Former pharmacist and debut author Jane Yang’s new sweeping historical novel, The Lotus Shoes (Park Row Books, Jan. 2025), is being compared to such classics as Memoirs of a Geisha and Pachinko. PW talked with the author about how her own family history impacted the novel's portrayal of the relationship between a young woman and her maidservant in 19th-century China.
Before you became a novelist, you had a scientific career as a pharmacist and clinical researcher. What inspired you to start writing fiction?
To answer this question, I must first tell you about my family background. In Vietnam, my parents owned a flourishing small business: life was comfortable. At 44, Dad had little incentive to start over in another country, but Mum wanted her children to grow up in a democracy. As always, Dad indulged her. With the Vietnamese dong being so low in relative value, Dad sold everything we owned to pay for our airfares to Australia. Once here, Dad labored the rest of his working years in a die-casting factory while Mum sewed garments for as little as 50 cents apiece.
As soon as I could read, I adored stories and wanted, one day, to write one of my own. But, growing up poor, I was terrified of poverty—the rows between my parents about bills, the cost of food and uniforms, the upkeep of our tiny, dilapidated weatherboard house dominated my childhood. Since the pursuit of writing was unthinkable, I never tried, never even indulged in daydreaming—to dwell on the impossible would have made reality harder to bear. I’ve inserted this part of myself into The Lotus Shoes. When asked about her dreams, Little Flower says, “I keep them pruned like a punzoi,” the Cantonese word for bonsai. I needed a secure job with a regular income. Knowing what Dad had sacrificed for our family, I also felt obligated to make him proud—having a pharmacist as a daughter was a badge of honor in our community.
I credit my husband with encouraging me to explore writing. His financial support also allowed me to reduce my work hours, freeing up time to write. Without him, The Lotus Shoes wouldn’t exist.
How did your family history influence this book?
Both of my grandmothers were storytellers. From my maa maa, my paternal grandmother, I learned about foot-binding. In 1800s China, bound feet were considered an essential accomplishment for all respectable women; only girls from the poorest families kept their natural feet. Without bound feet, also called golden lilies, a woman’s marriage prospects and social standing would be severely diminished. Maa Maa used to tell me that a perfect pair of golden lilies was the ultimate act of a mother’s love: only a woman with exceptional resolve could endure the horrors of inflicting pain on her daughter for the sake of securing the child’s future. Maa Maa also told me about Autumn Moon’s extraordinary fate. Despite having natural feet and against all odds, this distant great aunt’s genius in embroidery allowed her to marry into a genteel family. It is tempting to think of the past as a monolith, but stories like Autumn Moon’s are proof of exceptions. Autumn Moon possessed a quiet resolve: though she was small and delicate, she commanded respect, even among men. Little Flower is modeled on her.
My maternal grandmother, Po Po, loathed the patriarchy and longed to take the sor hei vows and join a celibate sisterhood. This phenomenal feminist movement is central to the second half of The Lotus Shoes.
How did you go about the process of creating characters and building a world that is rooted in the stories of real people and events but is its own fictional creation?
Before I started writing The Lotus Shoes, I often read interviews where authors said their characters “spoke to them,” that “they’ve a life of their own.” To my science-trained mindset, this used to sound a bit like a clever but hollow marketing ploy. As a writer, I’m a plotter—I plan every scene, and almost every setting is based on research. When it comes to historical correctness, I’m obsessive and often terrified that I will get a detail wrong. Initially, I couldn’t understand how characters and plot could diverge from the author’s intention. I even worried that my extended family would read the book and get upset if I didn’t portray our forebears in a way that resonated with them. But after the first draft, I started to relax. I’m still a stickler for historical accuracy, but I care less about pleasing everyone. With this liberating approach, once I’ve spent enough time with my characters, they do leap off the page! Often, they even morph from my initial conception in ways that surprise and delight me. I’m happy to eat humble pie: characters can and do write their own stories.
The characters' points of view are very different from a contemporary reader’s—for example, the idea that the women with natural feet would be jealous of the women with bound feet. How did you get yourself into their mindset?
Since I was 15, I’ve been a huge fan of historical fiction. I still remember the day I found a tattered copy of Pride and Prejudice in my school library. That Penguin cover featured a head-and-shoulders portrait of a young lady against a dark background. My friends barely glanced at it, but I was drawn to the mystery behind her large, languid eyes. Who was she? What was her world like? What would she say if she could speak? Historical fiction often exposes and acclimatizes readers to vastly foreign cultural norms—well before I typed the first sentence of The Lotus Shoes, I’d had years of exposure to bygone viewpoints. Whether these stories are set during the witch-burning era of medieval Europe or among ancient human sacrifices, they all explore the psychological impulses that still drive our behaviors today. With this reading background, I found it relatively easy to inhabit my characters’ worldview. Let’s take beauty and status as an example. The vast majority of women have always strived to adopt the beauty norms of their time. Tudor ladies whitened their faces with poisonous lead paint, while their Victorian counterparts practiced tight lacing. Today, Botox and fillers are all the rage. Bound feet are, of course, perhaps the most extreme form of body modification in the name of beauty, but Little Flower and Linjing’s struggles are familiar and relatable. Like us, they crave acceptance and admiration.
