Lady Tan's Circle of Women by Lisa See
A Novel
Title: Lady Tan’s Circle of Women
Author: Lisa See
Publisher: Scribner
Publication Year: 2023
ISBN: 9781982117085
Rating: 4.5 stars
For this Women’s History Month read, we are headed way back in history to the late 15th century. Thanks to my friend Linda who recommended this book and loaned it to me to read. Lady Tan’s Circle of Women is a fictionalized account of the life of Tan Yunxian, a female doctor in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, who wrote a book titled Miscellaneous Records of a Female Doctor. While most of Lady Tan’s life has been lost to history, See has done a significant amount of historical research to put this story together.
The book is divided into sections based on the stages of life of the protagonist, Yunxian. The book opens in 1469 when Yunxian is a small child. She spends her days trying to manage the pain of her ongoing foot binding while learning all of the lessons she will need as a wife and daughter-in-law in her future. Her mother, Respectful Lady, is her teacher and caregiver. Her father is studying for the next round of exams to move him up in the imperial government and will soon leave the family to go take the tests. Yunxian’s life is turned upside down when Respectful Lady takes ill from an infection that started in her feet. Despite her need for medical care, the male doctor isn’t allowed to look at her or touch her due to society’s rules. Yunxian must work as a go-between to describe her mother’s symptoms to the doctor and then do what he tells her to do. When Respectful Lady dies from her infection, Yunxian feels responsible. Shortly after her mother’s death, her father leaves for his exams and so Yunxian, Miss Zhao, her father’s concubine, and Yifeng, her half brother must make the long journey to her paternal grandparents’ home where they will now live.
The Mansion of Golden Light, Yunxian’s new home, is much larger than the only other home she has ever known. It is daunting at first, but as Yunxian gets to know her grandparents, she starts to feel more at home. Grandmother Ru and Grandfather Tan are both smitten with Yunxian. Despite her being a girl, they think she is smart and capable and reward her with closeness and affection that would be seen as spoiling her in wider society. Grandmother Ru is from a family of hereditary doctors and learned medical care from her parents. Grandfather Tan is also a doctor, but took up practicing after retiring from his imperial government job. Grandfather Tan thinks that Yunxian is smart enough to learn his type of medicine, but Grandmother Ru insists on teaching Yunxian her type of medicine instead. As a proper upper class family, the Tans want to live up to Confucian ideals. This is what prevents a male doctor from physically seeing a female patient—the closest he can get is talking to her from the other side of the screen. It also means that despite her medical knowledge and skill, Grandmother Ru only doctors the women within her family that live in the inner courtyards of the Mansion of Golden Light. It also means that none of them can touch blood, actively participate in childbirth, or conduct autopsies—these things are all the jobs of midwives who are lower class and are considered to be polluted by their duties.
Grandmother Ru introduces Yunxian to Midwife Shi and her daughter Meiling. While they are not of the same social class and midwives are frowned upon, they are still essential in the elite houses because male doctors are rarely present at childbirth and even female doctors can’t actively participate in delivery because of the prohibition against blood. Grandmother Ru and Midwife Shi go against what is considered proper in society and allow Yunxian and Meiling to form a close friendship that will continue for the rest of their lives.
Yunxian continues to learn from her grandmother until the day of her marriage when she is fifteen and she must go and live at her husband’s house. Even though the marriage is arranged, Yunxian likes her husband Yang Maoren. He is gentle and they get along nicely, but Yunxian struggles. She doesn’t fit in well at the Garden of Fragrant Delights, the Yang home. It is even bigger than the Mansion of Golden Light. She doesn’t often get to visit her own family and even though she constantly writes to Meiling, she doesn’t hear back. Lady Kuo, Yunxian’s mother-in-law doesn’t seem to like her and won’t let her practice medicine at all, instead having Dr. Wong, a male doctor oversee the family’s medical care. Additionally, it takes Yunxian several months to get pregnant, which only makes her even more unpopular. Yunxian starts to fall into a depression because of her circumstances, and it’s only made worse when she finds out that Lady Kuo has intentionally been keeping her letters from being delivered to Meiling. When Yunxian does get pregnant, she is hopeful that she will have a son to please her husband and his family. After a difficult birth when both baby and mother almost die, Poppy, Yunxian’s servant brings Meiling and Midwife Shi in and they are able to save both Yunxian and her baby where Dr. Wong would have failed. The baby is a girl, and even though Maoren seems pleased with his daughter, everyone else views Yunxian as a failure because she didn’t have a son. This worsens her depression and she remains ill after the baby’s birth until Meiling and her grandmother are able to nurse her back to health.
