Peony In Love
By Lisa See
Read: January 2009
Rating: Lovely
Set in China during a time of transition, the novel is a story of love, and voice. Peony
Definitely an improvement over Snow Flower, in that the language doesn’t have as many weak spots, and the historical fact conveyed is much, much smoother. Oddly enough, the voice is strongest at the beginning and weakens toward the end.
The book is an echo of The Peony Pavillion, an opera that played to emotions. Apparently, young women across China emulated the female protagonist, who stopped eating for love and died of starvation. Peony adores the opera. She is exstatic when her father arranges for it to be performed on her birthday, and that she will be able to hear, and maybe even see it. (This being a culture where women are not to be seen by men who are not part of their families.) The opera itself is so intense, that Peony slips away to the gardens to catch her breath. All precautions are useless, as she meets a young man there. They are enamoured at once, and by the third night of the opera, they are in love. Peony returns to the theater with a heavy heart. Having known such pure love, how can she go to her arranged marriage with a stranger?
Certain that the answer lies in the opera, Peony spends the next few months before her wedding studying the text. She writes in the margins. She tries to capture her feelings of love, so that one day she can look back at these pages and remember. She stops eating. Five days before her wedding, she dies.
What Peony was unable to see, was her father announcing to the theater at large who her betrothed was: the man she met in the garden.
Peony’s soul is devastated with grief. She follows the conditions of the Chinese theology, her soul’s happiness dependent on her family performing certain rites. They fail to do so, and she becomes a hungry ghost, condemned to stay on Earth and disturb the living with her presence.
The rest of the book is Peony’s journey to maturity, to a deeper understanding of love, and to the proper laying to rest of her soul. She must learn how to communicate, how to guide, how to be subtle. She hopes for the magical ending of the opera to come true for her as well. But first she must learn the truth of her family–who has been loyal, who has suffered, and who is deserving of love and respect.
Lisa See has given interviews where she talks about the corellation between the starving maidens and the modern idea of anorexia. In her research she found similar cases throughout history. But rather than these women trying to be beautiful, they were starving themselves because it was one of the few things they had control over. They could control what went into their bodies–one of the motives still cited today. This helps give the book a real-world context after so much time spent with ghosts.
It’s one hell of a compelling story. The kind I would like to write. See is not the world’s best writer, but DAMN does she know how to suck you in.
