Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

by Lisa See

For my entire life I longed for love. I knew it was not right for me—as a girl and later as a woman—to want or expect it, but I did, and this unjustified desire has been at the root of every problem I have experienced in my life.

First let me offer my greetings to everyone reading Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. When I first learned about nu shu -- the women's secret writing -- I became obsessed. Back then there was very little written about nu shu. I found only two things about it on the Internet and a copy of a dissertation at UCLA. But whatever I found fed my obsession. Finally, I said to my husband, "There's only one thing I can do. I need to go to China and see what I can find." After I went to the villages that are in the novel, I had one night in a tourist hotel. A voice came into my head. It was so strong that I sat down right then and wrote what became the first chapter. Everything that this book is about is embedded in the first four pages, although I didn't know it in the moment. Love -- Lily's yearning for it and her failure to recognize it when she has it -- is at the heart of the novel.