The Yang family is even more displeased when Yunxian exits her room before she is allowed to and finds the body of Spinster Aunt. Spinster Aunt is the only person Yunxian is close to at the Garden of Fragrant Delights and she screams upon finding the body and makes a scene. This requires an inquest to be held and brings shame upon the family. Despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, Spinster Aunt’s death is labeled an accident.
Yunxian continues to try to do her wifely duties. After their help at her birth and interference from Grandfather Tan, she is allowed to see her family and Meiling more often. She still doesn’t have Lady Kuo’s permission to practice medicine on the women of the family, but she secretly still does so. She has had two more daughters, but still no son. She is heartbroken and jealous when Lady Kuo brings in a concubine for Maoren in the hopes that someone will conceive an heir. After a visit from some of Maoren’s business associates, Meiling is recommended to go to Beijing to act as midwife to the Empress. Meiling recommends Yunxian when the Empress comes down with an eye infection and Yunxian must go to Beijing for an undetermined amount of time. The timing is bad because Yunxian has just discovered that she is pregnant again, hopefully with the long awaited son. Yet, she can bring honor to the Yang family, so she goes.
When she arrives in Beijing she is shocked to discover that Meiling is also pregnant after many years of trying, as is the Empress. She and Meiling are due about two months after the Empress, but because of childbirth customs and the required month of rest after having a baby, they won’t be able to make it back home before their own babies are due. Everything goes well and both expect to be rewarded for their efforts, especially when the Empress’s baby is a boy. However, when Meiling miscarries immediately after the Empress gives birth, in the same room, she faces a death sentence for allowing the Empress to see her miscarriage. Yunxian and the other women of the Empress’s court are able to intercede and Meiling is only whipped instead, but nearly dies between her injuries and complications from the miscarriage. Yunxian must care for the Empress and Meiling while still finishing out her pregnancy. When she gives birth to a healthy boy and the Empress gives her permission to leave, they all head home immediately despite the fact that Yunxian is supposed to remain in bed for a month.
When they reach their home, they are not greeted with the expected fanfare. They find that there has been a smallpox outbreak that has been tearing through town. Many of the people in the Yang family have been variolated against smallpox, but many haven’t, including Yunxian’s youngest daughter and her baby son. Dr. Wong ran at the first sign of disease and there is no one to take care of the sick. Yunxian hands off her son to her mother-in-law, and goes into the quarantine area to help as many people as she can. One of the other people in the quarantine area is Miss Chen, one of Master Yang’s concubines and the mother of the next heir to the Yang family after Maoren and their son. Yunxian and Miss Chang work together, but still lose many patients. Finally, Yunxian must call in Grandmother Ru and Miss Zhao for help. Miss Chang loses both of her children and many others are lost, but they are able to save Yunxian’s youngest daughter.
When the outbreak is over, Yunxian puts together some of the things Miss Chang said when they were working together. She speaks to Midwife Shi and starts to become concerned. She writes to her father who comes back to reopen the inquest into Spinster Aunt’s death. Dr. Wong is disgraced and punished for his interference in the Yang family.
