In nineteenth-century China, in a remote Hunan county, a girl named Lily, at the tender age of seven, is paired with a laotong, “old same,” in an emotional match that will last a lifetime. The laotong, Snow Flower, introduces herself by sending Lily a silk fan on which she’s painted a poem in nu shu, a unique language that Chinese women created in order to communicate in secret, away from the influence of men.

This partly historical fiction follows three (four if you count the author) generations of women during major changes in China's regime. You cam see the stark changes while reading about one young woman who was essentially a sex slave during the Imperial period to a girl who was an operative during the Communist Revolution with respect and rank. Areally great insight into the kinds of changes that China has gone through internally.

Spanning three generations, this novel of family and myth is told through a series of flashbacks that depict events of staggering horror set against a landscape of gemlike beauty, as the Chinese battle both Japanese invaders and each other in the turbulent 1930s.