Peony in Love

I enjoyed reading Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, and then I enjoyed Shanghai Girls. So when I saw the audiobook of Peony in Love at the library, I checked it out.

And I've been driving around blazing mad ever since. The main character, Peony, who narrates the story in first person, dies at the end of the second disk. I looked at the three remaining disks and wondered what else there was to say. Well, the rest of the story is the story of how Peony learns what mature love is...as a ghost.

Why does this make me mad? Because she's a ninny who doesn't have the brains to understand anyone's motives but her own and doesn't even have the native wit to keep her eyes open at the defining moment of her life. If you ask me, her life was a total waste. Her parents don't talk to her; the misunderstandings that led to her death could have been easily prevented. But finally she realizes that the only thing in her life she has any power over is whether she will eat, and she decides that she will not. Her world is unbearable anyway, bound first by the circumference of the women's quarters and the few steps she can take in her bound feet, from which the ends of sticking-out bones have to be occasionally filed off, and later by her mother's seemingly inexplicable decision to lock her in her bedroom for months. While locked in the bedroom, she does what any 16-year-old girl will do; she writes poetry.

Since this is a work of fiction, any poetry that a woman writes is very good and worthy of being published. The only conflict is that in Peony's culture, women are not supposed to want to be published. So the extended story of Peony's ghostly existence is the story of how her poems and her commentary on an opera finally get published.

Ah, so that's okay then, right? If this is a story about professional fulfillment for a woman during a time when that was all but impossible, then that makes having to read through the totally repellent story of the waste of several female lives--including one woman whose feet were bound solely because of Peony's ghostly hints--worth it. Um, no, I don't think so!

I think I can drive around for another week powered by my anger at the implicit argument that achieving fame as a writer is a happy ending for a girl who wanted to get married and have babies. Her life was a waste, and no ghost story is going to change that.

There are women today who get to have both a family and a career. And there have always been women who had to choose one or the other. But there are no women who should starve themselves to death so they can be venerated as "lovesick maidens" and have their writing published posthumously. That's an adolescent dream, and what kind of adult person goes around telling stories to encourage the belief that it can actually happen?