A flickering light amid the darkness

The physical reality of a distant past became clear to author Lisa See three years ago as she peered out a high latticed window on the second floor of an old, rural Chinese house, the only source of natural light in that man-made cave.

Such chambers were the domain of 19th century Chinese women who, at around age 6, had their feet broken and bound in an excruciating tradition that crippled them for the sake of beauty. Then as teenagers, they would be sent off in arranged marriages to spend the rest of their lives sequestered from a society that decreed their education irrelevant to their overriding purpose of giving birth to sons.

“The women were so completely isolated because of the foot-binding and because they were illiterate,” See says. “Their isolation was really severe -- a lifetime of being in a place that really is like a jail. They might not have interpreted it that way, but I did.”

How such women maintained friendships with other women -- often more emotionally sustaining than relations with their husbands -- is a badge of human perseverance. Yet even more compelling to See is how they sustained those friendships in Jiangyong county, part of China’s Hunan province.

Like water, the women of Jiangyong found an escape, if not in person then in spirit, by devising their own secret phonetic writing, nu shu. They used it to inscribe news of their lives on paper fans, or embroidered clothes and shoes, that would be slipped to female relatives and friends in their own cloistered rooms -- testimony to the human desire to communicate even when social codes and physical segregation would seem to make it impossible.

Upon a woman’s death, her friends would gather her nu shu writings and burn them, meshing the physical with the metaphysical as they introduced the afterworld to the soul it was about to receive.

“Nobody thought that these women had an intellectual thought. No one thought that they were creative in any way. They certainly didn’t want to hear about any emotions that they might have,” See says. “Yet through this writing, they were able to express all that.”

It is around just such women that See has built her new novel, “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan,” a literary evolution for the author of the 1995 award-winning family memoir “On Gold Mountain” and three third-person mysteries set in contemporary China.

All of her books try to inform American readers about a place and society they know little about, See says. Narratives, she says, make it easier for readers to absorb details of other cultures almost without knowing it, like slipping something sweet into a kid’s medicine.

“People will turn the pages because they’re caught up in the story,” she says. “Along the way, you can talk about the Three Gorges Dam, or how American goods are made in factories, or the global trade in endangered-animal parts for Chinese herbal medicine.”

While critics lauded her memoir and her first mystery, “Flower Net,” nominated for an Edgar Award, they generally dismissed the last two mysteries as built on overly contrived plots that undercut incisive descriptions of modern China.

In “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan,” See jettisoned the thriller-mystery genre for a more traditional work of literary fiction, and the raves have returned, including a starred review in Publishers Weekly, the influential trade magazine. BookSense, the consortium of independent booksellers, has made the novel its top pick for July.

“With this book in particular, I try to make a character that people can identify with, that they feel, ‘I’ve had those feelings, I’ve felt regret too,’ ” See says. “Whatever it is, I hope to get people to stop thinking of a group like the Chinese as ‘the other.’ That they’re just people like us....”

See’s name is invariably linked with that of her mother, Carolyn See, also a Los Angeles-based author and literary critic. But at age 50, with her own small library of accomplishments behind her, Lisa See has quietly built an independent reputation as a graceful writer who draws on her Chinese heritage for insights into a culture that could well shape the future of the world.

See was born in France but grew up mostly in L.A. Despite her red hair and freckles, she identifies closely with her father’s Chinese lineage, a connection firmed by countless youthful hours spent with her grandparents in their Chinatown antiques store. See’s great-grandfather, Fong See, was an early patriarch of Chinatown, helping transform it from an immigrant ghetto to a commercial hub.

As an adult, See has made her family part of Los Angeles’ cultural landscape. “Gold Mountain” details four generations of the family’s California history and the story, with See writing the libretto, was adapted for the stage in 2000. An exhibit based on the book was later displayed at the Chinese American Museum near Olvera Street.

See also curated other exhibits for that museum and the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, including one on the Chinese American experience, which moved to the Smithsonian Institution in 2001. Three years ago she was appointed to Los Angeles’ El Pueblo de Los Angeles Monument Authority, which oversees the complex that includes Olvera Street, the Chinese American Museum and other sites key to Los Angeles’ multiethnic history.

Those projects involve preserving the past. But in “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan,” See is more interested in the timeless -- love and friendship, deceit and family, hubris and the inevitable regrets born of pride.

The only way out

See’s novel is constructed as a memoir by 80-year-old Lily, a peasant daughter whose young feet are deemed by a “diviner” to be potential beauties if bound properly, the kind of feet that could attract a marriage match with a family from a higher station. The process is grotesque, and just the few paragraphs See uses to describe the young girl’s agony are searing. Too painful, in fact, even for the woman who wrote them.

Writing, See says, is largely putting ideas on paper “and then you go back, you reread and you edit over and over again. But that was a part I really didn’t do much to at all, because I really couldn’t stand reading it.”

See noted that the pain was willingly perpetrated by mothers on daughters, who willingly endured it, seeing a chance for a good marriage preferable to a life in the fields or sold to other families as slave-servants.

“They saw it as the only way out, their daughters’ only chance,” See says. “I just could not imagine doing that to my own child. But they did, and given the culture and the times they actually had legitimate reasons.”

See’s novel follows the arc of friendship between Lily and Snow Flower, who are united as laotongs -- lifelong intimate friends -- just after their foot-bindings. Their lives follow separate paths, Lily marrying into a family of wealth and prestige and Snow Flower, already disgraced by her father’s drug addiction and poverty, into a family of “unclean” butchers.

But they share their life experiences using nu shu. The roots of the secret writing are murky, and its 700 phonetic characters are less flexible and descriptive than the 6,000 character symbols of the established Chinese written language.

Nu shu relies on context for clear meaning, and in a crucial moment Lily misreads a missive from Snow Flower, destroying their friendship over wounded pride.

These are See’s two main themes: female friendship and regret, “one of the strongest emotions there is in the world.”

And regret is universal, she believes. The longer one lives, the more regrets one amasses.

In researching “Gold Mountain,” See says she spent hours with relatives and family friends, many at the ends of their lives. “To a person, they all had regrets,” she says, “and there was nothing they could do about it.”

The emotions that welled up as See watched their painful recriminations came back to See as she sat in a sun-drenched room overlooking a pool and manicured yard behind her Brentwood home. The biggest hurdle to overcoming regret is pride, she says.

“Everybody has to overcome something to deal with this, and a lot of people just can’t,” she says, her voice catching. “In writing this book, I really felt like I was trying to remedy all the regrets of those people in my family.

“You can’t really do that, but I just felt it’s like sending those words to the afterworld so that those things could be remedied, those regrets.”

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Readings and signings

Where: Vroman’s Bookstore, 695 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena.

When: 7 p.m. Monday

Contact: (626) 449-5320

Also

Tuesday: Book Soup, South Coast Plaza, Suite 2400, 3333 Bristol St., Costa Mesa; 7 p.m.; (714) 689-2665.

Wednesday: Borders, 3700 Torrance Blvd., Torrance; 7:30 p.m.; (310) 540-7000.

Thursday: Barnes & Noble, 1201 3rd St., Santa Monica; 7:30 p.m.; (310) 260-9110.

Saturday: Skylight Books, 1818 N. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles; 5 p.m.; (323) 660-1175.

Next Sunday: Dutton’s Brentwood Bookstore, 11975 San Vicente Blvd., Los Angeles; 2 p.m.; (310) 476-6263.