level, was overwhelming. The more betrayed and rejected I felt, the more my appetite increased. While I had been the same weight for my entire adulthood since high school, for the first time, I saw the scale climb. I was indeed carrying the weight of my battered emotions. I was a walking, eating illustration of Roth's theory. It wasn't until after I left that sad scenario that I began to tip back into balance, with contentment returning also a normal appetite, even as my appetite for a good life returned.

It could be that women are especially prone to this. Roth, unless I missed it, does not explain why her book addresses only women, but the genders do seem to develop different types of bad habits when it comes to attempts to escape our emotions. Since American men are also often obese, however, one wishes Roth might have addressed this further. When Roth tells her readers to face the pain rather than eat through it, she cheerily writes that there are worse things than facing a broken heart. Hmm, I had to think about that. Is there? Hearts break over betrayal, abandonment, death or loss of a loved one (spouse, mate, child), loss of a cherished dream, or any number of reasons. I would say there really is nothing worse, but hey, that's me. Whatever Roth considers worse, I would be curious to hear it, but her point is taken. We must at some point enter the pain, the rage, the storm of emotion, if we are ever to get through to the other side to a healthier self.

Compartmentalizing pain, Roth says, leads to obsession—in this case, an obsession with food. We may think we are dealing with our emotions when we reach for the bag of chips or bar of chocolate, but we are not. One way or another, our emotions will be heard. Compartmentalization may work in the short run as a survival mechanism, but in the long run it inevitably backfires; it simply pushes our denied emotions into other unhealthy behaviors. “Obsessions are ways we leave before we are left because we believe that the pain of staying would kill us.” (Page 42)

Roth addresses the women in her workshops, and her readers, by encouraging them to look more closely at whatever it is they are not facing. Hunger comes in different forms. Hunger for acceptance, hunger for love, all too often become confused with hunger for food. Through various steps, she helps women separate different kinds of hunger. Most of us, she rightly states, don't even recognize physical hunger. She also encourages women to stop fighting their hunger for food. This may initially sound controversial—to be told in a diet-crazed society that we should never diet again. But if diets worked, we would be the thinnest nation in the world rather than the most overweight.

Roth invites us to eat. Eat when we are hungry. Not when we are hungry for love, or acceptance, or whatever else … but to eat when our bodies are truly in need of physical sustenance. Then, eat to our fill. No more, no less. Once that taboo is removed, she argues, our obsession ends. Desire is often fed by the elicit, by the wish to do what we are not supposed to do, the forbidden apple becoming too much of a temptation … and so, Roth invites us to take a bite. She teaches us, in fact, to bite with utmost respect. Bite the apple, and yes, the cookie, too. Move aside all distraction, set aside the time, create a kind of divine moment of eating. Food is good. Food is not the enemy. Once we stop treating it like one, we may well find that our bodies, our appetites, begin to regulate themselves.

Feel the feeling, Roth says. Deal with the emotions. Compartmentalized pain will not go away until we fully open that door. If initially we may tear through our pantry, our no longer forbidden fruit will eventually become less enticing once it is readily available. We may, in fact, find ourselves reaching for the apple rather than the cookie.

In a society in which women are so often judged by our bodies, valued or not valued in direct correlation with our physical appearance, Roth writes of the need for treating our physical, and so also our emotional, selves with reverence. Objectification, after all, is just another word for hatred, and Roth speaks of the magazine photos of emaciated and anorexic women, the airbrushed images in all forms of media, women transformed by plastic surgery and treated as objects in pornography so that men come to expect an ever more unrealistic and unattainable perfection, and children, especially girls, being taught from an early age that appearance is everything.

“…our objectification of matter—including women’s bodies—is a partial cause of the apocalyptic disaster in which we now find ourselves. Rather than treating our bodies (and the body of the earth) with reverence, we trash them, try to bend them to our wills.” (Page 123)

Connect mind, body, spirit with reverence, open one to the other, deny none, and obsessions and addictions will lose their power.

Roth’s statement that food can be our doorway to the divine may be a bit of a stretch, but I do think she is on the right path with this. Including some closely monitored case studies (rather than anecdotal stories) with women dealing with emotional and/or spiritual pain in connection with their weight would have added much to this book. Adding expertise from persons in hard sciences would also have elevated it from an interesting and thought-provoking read to a powerful theory to be taken seriously. Nonetheless, it is worth considering and testing in one’s own life, with our emotional state being at least one part of our consideration of returning to a wholistically healthy state in body, mind and spirit.

If Roth’s guidelines are sometimes not realistic in our hurried and harried lives (e.g., never have a meal while simultaneously doing something else), the general idea is good common sense. Raising our awareness about the food we are stuffing into our faces is always a good idea. Slowing us down to consider that the hunger we are feeding, the void we are trying to fill, the pain we are avoiding, should be fed in healthier ways, is sound wisdom. Our national problem with food goes beyond these behaviors, but this is as excellent a beginning as any for a nation that is dealing with an epidemic of obesity.

Exiliana, poetry by Mariela Griffor

Book Review by Zinta Aistars

• Paperback: 75 pages
• Publisher: Luna Publications; 1st edition (January 31, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0978147103
• ISBN-13: 978-0978147105


When one is stripped of country, home, family, lover, to what does one cling? Mariela Griffor will always have language, her chosen tool to rebuild. In this, in her poetry, she takes root. She has found a new home, even as her heart aches for another home in the distance of time and place. She has made her home in a new country, surrounded herself with a new family, and her poetry attests new love.

