We live at the whim and pleasure of others, which is why what Snow Flower and her mother had done was so beyond. They had taken cloth that had once been sent from snow Flower's family to Snow Flower's mother as a bride-price gift, been shaped into the dowry of a fine maiden, been reshaped again into clothes for a beautiful daughter, and now restructured another time to announce the qualities of a young woman marrying into the house of a polluted butcher. All of it was women's work - the very work that men think is merely decorative - and it was being used to change the lives of the women themselves. Pg. 127

That woman had been critical of me for so long. She had also lied - not to my family but to me. I had never cared for her and now I liked her even...