Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

The classics tell us that, in relationships, the one between teacher and student comes second only to the one between parent and child.

You see, I still didn’t understand that you cannot control the manifestations of love, nor can you change another person’s destiny.

Yue-qing Yang’s evocative documentary, Nu-shu: A Hidden Language of Women in China,

We drain the family resources. We are raised by one family for another.

A laotong relationship was completely different from a sworn sisterhood. It involved two girls from different villages and lasted their entire lives, while a sworn sisterhood was made up of several girls and dissolved at marriage.

There are three events in Yao lives—no, all Chinese lives—on which the most money is spent: birth, marriage, and death. We all wish to be born well and marry well; we all wish to die well and be buried well. But fate and practical circumstance influence these three events like no others.