The Importance of Friendship

This is a joining of two hearts that cannot be torn apart by distance, disagreement, loneliness, better marriage position, or by letting other girls—and later women—come between you.

Here, in “Snow Flower,” Madame Wang explains to Lily and Snow Flower the importance of their laotong contract after they have signed it. In the way she explains it, the bond between laotong is more sacred than that of husband and wife. While a husband may take concubines or leave his family for months on end, both of which Lily’s husband eventually does, laotong must remain true to their promises no matter what. They vow to never let even another woman come between them. And, while a woman can be sold into a new marital family in the event of her husband’s death, nothing can break the vows between two women who are laotong. This shows how Lily and Snow Flower are meant to be true to each other throughout their lives in a way that no one else can be. It also foreshadows the conflicts that will come between them. First, Lily allows her better marriage position to disrupt their relationship. She then believes other women have come between them in the form of the sworn sisters.

All these types of love come out of duty, respect, and gratitude. Most of them, as the women in my county know, are sources of sadness, rupture, and brutality. But the love between a pair of old sames is something completely different.

Here, in “Love,” after Lily and Snow Flower have become laotong, Lily thinks of how their bond is different from any other relationship a woman will have. As women are only valued for their ability to be obedient under all circumstances and to bear sons, from birth, girls are seen as a nuisance to their parents, who can only hope to marry them off to a reputable family. Even once a woman is married, she must obey her husband and in-laws, often enduring horrific emotional, verbal, and physical abuse for arbitrary reasons. As Lily points out, these types of relationships can only lead to sadness. However, the love between female friends, especially laotong, is meant to be true and authentic, only based on their mutual respect, care, and admiration for each other. In a culture where women must undergo so much suffering based on their gender alone, female friendship is one of the bright spots that allows women to truly be themselves.

I’d been wrong on every count, including the last one because during those long days I saw the solace that the other women brought to Snow Flower. They had not come to her just at this final moment as I had; they had watched over her for many years.

Lily thinks these words to herself in the chapter titled, “Into the Clouds,” as she visits Snow Flower while Snow Flower is dying. Here, Lily realizes that Snow Flower was not part of the sworn sisters, just a friend whom they cared for and supported. Prior to this realization, Lily assumed the opposite, believing Snow Flower was closer to the women than she ever was with her. In the final weeks of Snow Flower’s life, Lily finally learns what true friendship looks like as she sees the interaction between the sworn sisters and Snow Flower. Since Lily always longed for love and thought she needed to work hard to earn it, she never knew love between friends as unconditional and freely given. While Lily assumed her duty to Snow Flower was to help her be a good wife, as her own relationship with Snow Flower elevated her own marriage prospects, she neglected to be the friend that Snow Flower actually needed. Seeing Snow Flower with the sworn sisters helps Lily understand that loving someone and being their friend means being there no matter what, without judgement or pity.

The Pain of Coming of Age

In this way, she taught me how to endure—not just the physical trials of footbinding and childbearing but the more torturous pain of the heart, mind, and soul.

Here at the beginning of the novel, in “Sitting Quietly,” Lily reflects on her childhood, a time when she longed for her mother’s love. She thinks of how she tried to win her mother’s affection by obeying and continuing on with her footbinding even when the pain seemed like it was too much to bear. As Lily looks back on this time, she realizes this process taught her both physical and mental fortitude. In this way, footbinding represents the pain of growing up, for women in particular. Not only does the procedure prepare Lily for the physical pains of womanhood, such as eventual childbirth, but it also teaches her how to withstand emotional turmoil, which she would experience with both her mother and Snow Flower. However, as she was taught to simply endure and ignore the pain, Lily would do the same with her own relationships, letting her anger fester, grow, and sometimes become displaced onto someone else. This shows how trauma from the abuse she experienced while growing up never truly left her, and eventually affected others in her life, thus continuing the pattern of abuse, misunderstandings, and anger.

The binding altered not only my feet but my whole character, and in a strange way I feel as though that process continued throughout my life, changing me from a yielding child to a determined girl, then from a young woman who would follow without question whatever her in-laws demanded of her to the highest-ranked woman in the county who enforced strict village rules and customs.