The novel reads quickly, which is interesting because both characters have very little agency in their lives. How did you manage to maintain this pace given that you were dealing with characters who had such limited options?
I’m thrilled to hear that you found The Lotus Shoes an energetic read—thank you! But most of the credit belongs to my agent, Madeleine Milburn, and editors across Sphere, Park Row, and HarperCollins Canada. Little Flower and Linjing’s lack of agency is at odds with the novel’s pace, I agree. When working with such oppressed characters, there is a risk of the story becoming slow, plagued by an excess of internal dialogue. My team encouraged me to focus on the push-and-pull dynamics between Little Flower and Linjing, to see them as antagonists for each other. Although they must submit to the harsh rules that govern their roles, they still have the power to influence the trajectory of each other’s lives. The tension created by their polar-opposite goals is the engine that propels the story at a clipping pace.
One of the two central characters, Little Flower, is exceptionally skilled at embroidery, and it presents life-changing opportunities for her. How significant was this skill for real-life women in 19th-century China?
Before my research confirmed my maa maa’s claims about Autumn Moon’s fate, I had some doubts, wondering whether Grandma had exaggerated some of the facts or missed some key points. How could needlework alone be so transformative? Women’s lives and voices are not well documented—this is the case in China and across most cultures—but there are revealing breadcrumbs scattered across historical sources. For example, The Way of Embroidery published in 1821 instructed women to “find a quiet, clean, and bright corner as unsullied as the embroiderer’s mind.” It also viewed embroidery as “a moral cultivation for women on par with masculine pursuits like literature and calligraphy.” In terms of artifacts, historical photographs contain images of antique embroidered shoes stitched onto tasseled silk mats. These tiny display shoes were presented to guests during weddings as proof of a bride’s prowess in needlework. In The Lotus Shoes, the pressure to create exquisite gift shoes is a major source of anxiety for Linjing, whose color blindness makes it impossible for her to master intricate patterns. Though Autumn Moon’s exceptional good fortune was likely one in a million, I’m convinced that embroidery played a pivotal and sometimes life-changing role in the lives of 19th-century Chinese women.
The Lotus Shoes delves into a little-known piece of history called the celibate sisterhood. Would you explain what that is and how you learned about it?
My po po used to speak longingly about the celibate sisterhood. In her stories, life in the sisterhood was idyllic: fear, loneliness, and rivalry did not exist. In the late 19th-century, the silk-reeling industry exploded in the Pearl River Delta of China. The delicate work needed nimble, slender fingers. For the first time in history, young women could earn a substantial income. Soon, groups of them formed collectives and built sanctuaries where they could live in relative independence, as long as they took the sor hei vows and remained celibate. Any sister who lost her virginity would be executed by drowning. According to Po Po and my own research, almost all the sisters entered the sisterhood to escape an arranged marriage, though some also feared endless pregnancies and wanted control over their bodies.
Po Po was born in 1930, and by the time she learned about the sor hei sisters, the movement was already on the decline. The sisterhood relied on the high wages of silk reeling to sustain their independence—this industry collapsed in the aftermath of the Great Depression, forcing many sor hei sisters to migrate. Most traveled to Hong Kong or Singapore to become amahs, female servants. Those women have largely all passed away, but readers who have visited those cities in previous decades, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, may remember seeing amahs with a single long braid or a simple chignon, dressed in the uniform of a white Chinese blouse paired with simple black, loose trousers. They were most likely sor hei sisters.
Your publisher has already sold several international editions of The Lotus Shoes. Why do you think it appeals across cultures?
At the heart of the story are women’s struggles and triumphs in a world where they are starved of rights and choices, a subject of great interest to readers across the globe. Themes like power and class barriers are also central to the narrative drive of this story, as they are in modern life. As a species, we share many admirable traits, like compassion and a tendency to pursue justice. At the same time, competition and rivalry exist as long as there is a scarcity of resources and opportunities. Though the setting and cultural norms of The Lotus Shoes are worlds apart from our contemporary societies, the characters’ conflicts, motivations, and choices are very relatable to modern readers across cultures. I believe we’ve all, at some point in our professional and private lives, experienced similar struggles. Perhaps some of us have suffered at the hands of adversaries like Linjing, or maybe we were the ones who chose advancement over solidarity.
The complex bond between Little Flower and Linjing, one that occasionally mimics the intimacy of sisters, is likely another appealing aspect of the novel. Due to the seismic imbalance of power between their social standings, their relationship floundered—in the absence of equality, it is exceedingly rare for two people to establish a truly meaningful relationship, be they friends or lovers. This is a universal theme that is as relevant today, across the world, as it was in 1800s China.
