Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See:

This book was really popular a few years ago, but the description on the back never seemed interesting to me so I never read it despite the hype.  A few weeks ago Lovey and I were perusing a used book store and I saw it.  Not only was it cheap, it was also 50% off.  I read this book in 24 hours; the old adage of not judging a book by its cover definitely stands true with this book.  Old world China is really interesting to me, despite the mess that modern China has become.  Not women friendly and life was brutal, but the Chinese culture was so unique.  I guess as the world's oldest continuous civilization, unique facets would emerge to keep it going. 
This book follows the story of Lily and Snow Flower; two young Chinese girls living in separate small villages.  They are linked by a matchmaker to become 'same olds,' which doesn't have a good translation, but its like life-long best friends that sign a contract as children.  Lily moves up in the world, financially, through the arrange, but Lily also has perfect feet for binding that made her very marriageable.  The book tracks the girls, who undergo the brutal feet-binding process, through girlhood, adolescence, and marriage in their small villages.  Along the way, they learn the womanly arts in the women's only chamber upstairs; knitting, embroidering, cooking, gardening, the women's secret language, as undergo the heartbreak of marrying someone they've never met, leaving their natal families, learning to cope being at the bottom of the social ladder in their new homes, with their mothers-in-law being in charge and their sole purpose to produce sons. 
As a reader, we learn about political instability, the consequences of opium addiction, cholera, feet-binding, family structure, expectations and roles of women, the importance of birth signs and Chinese festivals.  It's a really interesting read.  Lily is grounded, pragmatic, and naive;  Snow Flower is exotic, intelligent, and a dreamer.  They remain friends through all of it.  At the end the author has an afterward that explains the existence of a women's secret language (the language reserved for men is, I'm assuming, either Mandarin or Cantonese, but women wrote letters, poems, and stories in nu shu), that was discovered during the Cultural Revolution.  For thousands of years women utilized a language men couldn't read, although now its fallen by the wayside and is seldom used and rarely passed down to girls.  Fascinating home women find ways to survive in cultures that value them only for their uterus.