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Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
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Chapters 16-EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: Rice-and-Salt Days - Part 4: Sitting Quietly
Chapter 16 Summary: Letter of Vituperation
Life returns to normal for Lily and her family. Snow Flower, on the other hand, never recovers from the effects of their time in the mountains, either physically or emotionally. Lily’s husband points out that that Snow Flower is not as strong as she is, and that she is being mistreated by her husband. Lily confronts Snow Flower about her husband’s abuse and tries to convince her to leave him and come and live with her in the Lu household. Snow Flower refuses, because she cannot bear that shame of being known as a woman who abandoned her family, and she doesn’t want to leave her son unprotected in the butcher’s home.
Lotus, a woman Lily remembers from the time in the mountains, brings Lily the fan from Snow Flower. Snow Flower has written on the fan: “You won’t have to listen to my complaints anymore. Three sworn sisters have promised to love me” (220). Lily feels betrayed by Snow Flower, remembering how she herself had refused to reject Snow Flower and join a sworn sisterhood when her own mother-in-law suggested it. Lily begins to view their entire friendship as a series of betrayals on Snow Flower’s part. When Snow Flower writes again, asking for a response, Lily ignores her. Lily builds a flower tower, like the one they built for Beautiful Moon, and then burns it along with every letter and souvenir of their friendship she can find. When Madame Wang, now a very old woman, brings Lily a new fan, intended to be shared between Jade and Snow Flower’s daughter Spring Moon as lautongs. Lily refuses the gift and cancels the commitment.
When Snow Flower’s cousin is about to be married, both Lily and Snow Flower attend the month of “Sitting and Singing” in the Upstairs Chamber. Snow Flower sings a “Letter of Vituperation”, in which she tells the story of her difficult life and then goes on to tell of how she has been rejected by her lautong. Lily offers a responding “Letter of Vituperation”, in which she reveals all of Snow Flower’s dark secrets and characterizes her as an unclean woman who betrayed her "old same’s" trust. Because of her position in the community, Lily’s “Letter of Vituperation” is repeated to other daughters as a lesson and is recorded in women’s writing through embroidery. Snow Flower’s name becomes synonymous with shameful behavior.
Chapter 17 Summary: Into the Clouds
Eight years pass, during which Lily has no contact with Snow Flower. One day, Spring Moon shows up at the Lu household; Lily immediately recognizes her because of her resemblance to Snow Flower as a child. Spring Moon tells Lily that Snow Flower is terminally ill and begs her to visit and give her mother peace in her final days. Lily agrees, not because she forgives her friend, but because of her position in the community, or as she says, “to show my face as a gracious lady” (234).
When Lily arrives at Snow Flower’s bedside and sees her grave condition, she is filled with sadness for her friend and regret at having broken off contact. She learns that Snow Flower has a tumor in her stomach, and realizes that this illness was likely in its early stages back in the days when Lily was frustrated with her for her weakness and lack of appetite. In the final two weeks of Snow Flower’s life, Lily stays at her side, sleeping with her as they did when they were girls. She hires a doctor and a diviner, looking for any hope of a cure, but with no success.
In the last days of the disease, the servant Yonggang gives Lily a basket full of letters and mementos of her friendship with Snow Flower, including their special fan. She explains that she had hidden these items in those days when Lily had been burning everything, knowing that someday she would come to regret it. Lily spends the rest of Snow Flower’s days reading to her from their shared correspondence. Lily promises to care for Snow Flower’s two remaining children like an aunt.
After Snow Flower’s funeral, the three sworn sisters explain to Lily that Snow Flower had never intended to leave her relationship with Lily to join their sisterhood. What Snow Flower had meant to tell her was that she had found these sworn sisters to hear all her complaints so that she wouldn’t burden Lily with them. Lily realizes just how rash she had been to cut off all contact without seeking to understand Snow Flower’s message.
Epilogue Summary: Regret
Lily is now the eighty-year-old woman who is narrating the story. She is no longer able to do any housework, nor can she do any of the activities—embroidery and writing, for example—that she once enjoyed.
She remembers her grief after Snow Flower’s death, how she forced herself to carry on out of duty to her family and the community. She served in Snow Flower’s place for Spring Moon’s marriage ceremonies. Spring Moon committed suicide on her wedding night, after her new husband fell asleep. For Snow Flower’s son, Lily used her influence with her husband and her status in the community to secure work as a rent collector for the young man, so he would not have to carry on in his father’s business.
As she grew older, Lily’s relationship with her husband grew more companionable. Their children all had healthy families. Lily arranged with Madame Wang for one of her grandsons to marry Snow Flower’s granddaughter. Madame Wang seemed resistant, but when Lily offered to take on the responsibility for the girl’s foot-binding and training, the old matchmaker relents. This granddaughter was the girl named Peony, who is recording Lily’s story.
After the death of her husband, Lily spends her time recording the life stories of other women, those not trained in the art of women’s writing, because she believes that every life is important, and that every woman should know the value of her own life.
The final words of her narration are an appeal to Snow Flower, as she intends this story to go ahead of her into the afterworld, and she hopes Snow Flower will hear her story and forgive her.
Chapter 16 – Epilogue Analysis
The homoerotic nature of Lily’s lautong relationship with Snow Flower becomes more fully realized in the final chapters of the novel. First, when Lily believes that Snow Flower has severed their bond in order to join the sworn sisterhood, Lily describes her betrayal as that of a woman whose husband “announced he’d just taken his first concubine” (220). Of Snow Flower’s death, she says, “My rice-and-salt days were not over, but in my heart I began my years of sitting quietly” (247). With this statement, Lily is saying that her identity as a widow begins, not with the death of her husband, but with the death of Snow Flower. Although the relationship between the two girls has never been a sexual one, they have shared an intimacy that defied gender norms and allowed them each to explore and express their most intimate realities.
Lily tells us that certain phrases are commonly used to introduce certain forms of singing and storytelling. The “Letter of Vituperation”, for example, always begins with the line, “The pheasant squawks and the sound carries far” (227). In many songs and stories, the women repeat a refrain throughout the storyteller’s performance. Similarly, Lily’s narrative in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan uses repeating plot points as a means of echoing the formal storytelling style of the women. As Lily and Snow Flower were matched, so are their respective grandchildren matched. Spring Moon appears at Lily’s door looking just like Snow Flower did at the same age. The first and last chapters provide a narrative refrain by starting and ending the novel with Lily in her later years, identifying herself as the narrator and providing the formal introduction and conclusion to her story.
In the final chapter, the eighty-year-old narrator Lily is reflecting on the story she has just told. She acknowledges that she has said very little about her husband, because “all of that is in my official autobiography” (252). With this brief statement, we are reminded of her words in the first chapter, that she has instructed Peony “to make sure that [the story is] burned at my death” (6). In contrast to her official autobiography, this is a private story intended only for those in the afterworld. This distinction between the public and the private mirrors the two worlds present throughout the novel: the public world of men with its official writing, and the private world of women with its secret nu shu writing; the light and the dark; the yang and the yin.
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