While Lily is to marry the nephew of a scholar who had been well rewarded for his services by the emperor, Snow Flower's match is a humble butcher whose slaughtering activities make his profession unclean. Snow Flower's anguished cry of "Don't pity me! I don't want it!" is a foretaste of the rift that soon develops between the two women.
As Lily's prospects steadily advance, Snow Flower's deteriorate. They both give birth to sons, but Snow Flower loses her second child. While Snow Flower's husband beats her, Lily and her husband become the new Master and Lady Lu. Despite Lily's best efforts to offer consolation and encouragement, Snow Flower's sudden announcement that she is considering entering into a "sworn sisterhood" strikes Lily with the force of a dagger plunged into her heart.
Feeling devastated by Snow Flower's perceived betrayal, Lily goes about the business of cutting her from her affections. During the frenzy of accusation and counter-accusation that follows, Lily is too inflamed to realize just how alienated she has become from the love she has always needed.
making amends
Eight years later, on receiving a visit from Snow Flower's daughter, Lily learns that Snow Flower's supposed miscarriage was in fact cancer of the womb, and now a cure is impossible. Consumed with pain from being witness to Snow Flower's agony, Lily's heart melts into desperate remorse.
Realizing she still has time to reverse some of the harm she had caused the person she loves most in the world, she embarks on improving the position of Snow Flower's son, eventually securing a profession for him unconnected with butchering. Still restless to square the circle, Lily contracts a betrothal between Snow Flower's granddaughter and her own grandson.
The main driving force behind all the remorse that had taken hold of Lily stems from an observation -- conceivably the most telling in the book -- made by one of Snow Flower's sworn sisters.
"She loved you as a laotong should for everything you were and everything you were not. But you had too much man-thinking in you. You loved her as a man would, valuing her only for following men's rules."
This is an astute comment for a society where women were warped, both physically and mentally, into acting as tradition dictated and, above all else, by men's rules.
This is a strongly emotional novel and will affect many readers similarly. Some critics have commented on its lesbian implications, but it's real strength is as a protest against social conditions prevailing in the China of old. Fortunately, whatever the woes of China today, bound feet and the universal disregard of the wishes of the young are not among them.
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