47 pages • 1 hour read
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: Hair-Pinning Days
Chapter 7 Summary: Catching Cool Breezes
The “Catching Cool Breezes” festival takes place during the season when food stores have almost run out, but the new harvest has not yet come in. During this period, the lower ranking female members of the household return to their natal families. When the girls are fifteen years old, Snow Flower comes to stay with Lily’s family for the “Catching Cool Breezes” festival. As Mama, Aunt, Elder Sister, and the wife of Elder Brother are all in other homes; only Lily and Snow Flower remain to tend to the men in the household.
The two girls sleep together in the ladies’ chamber with no other women around. Over the course of several hot nights, they remove their clothes to cool down. One particularly hot night, Snow Flower takes the girls’ shared fan and uses it to cool Lily’s body. Wetting her finger with her tongue, she forms nu shu characters on Lily’s bare skin, which Lily must decipher. She writes the first line of a poem. Then they switch places, and Lily writes the second line of the poem on Snow Flower’s body. The two girls alternate in this way, touching increasingly intimate parts of their body, until they finish the poem.
Chapter 8 Summary: Beautiful Moon
During the hot days of “Catching Cool Breezes”, Lily, Snow Flower, and Beautiful Moon spend their time sewing for their dowry. They must make quilts and clothing for their entire in-law families, and they take particular interest in making and embroidering the shoes. Because of the summer heat, Lily’s father arranges a shaded space outdoors for them where they can work privately during the day while the men are away at work.
One day, while they are outdoors, Madame Gao delivers a letter from Elder Sister. In her secret writing, Elder Sister talks about how she is soon going to deliver her baby and how unhappy she is in her new family. Lily is sad for her sister, but happy that she herself may still live at home. Just as Lily finishes reading the letter, Beautiful Moon is stung by a bumblebee, has a violent reaction to the sting, and dies within minutes.
While they wait for Elder Brother to go get Aunt and Mama from their respective natal families, Madame Wang arrives and begins the process of preparing Beautiful Moon’s body. She then leaves to go to Snow Flower’s home to get her mourning clothes.
During the mourning period, Aunt behaves properly and remains placid during the day, but at night “she moaned from some deep, deep part of her soul” (97). Lily and Snow Flower fear that Aunt’s moans are a sign that they are in danger of being taken by Beautiful Moon into the underworld. Snow Flower suggests that she and Lily build a flower tower in Beautiful Moon’s honor. They build it with seven tiers, with rooms for dancing and floating, a ladies’ chamber with lattice windows facing in all directions. They write messages on the walls in nu shu. They burn the flower tower in order to send it into the afterworld, and while it burns they sing to Beautiful Moon, promising never to forget her, wishing that she will forget them.
The narrator Lily reflects on the nature of yin and yang, observing that in a home that had seen so much recent happiness, it is natural that extreme sorrow should occur to restore balance.
Chapter 9 Summary: The Flower-Sitting Chair
Two years after the death of Beautiful Moon, Lily is ready for her marriage. Her in-laws send gifts to her natal family, thereby making her father “one of the three most prosperous men in our village” (101). Girls and women from Lily’s family and her village come to celebrate for the month prior to Lily’s wedding, the period known as “Sitting and Singing” in the Upstairs Chamber.
When Madame Wang comes to visit, Lily notices that she spends some time conversing quietly with Snow Flower. Then, with a hand on Snow Flower’s lap, Madame Wang tells the story she calls “The Tale of Wife Wang” (102), about a devout Buddhist woman who is married off to a butcher in spite of her religious convictions, is then reincarnated as a boy, and through her success as a man is able to bring her husband, now an old man, and her family into nirvana. Lily takes the story to be a prediction of her own future, when her husband’s family may do things that she cannot condone, and takes hope from the story.
Lily observes that Snow Flower doesn’t seem excited by the prospect of her own marriage, which is set to take place a month after Lily’s. Immediately after her own wedding, Lily will go to spend the month of “Sitting and Singing” with Snow Flower. At this point, Lily has never seen Snow Flower’s home. When Lily asks her for details about her “Sitting and Singing” month, Snow Flower gives her very little information, saying that her mother intends it to be a surprise. Lily fears that Snow Flower thinks she is unworthy to come to her house.
