Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
Lisa See, 2005
Two girls in nineteenth-century China become laotong, sworn sisters for life, and write to each other in a secret script most men cannot read.
Lisa See
See's Chinese great-grandfather settled in Los Angeles's Chinatown; she wrote a family memoir, On Gold Mountain, about that history before turning to fiction set in China.
Feels like friendship, grief and family.
What a child decides she must become in order to be looked at.
Even now, after all these years, it is difficult for me to think about Mama and what I realized on that day. I saw so clearly that I was inconsequential to her. I was a third child, a second worthless girl, too little to waste time on until it looked like I would survive my milk years. She looked at me the way all mothers look at their daughters—as a temporary visitor who was another mouth to feed and a body to dress until I went to my husband’s home. I was five, old enough to know I didn’t deserve her attention, but suddenly I craved it. I longed for her to look at me and talk to me the way she did with Elder Brother. Books by Lisa See
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