Women, Virtue and Cultural Tradition

I finished Camilla Gibb's Sweetness in the Belly a couple weeks ago and Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan just last night and was struck by some of the similarities, despite their disparate settings - the former in 1970s Harar, Ethiopia and London of the mid-1980s, and the latter in the first half of 19th Century Hunan Province in China.

Both books wrote about the ways in which cultural tradition dictates women's suffering as proof of their virtue and worthiness - in Sweetness in the Belly, it's female circumcision and in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, it's footbinding. I read both of these scenes while riding the subway home and if any of the other passengers had happened to glance upon me at that moment, they may have wondered what I was reading that had so disturbed me.

My favourite passage in Sweetness is on page 126, when Gibb writes about how a community's history is made:

Once you step inside, history has to be rewritten to include you. A fiction develops, a story that weaves you into the social fabric, giving you roots and a local identity. You are assimilated, and in erasing your differences and making you one of their own, the community can maintain belief to its wholeness and purity. After two or three generations, nobody remembers the story is fiction. It has become fact. And this is how history is made.

My favourite of these two is Snow Flower though - perhaps because it's set in China and I could better relate to some of the customs and traditions that are discussed in the book, or maybe because the ending inspired a 4-hankie cry last night, it was so good.

Central to the novel is nu shu, which may very well be the only language ever created by women for their own exclusive use. I had never heard of it before and was fascinated: nu shu is phonetic and relies completely on context for meaning. It is made up of about 600-700 characters compared to the 5000+ that make up the Chinese written language. Women learned this secret language from their "sworn sisters" and mothers and in this way, they were able to safeguard their communications from men.