Yet…

In the passing of the years
the grief does not disappear.

Griffor has lived a life as complex as a novel, rich and filled with loss and tragedy and redemption. Born in Concepcion, a city in southern Chile, she was involved in politics from age 15, fighting for democracy and against the Pinochet dictatorship. Her first great love was a comrade in arms, and he was killed as such, even while she, still in her early 20s, carried his child and was forced into exile. Life tossed her first to Sweden, then a new love to the United States, where she now lives in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, today a poet and publisher, founder of Marick Press.

If a poet’s biography rarely makes it to the top of a book review, but is left usually as an after note, Griffor’s story is unavoidable here, for Exiliana is a song of her exile, of love for home old and home new, of an undefeated if still sometimes suffering spirit. Her history is in her poetry, her scars give it its meter, her passion its rhythm, her strong spirit its vibrancy.

In her first poem, “Prologue,” Griffor sets the stage as an outsider, one standing apart, yet even then, defining a new way to continue her life.

I invent a friend to pour out
remembrances of the old country.


Out here, I invent new sounds, new men, new women.
I assassinate the old days with nostalgia.
I don’t see but invent a city and its people, its fury, its sky.


I don’t belong to the earth but to the air.
As I invent you, I invent myself.

When roots are not allowed to sink into the soil where one stands, one grows them in air, easily moved from place to place, rooted instead in those invented men and women, and in that newly invented life. Griffor’s song of exile will resonate with anyone who is at home away from home, perhaps in poetry offering home to others likewise uprooted. She captures that paradox neatly—of embracing one while longing for the other, past and present, old and new, dark and light, somehow managing to remain fully faithful to both.

Her poems are the letters of a lover, and her love is even more fierce for its testing. She pays the cost of loving so fiercely, but it is that ferocity of spirit that is her key to survival. Her poems travel from her long ago home of Chile, to a rainy day in Michigan, wander along the cold streets of Scandinavia. Her poems dig down into coffins where lost lovers lie, soar to distant mountaintops, linger in a child’s all-seeing eyes, scratch with long nails at jealousy and envy, and know more than one moment of simple truth. Her poems sear love with its loss, accept new love with its patience and comfort, remember the chill of a grandmother’s absent “cyanide smile,” and contemplate the first moment of chaos in a butterfly’s flap of wings in faraway Santiago.

When so tossed, one begins to understand: “we were alive, full of sun and fears.” Love is shallow when wasted on the perfect, but blossoms fully with blessing when lavished on the imperfect.

I like you like that, full of imperfections, with that
indescribable hair that is not blond, black, or reddish,
with that big sharp nose
that cuts that Bremen face,
with those large and clumsy fingers
that hang like traps for my kisses …

Joy stands best when planted firmly beside tragedy. Home is most appreciated by those who have lost theirs.

We have left a joy pending.


Live, love, and fight with the same fervour of those
who know that life at any moment can go extinct.

Happiness thrives on grit, “what fresh happiness that was,” sharing a sleeping bag with a lover and the sand creeping in. From impersonal, Griffor focuses on the personal, stepping away for a moment to see her lover as the dead patriot, as others see him, but to her, he is the memory of a shared chocolate ice cream or a clay candlestick long ago lit. She has the heart of a warrior, a survivor, still standing and strong if heavily scarred.

I have lived among men of flesh and blood.
I have loved, hated,
fought against
men of flesh and blood.

I have been conquered, humiliated,
I have been cast out to a shameful exile
among men of flesh and blood …


I have come back in the darkness to encountering them.

Exiliana is a necklace of pearls made of such encounters. Griffor has caught the shadow in her clear, clean and simple language (and one wishes at times to see the originals in her native Spanish, if only to hear another kind of music and shift in rhythm), leaving no room for misunderstanding. This is life at its harshest, love at its most tender, grief at its darkest hour. This is poetry also of healing, encouraging all fallen to stand again, even her present city of Detroit, fallen in its own battles, to which she writes more than one poem like a ballad, or a war cry, to banish its voodoo and shame and rise again.

Griffor is a poet of contrast and paradox. With so much of loss and grief, and wounds time refuses to heal, a reader might fear sinking into such poetry—but should not. Only recall the poet’s reminder that love for perfection isn’t really love at all, but an easy ride soon forgotten. Love for the imperfect that we all, after all, are, is the only kind that sustains. There is a golden thread of hope and endurance through these lines, and Griffor’s poetry sustains by mirroring the battles of life that, to some degree, we have all known and survived.

Let the golden haze
that rusts your aura
shine proudly
on your face again.


Let a feeling of goodness
drench the city like a storm.
Let your dreams flourish and endure.
Turn the holy fight into
salutation.
Let the happiness return.


Mariela Griffor was born in Concepcion, Chile, and attended the University of Santiago and the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. She left Chile for an involuntary exile in Sweden in 1985. She and her American husband returned to the United States in 1998 with their two daughters. They live in Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan. She is co-founder of The Institute for Creative Writers at Wayne State University and Publisher of Marick Press. Her work has appeared in periodicals across Latin America and the United States. Mariela holds a B.A in Journalism and a M.F.A. in creative writing from New England College. She is Honorary Consul of Chile in Michigan.