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Daughter Days: Love & Daughter Days: Learning

Summary: Daughter Days: Love

Lily thinks of how different the love women mostly experience for and from their families differs from the love of a laotong. While most types of love are born out of obedience and only lead to disappointment, the love in a laotong relationship is a choice freely made. Still, gaining someone’s love through hard work was all Lily had ever known, and so she tries to grow her love with Snow Flower through the messages on their fan. To Lily, Snow Flower’s words seem far more sophisticated than her own. Snow Flower eventually comes to visit Lily again, and they talk, giggle, and play like young girls. Lily learns things from Snow Flower about how to be more ladylike, while Snow Flower asks Lily to teach her about everyday chores. Lily notes how Snow Flower brings life and joy into her house, playing with Younger Brother and making her father Baba and Uncle laugh. Lily feels that her hard work has produced the love she desires and knows Snow Flower loves her as well.

Summary: Daughter Days: Learning

Over the next three years, Snow Flower visits Lily’s home every few months, though Lily never goes to Snow Flower’s house. Tensions begin brewing between Madame Wang and Madame Gao, as Madame Gao tries to get Snow Flower’s family to hire her services as revenge for Madame Wang taking over Lily and Beautiful Moon’s fate. When Lily, Beautiful Moon, and Snow Flower are eleven, their footbinding is complete, and Madame Wang begins arranging marriages for all of them. Lily is arranged to marry into the prosperous Lu family in Tongkou. Beautiful Moon will marry into a lesser Lu family, though will still be near Lily, and Snow Flower will marry into a different family in the village of Jintian. 

The three girls continue learning nu shu from Aunt. Aunt tells the story of the woman who invented nu shu over a thousand years ago. A woman named Yuxiu, taken to be a concubine of the emperor, missed her family and was shut out by the other women who derided her calligraphy and embroidery as sloppy. They didn’t realize that Yuxiu was intentionally changing men’s writing to be a code she could send to her mother and sisters. Aunt reminds the girls that nu shu will help them stay connected to their birth families even after they marry.

As the girls turn thirteen, the conflict between Madame Wang and Madame Gao escalates as Madame Gao insinuates something disgraceful has happened to Snow Flower’s family, mentioning her father taking a pipe. Mama kicks Madame Gao out of the house, and Madame Wang tells Lily to never repeat to Snow Flower what she heard. Eventually, Elder Sister’s wedding ceremony arrives. After the wedding, Elder Sister will live with her birth family until she becomes pregnant, staying with her husband for occasional conjugal visits. Elder Sister, who was always obedient, laments at how abusive her in-laws are. Lily and Beautiful Moon feel sympathy for Elder Sister, but believe such a thing would never happen to them. Aunt, who is usually the family’s comedic relief, says that women must accept their fate. As Elder Sister sobs more, Mama confirms what Aunt has said, and tells Elder Sister she has no choice but to obey her in-laws.

Analysis: Daughter Days: Love & Daughter Days: Learning

The absence of love in Lily’s life is evident in how she views her relationship with Snow Flower as a child. As an old woman looking back, Lily recognizes that her relationship with Snow Flower should have been the most equal, authentic love she ever had. Unlike the relationships with her birth family, husband, or in-laws, a laotong relationship is not dependent on blind obedience. However, because Lily never knew true love from her family, she felt that Snow Flower’s love was something to be earned—yet, she did not believe that Snow Flower had to do anything to be worthy of Lily’s love. This belief shows again how Lily’s view of love, shaped by the abuse she received from Mama, twisted her own sense of self-worth and would ultimately lead to the downfall of the most important relationship of her life.

In these chapters, Lily learns more about Snow Flower as they grow closer. However, Lily’s insecurity about her own background and innocence of the world makes her unaware of some realities. Though they are equals in nearly every way, as determined by the eight characters, Lily still looks up to Snow Flower, whom she views as far more sophisticated due to Snow Flower’s family’s social standing. Lily seems surprised to see that Snow Flower is a young girl who likes to play and have fun just like her. However, Lily does not question why she has never been to Snow Flower’s home, assuming it is her own low social standing that prevents this. Lily also does not think twice about Madame Gao’s multiple insinuations that Snow Flower’s family has been in some way disgraced, and she disregards the words of such an “unrefined” woman. Lily also does not wonder at the lack of information about Snow Flower’s future husband. However, the fact that Lily includes these details in her story shows that they will take on more meaning later.

As Lily, Snow Flower, and Beautiful Moon continue to prepare for their upcoming marriages, Aunt explains to them the true reason for the creation of nu shu: for women to stay connected to their families of birth. By writing in a way that simply looked like a sloppy form of men’s language, Yuxiu was able to evade detection, showing how women can use men’s tools to secretly gain power. That this reasoning is revealed with a story, which may be true or not, again shows the importance of storytelling. By painting a picture of a woman who is desperately lonely even in the emperor’s palace, the girls can understand the need for a form of communication with one’s family. This need becomes even more clear when Lily and Beautiful Moon witness Elder Sister’s suffering. Though Elder Sister is able to stay with her family until she becomes pregnant, once she is ready to give birth, she will permanently live with her in-laws. Although Elder Sister is miserable, she is reminded that as a woman, she has no other path in life. 

Lily and Beautiful Moon show how childish they still are in their naïve belief that they would never find themselves in the same situation as Elder Sister. The fact that Aunt, who is usually bawdy and light-hearted, relates to Elder Sister’s suffering shocks Lily, and provides her first lesson in how women often suffer in silence. Throughout her life, Lily will see firsthand the suffering women experience at the hands of their in-laws, and understand even more fully the need to stay connected to the women of one’s birth family.

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