"From that day on, I knew I'd never be serious with men in my whole life," Miao Yan declares. This only increases Chen's attraction. After witnessing another of her impromptu dance performances, she's totally stunned. "A strange dizziness struck me in a kind of ecstasy. I felt my blood pumping through my veins and crushing my organs. Never before in my life had I been so paralyzed by an unspeakable emotion and so incapable of expressing my thoughts."
Nevertheless, Chen finally settles for viewing Miao Yan as "a sister, as someone superior, dominant, sexy and mature." But she does everything she can to be with her, though by turns frustrated and thrilled by the intimacy they share. "I didn't know how to hold back; I just let my passion and will run their full course without worrying where I would end up," she declares.
Back in the dormitory, Chen finds herself being shown pictures of people copulating in a porn magazine by Pingping and Donghua. Her confusion is increased when she learns that sexual love between women was at that time viewed by the Chinese authorities as a form of mental illness. As a result of all this she's reluctant to act on her undeniably strong feelings for Yan Miao.
Once she turns 18 Chen longs to be a "proper woman" — which she considers means losing her virginity. Yet in the event she spends her birthday with one of Miao Yan's ex-lovers, watching him masturbate. Another relationship fails to get off the ground when her boyfriend understands how hopelessly addicted to the charismatic Miao Yan she has in fact become.
A chance encounter with a woman she meets in a bar further unsettles her, though pushing her towards acceptance of her feelings. She's seen many women like Chen, she tells her dismissively. They're timid, baffled, and simply don't have the guts.
The story concludes in the US with Chen approaching San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. In a classic playing out of "gay anguish" stories, she's tried repression, and is now trying to reactivate her past. She's heard that Miao Yan owns a boutique in Chinatown and finally resolves to find her. This is bizarrely seen as paralleling the tormented Heathcliff (a far from repressed figure) searching for Catherine in Wuthering Heights.
"I have plenty of time and energy to stroll every street, every block," muses Chen, "and in my mind's eye, there she is — appearing out of nowhere, just as she did when I saw her on the rooftop for the first time — examining a delicate dress with her long, thin fingers in the gentle light."
Fan Wu arrived in the US from China nine years ago and after graduation worked for Yahoo. But she wanted to get back to literature, her college major, and determined to try to write a novel in English. The happy result is a style that's engagingly animated throughout, especially when describing the details of student life. Initially, American publishers claimed the book's tone was too uncertain, but what February Flowers succeeds in being is an account of conflicting allegiances. But it also, despite the heroine's uncertainty and false starts, still manages to be by implication what those publishers perhaps wanted it to be from the beginning — a strong and intransigent lesbian coming-out story.
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