Author: Lisa See
# of Pages: 342 (hardback)
Genre: Adult, Historical Fiction
Rating: ★★★★☆
Synopsis: According to Confucius, “an educated woman is a worthless woman,” but Tan Yunxian—born into an elite family, yet haunted by death, separations, and loneliness—is being raised by her grandparents to be of use. Her grandmother is one of only a handful of female doctors in China, and she teaches Yunxian the pillars of Chinese medicine, the Four Examinations—looking, listening, touching, and asking—something a man can never do with a female patient. From a young age, Yunxian learns about women’s illnesses, many of which relate to childbearing, alongside a young midwife-in-training, Meiling. The two girls find fast friendship and a mutual purpose—despite the prohibition that a doctor should never touch blood while a midwife comes in frequent contact with it—and they vow to be forever friends, sharing in each other’s joys and struggles. No mud, no lotus , they tell from adversity beauty can bloom. But when Yunxian is sent into an arranged marriage, her mother-in-law forbids her from seeing Meiling and from helping the women and girls in the household. Yunxian is to act like a proper wife—embroider bound-foot slippers, recite poetry, give birth to sons, and stay forever within the walls of the family compound, the Garden of Fragrant Delights.
Review: I only knew two things going into the book: the cultural focus would be at least Chinese-adjacent (as per the title), and there would be graphic descriptions about the foot binding process.
Both ended up being more than true. The foot binding process was only a small fraction of the story and is actually just the tip of the iceberg of the depth of See's research in traditional Chinese customs. See's detailed account of Chinese medicine actually is what made the first ~100 pages difficult for me to get through. I don't have a particular interest in reading about medicine, so I was worried I picked the wrong book for me. It would be at most a 3 star read if it continued to lean toward being a slow history lesson rather than an engaging life story.
However, after that first 100 pages, it got a lot better. I became invested in Lady Tan's life story albeit fictional (while Lady Tan is a real historical figure, little is known about her, so the author had to fictionalize many details to connect the dots). On theme with the women's fiction streak that I'm starting, this book focuses more on Lady Tan's non-romantic relationships, especially those with other woman.
There's a question that arose from me that actually ended up being answered by the author on her website: "There are certain aspects of the novel that seem very contemporary—the epidemic outbreak, the arguments for and against variolation, and questions over who has control over women’s bodies. Was that intentional?" While the author says she is being historically accurate to the sentiments for/against variolation at the time, there are undoubtably parallels with the debate over the COVID-19 vaccines that were happening at the time of publication in 2021. This admittedly broke the immersion into traditional Chinese culture for me since there was extra focus on this topic in particular over other medical topics.
Something that surprised me is that the book also became somewhat of a murder mystery? Not enough so that it would reclassify the genre of the book, but enough to be startling for a book I expected to be vanilla historical fiction.
Overall, this book was better than I thought! Despite the slow start, See did a decent job at avoiding making her book read like a textbook and created characters that the reader actually will care about. I would recommend this book to people who are interested about Chinese history and women empowerment.
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