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Maybe I should have been angry at Snow Flower for lying to me, but that’s not what I felt.I had believed I had been plucked for a special future, which made me too self-centered tosee what was directly in front of me. Wasn’t it my lack as a friend—as a laotong—that hadprevented me from asking Snow Flower the right questions about her past and herfuture? I was only seventeen. I had spent the last ten years almost entirely in the upstairschamber surrounded by women who saw a specific future for me. The same could be saidfor the men downstairs. But when I thought about all of them—Mama, Aunt, Baba, Uncle,Madame Gao, Madame Wang, even Snow Flower—the only one I could really blame wasmy mother. Madame Wang may have duped her in the beginning, but she had eventuallylearned the truth and decided not to tell me. How I felt about my mother twisted andwarped with the realization that her occasional signs of affection, which I now saw aspart of her greater lies of omission, had simply been a way to keep me on course to thegood marriage that would benefit my entire natal family.

I was at a moment of supreme confusion, and I believe it set the stage for what happenedlater. I didn’t know my mind. I didn’t see or understand what was important. I was just astupid girl who thought she knew something because she was married. I didn’t know howto resolve any of these things, so I buried them deep, deep, deep inside of me. But myfeelings didn’t—couldn’t—disappear. It was as though I’d swallowed the meat of adiseased pig and it slowly began to spoil my insides.

i had not yet become the Lady Lu who is respected today for her graciousness,compassion, and strength. Still, from the moment I walked into Snow Flower’s house, Ifelt something new inside me. Think again of that diseased piece of pork, and you’ll

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understand what I’m talking about. I had to pretend I wasn’t sick or infected, so I used mywill to good pur ose. I wanted to bring honor to my husband’s family by being charitableand kind to peop

pple in the lowest of circumstances. Of course, I did not know how to dothat, because these things were not natural to me.

Snow Flower was getting married in a month, so I helped her and her mother clean thehouse. I wanted it to be presentable to the groom’s party, but no one could deal with thefoul odors that permeated the rooms. The sick sweetness came from the opium that SnowFlower’s father smoked.

And the other rankness, as you have probably guessed, came from his impacted bowels.No incense, no burning of vinegar, no opening of windows even in those cool monthscould disguise the filthiness of that man and his habits.

I saw the routine of that household, in which two women lived in fear of the man whoresided in a room on the ground floor. I experienced their hushed voices and the way theycowered reflexively when he called for them. And I saw the man himself, lying there in hisstink and mess. Even in poverty, he was as petulant and quick to anger as a spoiled child.There may have been a time when he’d lashed out physically at his wife and daughter, butnow he was just a drug-dazed creature who was better left alone with his vice.

I tried not to let my emotions show. Enough tears had poured in that house without minebeing added. I asked to see Snow Flower’s bride-price gifts. In my mind I thought: Maybethis butcher family won’t be so bad after all. I had seen the silk pieces Snow Flowerworked on. These people must be relatively prosperous, even if they were spirituallypolluted.

Snow Flower opened a wooden chest and carefully laid out everything she had made onthe bed. I saw the sky-blue silk shoes with the cloud pattern she had finished the dayBeautiful Moon died. I saw a jacket that used some of that same silk on the front panel;then, in a neat row, Snow Flower propped five pairs of shoes of different sizes in the samefabric but embroidered with additional designs. This all looked familiar to me, andsuddenly I understood why. These things had been fashioned from the jacket SnowFlower had worn on the first day we met.

My hands traveled over other items in her dowry. Here was the lavender-and-whitematerial that had made up Snow Flower’s traveling outfit when she was nine, now recutand reshaped into vests and shoes. Here was my favorite indigo-and-white cottonweaving that had been slit into panels and strips to be incorporated into jackets,headdresses, belts, and decorations on quilts. Snow Flower’s actual bride-price gifts wereminimal, but she’d taken pieces from her own clothes to create a unique dowry.

“You will make a remarkable wife,” I said, truly awed by what she had accomplished.

For the first time, Snow Flower laughed. I had always loved that sound, so high, so

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alluring. I joined in, because all of this was . . . beyond— beyond anything I could haveimagined, beyond what was fair or right in the universe. Snow Flower’s situation andwhat she’d done with it was horrible and tragic and funny and amazing all at the same time.

“Your things—”

“Not even mine to begin with,” Snow Flower answered, as she gulped for air. “My mother recut her dowry clothes to make my outfits when I visited you. Now they are recut againfor my husband and my in-laws.”