In “Sitting Quietly” at the beginning of the novel, Lily thinks of how the footbinding process made her into who she became. As her feet were once malleable, so was her personality, which made her especially vulnerable to her mother’s orders of obedience and duty. Since Lily’s feet were bound from such a young age, beginning at age seven, her personality, like the bones in her feet, became set when she was far too young to truly know who she was. Being forced to endure the pain of footbinding from childhood meant that Lily expected a life of pain and suffering, and so never questioned what she was told by the elders in her life. This shows how forcing someone to come of age too early, and in such a painful way, can have irrevocable effects for the rest of their life. In turn, Lily then became an adult who demanded her children follow these same traditions. As she never questioned what she was taught, she never thought to change the pattern and choose a new way of raising her children.

‘A true lady lets no ugliness into her life,’ she repeated, again and again, drilling the words into me. ‘Only through pain will you have beauty. Only through suffering will you find peace.’

While readers first hear these words spoken by Mama to Lily here in the chapter titled “Footbinding” during Lily’s footbinding process, Lily will hear these same words again the night before her wedding, when her mother insinuates what will be expected of Lily on her wedding night. Though Lily is only seven years old at the start of her footbinding, with these words, Mama is instilling in her the idea that women must suffer in order to attain the ultimate goals of marriage and giving birth to sons. Just as a girl’s journey into womanhood is filled with the pain of footbinding, so will a woman’s life be filled with pain and suffering, whether from sex, losing children to miscarriage or stillbirth, or enduring abuse from her husband. By teaching this to her daughters from a young age, Mama tries to ensure that they are prepared for what awaits them, showing her “mother love” in the only way she knows how.

The Suffering of Women

For my entire life I longed for love. I knew it was not right for me—as a girl and later as a woman—to want or expect it, but I did, and this unjustified desire has been at the root of every problem I have experienced in my life.

Looking back on her life as an eighty-year-old woman in the novel’s opening chapter, “Sitting Quietly,” Lily thinks of how the greatest source of conflict in her life was her desire to be loved. Even as a girl, she knew she was not worthy of love, as daughters are considered to be worthless, a fact made clear not only by her family but by her entire culture. This shows how from a young age, women in 19th century China have extremely low expectations for what their lives will look like, believing they are not worthy of love even from their parents. That Lily, at eighty years old, still sees this craving for love as an “unjustified desire” shows how deeply it is instilled in women that they should not expect love from others, even their mothers. Rather than blaming a culture that oppresses women, women blame themselves, which only perpetuates the cycle of suffering, for these girls usually grow up to only repeat the process with their own daughters.

I wish my daughter would never marry out so that I would have her to hear my sorrows. But this is how it is for women. You can’t avoid your fate. It is predestined.

Here, in “Learning,” Elder Sister has been lamenting how horrible her husband and in-laws have been to her, and Aunt responds with these words, telling Elder Sister that she has no choice but to go along with her fate. Lily is surprised to hear this, as she has always thought of Aunt as funny and content in her marriage to Uncle. However, here, Aunt explains that, like all other women, she is only valued as a “vessel” for sons, and she was not even able to give birth to sons, implying that she, her family and society as a whole, views her as worthless and a burden. While Aunt loves her only child, Beautiful Moon, she knows one day they will be separated from each other, and there is nothing that can be done to avoid that. Aunt makes clear that, once her daughter marries, she will lose the one person she feels who truly hears her, the person she can express her pain to. In this moment, Lily understands that even women who may put on a happy face must endure deep sorrows and suffering, as is the case for both Elder Sister and Aunt.

For the rest of my life I would be merely a guest in my husband’s home—not the kind you treat with special meals, gifts of affection, or soft beds, but the kind who is forever viewed as a foreigner, alien and suspect.

In “The Flower-Sitting Chair,” on the way to her wedding ceremony, Lily cries as she thinks of what it will mean to be married. Though custom dictates that she will return to her birth home until she is ready to give birth to her first child, Lily knows she will eventually permanently move into her husband’s home, where she will never truly be seen as part of his family. Such a move will turn her into a kind of nobody and put her in a nowhere land. As women are only valued for their ability to bear sons, they never have a true home either with their birth family or their marital family. Lily also distinguishes the type of guest she will be, not one that is treated with respect, but viewed as a nuisance, just someone to feed and house, as she was by her parents for much of her childhood. Viewed as “a foreigner,” Lily knows she will never have a true confidant in her in-laws’ home as well. As women are never able to have a fixed place in the world, they are always at the mercy of other people and not in control of their own fates.

Take a Study Break