Karen’s Pick
September
Lady Tan’s Circle of Women
Lisa See
Scribner- June 6, 2023
357 pages
Lady Tan’s Circle of Women, by Lisa See, a work of historical fiction, is based on the true and profound story of a woman physician in 15th century China, Tan Yunxian. See’s writing is highly detailed and does an amazing job of informing the reader of the structure of imperial families during the Ming Dynasty. Her characters come alive, and her skillful writing transports the reader to the time and place of her book.
The story’s main character, Tan Yunxian, is a child from a highly educated elite family, As a young child Tan is taught her place in her world. “When a girl, obey your father; when a wife, obey your husband; when a widow, obey your son.” However, life begins to change for Yunxian when her mother dies. She is sent to live with her grandparents who recognize her precociousness and suggest she pursue a medical education to be fostered primarily by her physician grandmother, Lady Ru, a doctor of “great skill and wisdom”. Yunxian is allowed to apprentice with a mid-wife and her daughter Meiling, who becomes a life-long friend, though they are from different social status. It is during this time as an apprentice that Tan begins to clearly see the disparity between medical care for commoners and the discrepancies in the medical treatment of women by male doctors. She quietly makes it her life mission to defy the Confucian value, “ an educated woman is a worthless woman”. Through unrelenting study she becomes an instigator and facilitator for improved medical care for the women in her life, especially those confined within the gilded compounds of her family homes. She was a practitioner of better health practices for suffering women feeling anger or despair whether they were of titled elite, concubines, or common women, oft times to the disdain of family and members of her society.
As a reader, one needs to be prepared for the very specific cultural and medical practices of the Chinese during the Ming Dynasty era like foot binding. See spends an elaborate amount of time on the pain women endured for the purpose of enticing husbands and obtaining cultural status and the beauty ideals of the royals. Yunxian accepts this cultural practice of foot binding but establishes a protocol of continual foot care for women throughout their lives to prevent an infection much like the one that killed her mother.
See allows us to be part of Tan Yunxian’s (Lady Tan) life journey from childhood to her death; from that of a child student to a respected health practitioner and writer of a medical journal with remedies that are still practiced five centuries later. Most importantly, Lady Tan’s Circle of Women is the story of women helping women, female friendships, and women overcoming the odds in a culture that readily dismisses them.
I highly recommend Lady Tan’s Circle of Women and look forward to reading other books by Lisa See.