In the final days before the wedding, as the in-law family arrives, Lily grows weak from the customary fasting and nervous about what her husband will expect of her sexually. Her mother gives her a brief and unhappy lecture about her duties as a wife, which Lily doesn’t fully understand. Then Snow Flower reassures her that she will be fine, telling her that the in-law family already approves of her as a match for their son.
Lily’s wedding day arrives, and as she boards the palanquin to ride to the in-laws’ village, Snow Flower gives her a package, telling her to read the message on the way. It begins as a conventional greeting to Lily on the occasion of her marriage. Then Snow Flower writes, “In the coming days you will learn things about me” (112). Snow Flower expresses the hope that Lily will continue to love her as lautong even after she learns these things.
The first two days of Lily’s marriage go smoothly. Her husband turns out to be kind and attractive, as Snow Flower had said, and he in turn finds Lily pleasing. On the third day, the families are to come together for a larger celebration, and Lily is eager to see Snow Flower again and to learn what she meant by her message. Lily is dismayed when Snow Flower fails to attend.
Chapter 7 – Chapter 9 Analysis
To reassure Lily ahead of her wedding preparations, Beautiful Moon outlines all of the ways Lily has made herself acceptable for her husband:
“You are soft in your words but strong in your heart. You comb your hair in a demure manner. You don’t wear rouge or powder. You know how to spin cotton and wool, weave, sew, and embroider. You know how to cook, clean, wash, keep tea always warm and ready, and light the fire in the hearth. You take good and proper care of your feet.”
This description outlines the characteristics and duties of the ideal wife in Lily’s society. It emphasizes physical appearance, comportment, modesty, and care for the physical needs of the household.
Upon Beautiful Moon’s death, Lily reflects on the notion of yin and yang, the belief that all of life exists in a balance, “women and men, dark and light, sorrow and happiness” (99). This idea provides a sense of order in a world where people must cope with the unexpected, in particular unexpected tragedy, like the death of a child. Contained within this notion of a world of opposites held in balance is the evaluation of desirable and undesirable elements. Because gender is placed on this same polarizing system of elements, we see again that, for women, the world is an unfriendly place. The woman is always consigned to the position of being undesirable, if necessary part of life.
Lily’s and Snow Flower’s marriages are themselves an enactment of the notion of yin and yang. As the chapter called “The Flower-Sitting Chair” begins, Lily is preparing for her long-awaited marriage and her father’s sudden prosperity “showed that our family’s hard work in preparing me for my special future had paid off” (101). As Lily is transitioning into this elevated status, she observes a change in Snow Flower, which culminates in the lautong’s failure to appear at the most important part of Lily’s wedding ceremony. From what Madame Gao has said in previous instances, coupled with the message Lily receives from Snow Flower in the palanquin, we can infer that Snow Flower is experiencing a transition to a lower level in society. Lily reads Snow Flower’s message on the third wedding day, “The phoenix mates the golden hen, a match made in heaven” (116), as a characteristic message from her imaginative lautong, seeing Snow Flower as the mythical phoenix and herself as the commonplace hen. In light of the changing fortunes of the two girls, it might be the case that Lily has misinterpreted the message, and that Snow Flower has become the hen.
Madame Wang’s story, “The Tale of Wife Wang” (102), is a story of a woman who transcends the limitations of her sex by being reincarnated as a baby boy, even as she retains her original identity as a woman. The very language Madame Wang uses to tell the tale, using the female pronoun “she” (103) as she narrates the actions of the male character in the story, becomes a subversion of her culture’s fixed identities of male and female. Her story does not break the culture’s norms—the woman is only able to achieve a man’s status when she exists in the male body—but the story demonstrates how the woman’s virtue and ingenuity enable her to embody the male role to achieve virtuous ends.
Unlock all 47 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By Lisa See