Of course! This had to be the case, because now I could remember thinking that a certainpattern seemed too sophisticated for a girl so young, or cutting loose threads from a cuffwhen Snow Flower wasn’t looking. I was stupider than a chicken in a rainstorm. Bloodrushed to my face. I clasped my hands over my cheeks and laughed even harder.

“Do you think my mother-in-law will notice?” Snow Flower asked.

“If I was too blind to notice, then . . .” but I couldn’t finish because it was all too funny.

Perhaps it is a joke that only girls and women can understand. We are seen as completelyuseless. Even if our natal families love us, we are a burden to them. We marry into new families, go to our husbands sight unseen, do bed business with them as total strangers,and submit to the demands of our mothers-in-law. If we are lucky, we have sons and secure our positions in our husbands’ homes. If not, we are faced with the scorn of our mothers-in-law, the ridicule of our husbands’ concubines, and the disappointed faces ofour daughters. We use a woman’s wiles—of which at seventeen we girls know almostnothing—but beyond this there is little we can do to change our fate. We live at the whimand pleasure of others, which is why what Snow Flower and her mother had done was so beyond.

They had taken cloth that had once been sent from Snow Flower’s family to Snow Flower’s mother as a bride-price gift, been shaped into the dowry of a fine maiden, been reshaped again into clothes for a beautiful daughter, and now restructured another time to announce the qualities of a young woman marrying into the house of a pollutedbutcher. All of it was women’s work—the very work that men think is merely decorative —and it was being used to change the lives of the women themselves.

But so much more was needed. Snow Flower had to go to her new home with enoughclothes to wear her entire lifetime. Right now, she had very little. My mind raced withthings we could do in the month we had left.

When Madame Wang arrived for Snow Flower’s Sitting and Singing in the Upstairs Chamber, I took her aside and begged her to go to my natal home. “There are things Ineed. . . .”

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That woman had been critical of me for so long. She had also lied—not to my family but tome. I had never cared for her and now I liked her even less for her duplicity, but she didexactly as she was told. (I now outranked her, after all.) She returned from my homeseveral hours later with a basket of my wedding dumplings, some of the sliced pork myin-laws had sent, fresh vegetables from our garden, and another basket filled with cloththat I had planned to cut when I returned home. To see Snow Flower’s mother eat thatmeat was something I’ll never forget. She had been raised to be a fine lady and, as hungryas she was, she did not tear into the food as someone in my famil might. She used herchopsticks to pull apart slivers of the pork and lift them delicately

yy to her lips. Herrestraint and control taught me a lesson I have not strayed from to this day. You may bedesperate, but never let anyone see you as anything less than a cultivated woman.

I was not done with Madame Wang. “We will need girls for Sitting and Singing,” I said.“Can you bring Snow Flower’s elder sister?” “Her in-laws will not let her come back to thishouse.”

I digested this fact. I had not heard that such a thing was possible. “We still need girls,” Iinsisted.

“No one will come, Miss Lily,” Madame Wang confided. “My brotherin-law’s reputation istoo bad. No family will allow an unmarried girl to cross this threshold. What about yourmother and aunt? They already know the situation—”

“No!” I wasn’t ready to deal with them yet, and Snow Flower didn’t need their pity. Whatmy laotong needed were strangers.

I had cash from my wedding. I slipped some of it into Madame Wang’s hand. “Do notreturn until you have found three girls. Pay their fathers whatever you think is theappropriate amount. Tell them I will be responsible for their daughters.”

I was sure that my new married status to the best family in Tongkou would be persuasive,yet I could just as easily have been talking out of my behind, for surely my in-laws had noidea I was using their position in this manner. Still, I could see Madame Wang weigh this.She needed to continue to do business in Tongkou and was just about to reap the longterm

benefits of bringing me to the Lu family. She did not want to jeopardize her position,but she had already bent many rules to benefit her niece. At last Madame Wang workedout the equation in her mind, nodded once, then left.

A day later, she returned with three daughters of farmers who worked for my father-inlaw.

In other words, they were girls like me, except they had not had my specialadvantages.

I willed that month. I led the girls in their singing. I helped them find good words to writeabout Snow Flower—someone they knew not at all—in their third-day wedding books. Ifthey didn’t know a character, I wrote it for them myself. If they dawdled in their

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quiltmaking, I took them aside and whispered that their fathers would be punished if theydidn’t adequately perform the jobs they had been hired for.

