Lady Tan’s Circle of Women

“Friendship is a contract between two hearts. With hearts united, women can laugh and cry, live and die together,”

“It takes a lifetime to make a friend, but you can lose one in an hour,” she recites. “Life without a friend is life without sun. Life without a friend is death.”

“There is soft happiness in sadness and deep sadness in happiness.”

“I wish I were a giant gingko tree hundreds of years old, with the deep roots it takes to stand strong against mighty winds. Instead, I feel like a sapling in a typhoon, desperately trying to hang on.”

“I’ve been lucky to have been cared for and loved since childhood by a circle of women. Now it’s time for me to create a wider circle, so I can do for my daughters and other women in the household what Grandmother, Miss Zhao, Meiling, and even Poppy have done for”

“A friend without faults will never be found”

“A woman is a woman whether born in the dirt or on silk.”

“Friendship is a contract between two hearts. With hearts united, women can laugh and cry, live and die together.”

“Store up good deeds and you will meet with good. Store up evil actions and you will meet with evil.”

“Human life is like a sunbeam passing through a crack.”

“A woman who helps others helps herself.”

“You must speak if you wish to be heard.” Her features soften, perhaps because she realizes she’s been harsh. “I’m not angry at you,” she says. “I’m irritated with men. I’m lucky to love your grandfather, but most men—other doctors, especially—don’t like to see us succeed. You must always show them respect and let them think they know more than you do, while understanding that you can achieve something they never can. You can actually help women.”

“All the sorrows of the world arise from parting, whether in life or by death.”

“I always think about the tie between emotions and the body. Fierce joy attacks yang; fierce anger damages yin. If I were to write a book, I’d want to include Liver-related conditions that are affected by the different types of anger we women must hide from our husbands, mothers-in-law, and concubines. And then there are the ailments connected to Lung emotions—sadness and worry.”

“Your silence is like rain on my worries, feeding and growing them.”

“sometimes I feel like I’m drowning from the expectations and responsibilities that have been placed on me.”

“I always assured him our son would become master of the Garden of Fragrant Delights. Now Manzi never will.”

“To live is to suffer.”

“I wish I could explain to them that while I take pride in what I’ve accomplished with their footbinding, I despise this chore with equal measure. Who among us would wish to inflict agony on her child? We say we want sons to continue the family line, but sometimes I wonder if what we’re really saying is that we’d rather have a son than do this.”

“For much of my life I felt alone, but over the years a circle of women came to love me, and I came to love each of those women in return.”

“But I believe we have even more to gain than a husband’s admiration, and that is compassion. We may not care for concubines, but it’s important to remember that each one came from the womb of a woman. Every girl—no matter how small-minded or unfortunate—had a mother who nursed and cared for her.”

“A midwife’s contact with blood places her on the same base level as a butcher. Furthermore, midwives are disreputable. They are too much in the world.”

“You are a little girl, so you are still in milk days.”

“balance of life through yin and yang—dark and light, death and life.”

“He who depends on himself will have the greatest happiness.Book of Odes”

“It may not be decorous to say aloud, but we women - rich, poor, educated, uneducated - are at the mercy of our bodies: the cycles of blood, the patterns of energy, the depth and complexity of our feelings.”

“We are the circle of good that surrounds her.”

“Today we can recognize infant-cord rigidity as tetanus presumed to have been contracted while squatting on straw to give birth or sitting on wet ground during or after labor. (Tetanus is still one of the main causes of death for postpartum women in the third world.)”

“term child palace dates to the first or second century C.E. and is still used in contemporary Chinese for the uterus.”

“He who depends on himself will have the greatest happiness. And look! It has turned out to be so.”