The narrator identifies herself as an eighty-year-old widow who is being cared for by Peony, her grandson’s wife. Lily is choosing to tell the story of her life now, because she has “nothing left to lose and few to offend” (3). She says she longed for love her entire life, an inappropriate desire for a woman, and that this desire caused her to take extreme measures to gain approval, first from her mother, and then from the family she married into. She says she endured physical pain to have her feet broken and shaped according to tradition, but that this experience taught her to endure other types of pain, until she became rigid within her heart, angry and unforgiving. She recalls how she found an emotional outlet in the secret women’s writing, called nu shu, by which she corresponded with her lautong, or secret-writing partner, a girl named Snow Flower. She describes a fan that she has kept over the years, which contains the writings she and Snow Flower exchanged, and which is now a record of both their friendship and the differences that led to the end of that friendship. She says that, after recording the autobiographies of many other women who were unable to write in the secret language, she has now chosen to record her own story.