February Flowers by Fan Wu

Set in modern China, February Flowers by Fan Wu is a coming of age story of two young women in a society torn between tradition and modernity, focusing on the bond between the two girls.

Innocent seventeen-year-old Chen Ming and worldly and flashy twenty-four-year-old Miao Yan have very little in common other than studying at the same university. Ming lives in her own world of books, music, and imagination and resists joining the social life.  Yan, by contrast, is sexy, cynical, beautiful and wild.  When the two meet and become friends, Ming’s world is forever changed. Ming is captivated by free-spirited Miao Yan until it becomes a quiet obsession for Ming. Yan, on the other hand, yearns for the kind of stability that Ming’s seriousness can bring. The tension between the two characters, and the concurrent tension within the university itself propels the story.

The novel is written in memoir format narrated twelve years after the fact by an older post-marriage Ming. Ming would have never imagined herself to be so attached to a woman so different from herself. But as much as opposites attract, their differences create a friction that at once pulls them together, and pushes them further apart. Ming’s longing and her repression permeate the pages of the novel.

The book ends with an energised and positive Ming, suddenly aware that she is no longer a subservient girl, but a woman in charge of her own destiny.

I started reading the book with some misgivings that I would find the book boring. But surprisingly, I enjoyed the novel. And it is the first book that I have read in the Year of the Tiger.