Snow Flower and the Secret Fan Rice-and-Salt Days: Sons & Rice-and-Salt Days: Joy and Sorrow Summary & Analysis

Rice-and-Salt Days: Sons & Rice-and-Salt Days: Joy and Sorrow

Summary: Rice-and-Salt Days: Sons

Snow Flower writes to Lily that she has given birth to a healthy son. Lily also gives birth to a son, securing her place in the family. However, Lily’s mother-in-law does not allow her to invite Snow Flower to her son’s one-month party. Still, Lily and Snow Flower continue to write to each other almost daily. Since women’s writing is seen as unimportant to men, Lily’s husband doesn’t pay attention to her letters, but Lily must look out for her mother-in-law, who continues to encourage Lily to distance herself from Snow Flower. Snow Flower writes of the abuse she suffers at her in-laws’ hands. Lily realizes that Snow Flower has used nu shu to write honestly about her life, and understands their secret language was meant to give them a voice. Lily invites Snow Flower to her birth home for the Expel Birds Festival.

Lily picks up Snow Flower on her way home, and Lily encourages Snow Flower to obey her husband and in-laws to have harmony in the house. Snow Flower reveals she is pregnant again, and Lily is surprised, as this means Snow Flower and her husband did not wait the customary one hundred days after childbirth before resuming sex. One night, Snow Flower confides that she enjoys having sex with her husband, which bewilders Lily. Once they leave, Lily feels glad to have spent time with Snow Flower. After a few months, Snow Flower writes, grieving that her daughter was stillborn. Lily feels confused by Snow Flower’s sadness, as parents are often grateful if a girl is stillborn. Lily writes back to Snow Flower, saying that now she can try again for a son. Three years later, Lily gives birth to another son, while Snow Flower has another stillborn daughter.

Summary: Rice-and-Salt Days: Joy and Sorrow

A few years later, Snow Flower and Lily give birth to daughters. Though none of their daughters’ eight characters match, they plan for their daughters to be laotong. Two years later, Snow Flower gives birth to another son, though the country mourns as the emperor dies and his son takes over. Uncle Lu loses his position with the emperor, and Lily hears the men in her family talk of rebel uprisings. After Lily gives birth to another son, she visits with Snow Flower at Lily’s birth home. Snow Flower tells Lily of the rebels, the Taipings. When Lily asks her husband about the Taipings, he tells her she cannot visit her birth home again if she talks of such things.

After a drought, Lily’s husband tells her he plans to travel to the next province to procure salt to sell. Lily fears for her husband’s safety, for if he dies, she could be sold to another family. During the hot season, typhoid strikes the county, and the Lu family sequesters themselves. When Lady Lu becomes ill, Lily tends to her until she dies. Once the disease ends, Lily learns that her Mama and Baba died. Lily rejoices when her husband returns home with enough salt to solve their financial problems. After her father-in-law dies in the fields one day, Lily and her husband become the new Master and Lady Lu.

Analysis: Rice-and-Salt Days: Sons & Rice-and-Salt Days: Joy, and Sorrow

As Lily and Snow Flower begin to fulfill their duties by having children, the gap between them widens. While Lily has four healthy pregnancies and children, two of Snow Flower’s babies are born dead, showing the vast difference in their lifestyles and the care they are able to receive. As Lily basks in her good luck and her large family, she becomes farther removed from the struggles that Snow Flower experiences. Lily was once intimately familiar with the suffering specific to women, as she saw Elder Sister go through a nearly identical experience to what Snow Flower now faces. Lily also feared that she would only ever feel like a guest in her husband’s home. Even as a married woman secure in her husband’s household, Lily knows that her position will always remain precarious, as she could be cast out of the house if her husband were to die. However, Lily’s upbringing and her own privileged point of view allow her to believe that, as long as a woman is obedient and follows customs, she will have happiness. This advice will prove to be not only unhelpful to Snow Flower’s specific predicament, but damaging to their relationship as well.

In addition to not understanding Snow Flower’s suffering at the hands of her in-laws, Lily lacks any sympathy for the loss of Snow Flower’s daughter. As a child, Lily acutely felt the pain of not having her mother’s love, and desperately longed for it. However, only a few years removed from childhood, Lily now is more like her mother than she likely ever wanted to be. Just as Mama and Aunt believed Third Sister would be better off dead from infection than having unbound feet, Lily thinks a baby girl is better born dead than alive. This cruel reaction shows how Lily has gone from being a victim of women’s suffering to one who perpetuates it by viewing girls as worthless.

Now that Lily has attained the high social standing she has always wanted, she views people as what they are worth instead of who they are as individuals. Lily’s judgment of Snow Flower is also clear in her reaction to Snow Flower’s admission that she enjoys sex. To Lily, a mark of femininity is enduring the pain and humiliations of womanhood, including footbinding and sex. That Snow Flower would admit to enjoying sex, especially to the point that she flouted the tradition of waiting one hundred days after childbirth, makes her seem dirty and even more inferior in Lily’s eyes.

Still, Lily continues to value Snow Flower as her laotong, the only person she can truly be herself with. Lily even goes against her own advice, disobeying her mother-in-law to keep Snow Flower in her life. Although Lily cannot empathize with Snow Flower’s suffering, she understands more fully why women need nu shu to be able to communicate their most private thoughts with one another. This deepens the themes of the importance of friendship and the power of language. For women in this culture, whose duty is to take care of their children and serve their in-laws, female friends are the only people whom they do not need to obey. Although most sworn sisterhoods end with the marriage of each sister, Lily and Snow Flower’s relationship shows why friendship may be even more important after women get married. However, as Lily feels more superior in her improved social status, she begins diminishing the equality between herself and Snow Flower. By trying to tell Snow Flower what to do to please her in-laws, Lily becomes yet another person Snow Flower needs to obey, rather than a lifelong friend with whom she can entrust her feelings.