Remember how things were for my elder sister? She was sad to be leaving our home, buteveryone believed she was going to a fair marriage. Her songs were neither too tragic nortoo blissful, reflecting what was to be her future. I had had mixed emotions about mymarriage. I too was sad to leave home, but I was excited that my life would change for thebetter. I had sung songs to praise my parents for bringing me up and to thank them fortheir hard work on my behalf. Snow Flower’s future, on the other hand, looked bleak. Noone could deny or change that, so our songs were filled with melancholy.

“Mama,” Snow Flower chanted one day, “Baba failed to plant me on a sunny hill. I will livein the shade forever.”

Her mother sang back, “Truly, it is like planting a beautiful flower on a pile of cow dung.”

The three girls and I could only agree, raising our voices in unison to repeat both phrases.This is how things were: heavyhearted, but done in the traditional manner.

the days grew colder. Snow Flower’s younger brother visited one day and glued paperagainst the lattice window. Still, the damp crept in. Our fingers grew tight and red fromthe constant chill. The three girls were afraid to say much of anything. We couldn’t go onthis way, so I suggested that we move downstairs to the kitchen, where we might warmourselves by the brazier. Madame Wang and Snow Flower’s mother deferred to me,showing me once again that I had power now.

Long ago I had made my third-day wedding book for Snow Flower. It was filled withlovely predictions about Snow Flower and her future, but these things no longerpertained. I started again. I cut indigo cloth for the outside, folded it around severalsheets of rice aper, and stitched the binding with white thread. Inside the front leaf Ipasted red pap

pper cutouts into the corners. The first pages were for me to write myfarewell song to Snow Flower, the next were for my introduction of her to her new family,and the rest were left blank so she could use them for her own writings and to store herembroidery patterns. I rubbed ink against stone and enlisted my brush to write thecharacters in our secret language. I made each stroke as perfect as possible. I couldn’t letmy hand—so unsteady from the emotions of those days—mar the sentiments.

When the thirty days were over, the Day of Sorrow and Worry began. Snow Flowerstayed upstairs. Her mother sat on the fourth stair leading to the women’s chamber. Oursongs had grown and developed by then. Despite the ominous threat of Snow Flower’sfather’s anger at any noise, I raised my voice to chant my feelings and recommendations,such as they were.

“A good woman should not detest her husband’s disadvantage,” I sang, remembering“The Tale of Wife Wang.” “Help lift your family to a better state. Serve and obey your

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husband.”

Snow Flower’s mother and aunt echoed these thoughts. “To be good daughters, we mustobey,” they sang together. Hearing their voices harmonizing together, no one could doubtthe devotion and affection between them. “We must stay in our upstairs rooms, be chaste,be modest, and perfect the womanly arts. To be filial, we must leave home. This is ourfate. When we go to our husbands’ homes, new worlds unfold—sometimes better,sometimes worse.”

“We had our happy daughter days together,” I reminded Snow Flower. “Year after year,we were never a step apart. Now we will be together just the same.” I recalled things wehad written in our first exchanges on the fan and in our laotong contract. “We will stillspeak in whispers. We will still choose our colors, thread our needles, and embroidertogether.” Snow Flower appeared at the top of the stairs. Her voice floated down to me. “Ithought we would soar together—two phoenixes in flight— forever. Now I am like a deadthing sinking to the bottom of a pond. You say we will be together just the same. I believeyou. But my threshold will hardly compare to yours.”

She slowly descended, stopping to sit by her mother. We expected to see bitter tears, butthere were none. She linked arms with her mother and listened politely as the village girlscontinued their laments. Looking at Snow Flower, I couldn’t help wonderi at herseeming lack of emotion, when even I—as excited as I’d been to be marrying

ngng well—hadcried during this ceremony. Were Snow Flower’s feelings just as confused as mine hadbeen? She would miss her mother surely, but would she miss that vile father of hers ormiss waking up each morning in that empty house, which could only be a constantreminder of everything that had gone wrong with her family? It was terrible to bemarrying into a butcher’s home, but as a practical matter could it be worse than this? AndSnow Flower was born a horse too. The galloping spirit that yearned for adventure wasjust as strong in her as it was in me. Still, although we were old sames, both of us bornunder the sign of the horse, my feet were always on the ground— practical, loyal, andobedient—while her horse spirit had wings that wanted to soar and fought againstanything that might rein her in, despite having a mind that sought beauty and refinement.