For those good women who have blessed–and continue to bless–my life

Years ago I read and was profoundly moved by Lisa See’s novel, Snowflower and the Secret Fan. See provided me with a unique look into the 19th century Chinese life of her female protagonist, Lily.  For her entire life, Lily longed for love, something she admits was not right for her but which she could not help but yearn for, wait for, hope for. Ultimately, she realizes that this unjustified desire has been at the root of every problem I have experienced in my life.

It was See’s crafting of Lily and the life she bore that introduced me to the concept of laotong. In some Chinese provinces when girls as young as seven began the footbinding process, they were matched with others who were beginning the same excruciating process. This contracted relationship which grew and developed over a lifetime was called laotong or old same. What these women often lacked in love and security in their marriages, they found in each other’s friendship. Old sames communicated in a secret language that only women could read: nu shu.

Lily and her old same, Snowflower, find in each other a lasting and deep love that they could not find in their arranged marriages or even in their families:

a laotong relationship is made by choice…when we first looked in each other’s eyes in the palanquin I felt something special pass between us–like a spark to start a fire or a seed to grow rice. But a single spark is not enough to warm a room nor is a single seed enough to grow a fruitful crop. Deep love–true-heart love–must grow. 

Throughout my life, I have been blessed with the friendship of a few good women. At the end of the work day, I have taken solace in those precious moments when I could unburden myself in the presence of an old same. Here, before I faced an evening of making supper, giving baths, folding laundry and grading essays, I could speak my joys, my fears and regrets of all that I’d done or not done that day to a trusted friend. Here, I could speak my doubts in the safety of one who truly understood. Was I a good mother and wife? A good teacher? A good person and friend? What was I really contributing to this world? Who might I become? And what if I didn’t? 

In the Sanctuary of a Few Good Women, you can put everything on the table. Every course is served with transparency, and there is no judgment for dessert. For me, the banquet of laotong has been, and continues to be, one of life’s greatest blessings. As I have moved to new places and new jobs, a new Snowflower would emerge, a new spark to start a fire or a seed to grow rice. And over time, true-heart love would grow and flourish.

Holocaust survivor and author Eli Wiesel writes: Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing. Never anything but sharing. . . For me–and I suspect for many women–sharing, however, is everything. In her novel, Beloved, Toni Morrison’s protagonist, Sethe, explains the genuine power of sharing much better than I can:

She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.

In the Sanctuary of a Few Good Women, those who can gather your ragged pieces together and give them back to you in all the right order are those who have made sharing their life’s mission. They are those whose very presence is more than enough. When words fail, when there is no way to “fix” things, when circumstances spiral heedlessly beyond your control, old sames settle in beside you for however long it takes to find what poet Robert Frost calls a momentary stay against confusion. Acquaintances, well-meaning as they may be, offer glib words of advice and quick pats on the back. They smile and utter the dreadful words, Just let me know if you need anything. As if you know what you need. That’s the whole point of laotong: you feel another even when there are no right words. Even when there are simply no words at all.

Laotong may grow in female friendship, in the relationship between mother and daughter, between sisters or cousins, between colleagues. In the Sanctuary of a Few Good Women, there are no rules about who can or cannot be an old same. You can make your own rules, choose your own sisterhood. In Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Rebecca Wells writes:

She longed for porch friendship, for the sticky, hot sensation of familiar female legs thrown over hers in companionship. She pined for the girliness of it all, the unplanned, improvisational laziness. She wanted to soak the words ‘time management’ out of her lexicon. She wanted to hand over, to yield, to let herself float down the unchartered beautiful fertile musky swamp of life, where creativity and eroticism and deep intelligence dwell.

Porch friendship with familiar female legs thrown over yours. This is it exactly. And if you can’t have a porch, a grocery aisle, a corner of an office or classroom, or the front seat of a car will do. Laotong transcends place and time. If you seek it, she will come.

Perhaps the best thing about the Sanctuary of a Few Good Women is God’s hand in laotong. We may believe that we choose our old sames and that this true-heart love is the product of our own efforts. C. S. Lewis sets us straight:

In friendship…we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few years’ difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another…the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting–any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,” can truly say to every group of Christian friends, “Ye have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.” The friendship is not a reward for our discriminating and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.  [The Four Loves]

Laotong is, indeed, an instrument of God’s great grace through which He reveals to each of us the beauties of others. And it is likewise an instrument through which God allows others to reveal to us and to affirm in us our own beauties. In a world in which ugliness and uncertainties dominate the airwaves and pervade our lives, old sames doctor the gray oppressiveness of it all with beauty and light.  They communicate in the secret language of a bond forged like steel and tested by fire.

And when they sidle up beside us and we are assured of their tangible presence, this is more than enough to sustain us through whatever may come.