Accidentally read "Snow Flower and the Secret Fan"

[MsAmerica]

I picked it up for a friend, who likes historical fiction and is interested in China, and while it was sitting around my place, I started reading it before I gave it to her.

Obviously, an impressive amount of research, and once again showing how women are "kept down" in so many ways. In particular, though I thought I knew quite a bit about the custom of footbinding, this really brought it home very forcefully. I can't imagine how they managed to start that custom in the first place. I can see the status element - having bound feet making you unable to walk properly implies wealth, just as having long fingernails in modern times implies you're wealthy enough not to be doing manual labor. But still...

www.bloomsbury.com/uk/snow-flower-and-the-secret-fan-9780747588153/

Some women still have surgery to fit high heels so foot binding isn't that far away.

Wow, I've never heard of that. How awful. Actually, it reminds me that in the original of Cinderella, the bad sisters cut off their toes to fit into the slipper.

Still, what's more striking is when a whole society goes in for some version of stomping on women. In "Snow Flower," there are a rage of instances.

i loved that book! it was given to me as a gift and i could really get into it. i passed it onto my adult daughter (no clue if she enjoyed it).
however the idea of nicole kidman playing any part made me sick. i couldn't fathom a red headed australian actress in any part.
my imagination was much better than the movie.

Wait a minute. I just looked up the movie, and don't see Kidman in there.

My memory of Lisa See's novels about Chinese and Chinese-American women is a bit hazy though I enjoyed them at the time I read them, but I highly recommend The Island of Sea Women, which I read in early 2020. It's not set in China, where See's family came from, but on the South Korean island of Jura, and is the story of a woman and her friend from childhood through their lives and through some difficult periods of Korean history, including Japanese occupation and the Second World War. I was surprised that a novel by an American writer was quite critical of the US role there, and by the portrayal of the South Korean government with US backing in the 1950s and beyond, at the height of the Korean War, as quite an authoritarian and repressive regime.