Eventually, Yunxian enters the next stage of life when her father-in-law dies and Maoren becomes head of the family. Her two oldest daughters are happily married, her youngest daughter remains with the family as the new Spinster Aunt due to her smallpox scars and her son is married. She is the head lady of the family and has her own daughter-in-law. Now that she is out from under Lady Kuo’s control, Yunxian changes the way things are done. She openly practices medicine on both women of the family and other women who come to her for help. She allows the wives a bit more freedom. She and Meiling decide to work on a book together to help women diagnose and treat common ailments they face that male doctors can’t and won’t treat. They continue to be as close as ever.
I was really captivated by the setting of this story. Just the other day I was having a conversation with my husband about how little we learn about Asian history. Because they were so shut down from outside influences, their societies and cultures happened on a very different timeline than the Western cultures we tend to learn more about in school. For example, in this book, they have smallpox variolation, which apparently has been a thing in China since 200 BCE. The same practices weren’t seen in Western Europe until the 1700s. They also had gunpowder, paper, movable type printing, kites, seed drills, etc. much earlier than we see them in the West (we’re talking BCE). Because Asian cultures are on such a different timeline than the history I’ve always learned, it can be hard to contextualize in my head. This story opens in the 1460s, before Columbus even set sail trying to get to India and yet, I kept thinking this story happened much later because I am still placing it on a European timeline.
Through the lens of Women’s History Month, I was also interested in the ways women were expected to act and behave in the society we see in the story. Yunxian was an upper class and very privileged woman and because of that she led a relatively easy life. She was expected to bear sons and know some feminine arts like embroidery, a little bit of music, and some poetry composition for entertainment. However, despite the relative ease of her life, she was so restricted by rules and propriety. Pretty much everyone but her was allowed to have an opinion on her behavior and comportment and she rarely got to leave the inner courtyards of her home. However, Meiling and some of the working women Yunxian meets have much, much harder lives. They live in small confined spaces, potentially face food insecurity, and have to do backbreaking labor. They also have little to no access to birth control and must raise and provide for their children on top of that with no servants. Yet despite the difficulties of their lives, these women have far more freedom to dress the way they like and come and go as they please. Throughout the book, Yunxian is extremely envious of these women because of their freedom. Meiling serves as a great way of keeping Yunxian in check, constantly reminding her of the privileges she has in exchange for her freedom. To me it reinforced that throughout much of history there wasn’t a good way to be a woman. Every woman’s life had positives and negatives, but there wasn’t any way to really have it all. No matter where you fell in society, you were missing something. Of course the scale isn’t always the same: being bored and stuck in your mansion with water features and expansive gardens is a very different struggle than having your 10th kid in ten years while trying to run your family farm while your husband is out drinking the proceeds…
My favorite part of the book is the friendship between Yunxian and Meiling. While female relationships and the importance of them is central to the story (the title refers to a circle of loving and supportive women a woman can count on in her lifetime), their relationship was the best one. When Yunxian arrives at her new room in the Garden of Fragrant Delights, her room has been decorated to encourage happiness in the marriage. She notices a sign showing two birds together on a branch (a sign of happiness and longevity). The sign says “White-haired, growing old together.” Throughout her marriage, that is what she hopes to achieve with Maoren, but after she gives birth to a son and is more outspoken than Maoren likes with her actions and opinions, she realizes that any great passion they ever had between them is gone. She buys him a concubine and they continue to have a friendly marriage. However, toward the end of the book as she sits and discusses the idea of her own book with Meiling, she realizes that Meiling is the one who has gone through everything with her—the carefree days of childhood, being teenagers, the early days of marriage, having sons, disappointments, loss, and finally they are both white-haired and growing old together. She has often commented on Meiling being the other half of her heart, but in this moment she realizes that the great soul-mate love that she always hoped to find in her marriage has been her best friend all along. While I think there is a clear queer interpretation you can make of this book, I think it is really focused on the love and support of female friendship and how essential it is, especially in a world where women’s options are narrow and limited.
I loved this book as an insight into history and as a celebration of strong female friendship. I think it is a perfect read for Women’s History Month.