The Red Moon

              A work of historical fiction, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a story of a girl named Lily. Set in nineteenth-century China in a remote Hunan county, the story delves into the intricacies of the culture of pre-modern China, and more specifically, it’s influence on the lives of women. The author, Lisa See, manages to brilliantly outline the life of Lily from when to she is seven, up until her death. At seven, Lily is paired with Snow Flower, a girl from another village, as her ‘laotong’, a sort of a customary official friendship match between two females that is meant to last a lifetime, which it kind of does - with some complexities.               The highlight of the book, at least for me, was the practice of foot-binding. Foot binding was the custom of applying tight binding to the feet of young girls to modify the shape and size of their feet. The aim was to acquire small “lotus feet”. The p...