Snow Flower & The Secret Fan
comments by Thor May
When Wendi Deng from China magically fell into the pan-national world of international business and married the media billionaire Rupert Murdoch, (who had abandoned Australia for the same stateless realm of five star hotels), at once we recognized that age old story of the gold digger and the sugar daddy. Perhaps though our belief in a simple storyline was, if not wrong, at least incomplete. Origins matter after all.
As a teacher to young women in Zhengzhou, central China for three years recently, I could sense the conflicting currents of duty, ambition and the hope for love that tossed them about in relationships. The mix for each modern girl was individual, and Deng herself is a product of those choices. It is surely no accident then that Wendi Deng and another high profile Chinese-American transplant, Florence Sloan, were co-producers of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, a film which deals directly, though often through a veil of tears, with just these dilemmas.
The film is a fairly free adaptation of Lisa See’s now widely praised novel of the same name. What follows here are some personal reactions to the film, plus a few references to the book, which I have not read yet (some published reviews about the book are pasted at the end of these notes). Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a film about relationships between women. It also highlights the conflict between feminine friendship and how each woman deals with the men in her life. Partly because of the Chinese historical context, the dimension of affection between men and women gets little attention in the film, which makes a jarring contrast with the world many of us like to think we live in today (even if we are deluded). However, the film’s director, Wayne Wang, has done a masterful job of bringing to life the relationships between two pairs of women. The first pair, Snow Flower (Korean actress, Gianna Jun) and Lily (Li Bing Bing), were both born in 1823 and tied into a lifelong feminine sworn bond called lau tong, which may have been more emotional and stronger than the man-woman contract of marriage in 19th Century Qing China. The second pair are two young and ambitious women in today’s Shanghai, Sophia and Nina, equally enmeshed in a lifelong but tempestuous bond of friendship.
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In the minds of China's rulers, past and present, there has only ever been one possible view about the future of Taiwan. For a multitude of reasons – strategic, economic, ethnic, linguistic, historical and sentimental – they have believed that it should be properly incorporated as part of the Chinese state, and that the expression of any views to the contrary amount to treason. As a resident of China for five years, I cannot recall encountering any Chinese citizen who did not declare this "proper" status of Taiwan to be self-evident when asked. On this topic the Chinese education system has successfully promoted a consensus.
