Sister Snake Summary, Characters and Themes
Sister Snake by Amanda Lee Koe is a bold, genre-bending novel that blends ancient Chinese mythology with modern-day queer sensibilities and feminist themes. Rooted in the legend of the White Snake, the book follows two immortal snake sisters—Su and Emerald—who have lived for centuries in human form, shapeshifting through history, cities, and identities.
Amanda Lee Koe reimagines their myth as a confrontation with patriarchy, identity politics, trauma, and the politics of assimilation versus rebellion. The novel explores themes of survival, transformation, and chosen family in an often-hostile world. Lyrical yet punk in tone, it is as much a story of sisterhood as it is a queer feminist manifesto stretched across time.
Summary
The story opens in a time long past, at West Lake in Hangzhou, where two snake spirits—one white, one green—live beneath a willow tree. The white snake longs to experience human emotions, identities, and relationships.
On the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival in 815 CE, the green snake offers a transformative gift: lotus seeds capable of turning them into humans. With this shared decision, they commit to a new kind of immortality and walk into the world of humans under the names Bai Suzhen (Su) and Xiaoqing (Emerald).
Centuries later, Su is living in Singapore, having built a life of precision and composure as the wife of an ambitious politician. Her current existence is orderly and controlled, one where her snake past is largely repressed.
But when news of a mysterious green snake attacking a billionaire in New York surfaces, her reality begins to crack. This triggers memories and suspicions—could her estranged sister Emerald still be alive?
Emerald, meanwhile, is very much alive and operating in the shadows of New York City as a modern-day seductress and predator. She draws life energy—qi—from men during sex, navigating a brutal city as a sugar baby who turns the tables on powerful men.
After a violent encounter in Central Park goes awry and she is nearly killed by police gunfire, Emerald escapes underground, wounded but still dangerous. She is aided by a friend named Bartek, an artist and her roommate, who becomes her occasional confidant and partner in self-stitching and emotional survival.
Su’s suspicions push her to leave Singapore under the guise of a family emergency. She flies to New York, not only to verify whether the attack involved Emerald, but also to face unresolved pasts.
Emerald, upon hearing that Su is in the city, spirals into memories of the lives they have shared—Victorian England, colonial India, Weimar Berlin. These flashbacks offer glimpses into centuries of migration, adaptation, exploitation, and resistance, often filtered through gender, race, class, and sexuality.
Their eventual meeting is charged with unspoken hurt, unsaid words, and aching memories. They interact at a Brooklyn bar, where tension hums beneath every sentence.
Su presents a façade of calm control, but Emerald sees through her. Soon after, when Su is threatened, Emerald protects her, drawing them closer again, though uneasily.
A new layer of complexity is introduced when Su begins bleeding—either from a mysterious pregnancy or old trauma—while Emerald stands by, confused and concerned. As Su reflects at a Buddhist temple, she questions her choices: the life of assimilation she pursued, the trauma she buried, and the identity she tried to erase.
Emerald, in contrast, immerses herself in queer spaces—drag shows, encounters, and gender-fluid expressions of power. Both are navigating different modes of survival, trying to reconcile the immortality of their origin with the fleeting, messy nature of humanity.
They travel together to West Lake once more, only to find the willow tree gone, a symbol of lost innocence and shifting legacies. Their philosophies clash here—Su considers retreating to her curated life, perhaps with the child she’s carrying, while Emerald champions autonomy and authenticity over respectability.
Flashbacks continue to enrich their emotional depth. One of the most haunting memories involves Su’s decision to become human after a traumatic event in her snake form, which profoundly shaped her need for control.
Emerald’s queerness is further explored through snapshots of her lovers from different periods and geographies—each illustrating her ongoing defiance against norms and boundaries. Toward the end, Su finally confirms her pregnancy is real, and the sisters begin a tentative reconnection.
Bartek watches their interactions with growing curiosity, understanding that their bond is unlike anything he’s known. Despite their differences, they seem to recognize each other’s pain and the uniqueness of their shared existence.
The novel closes with the sense that their relationship is far from simple but profoundly necessary. Their story does not hinge on resolution, but on the act of remaining tethered—through time, through trauma, through transformation.
Characters
Emerald (Xiaoqing)
Emerald, the green snake turned human, is a richly layered figure who embodies fluidity, queerness, rage, and untamed power. From the beginning, she is characterized by her defiant nature—she chooses transformation not out of conformity, but for the possibility of autonomy and indulgence.
In modern-day New York, she survives by consuming qi through sex, which becomes both a tool of pleasure and a form of parasitic vengeance. Her transient, often violent interactions with men are not just transactions but acts of reclamation, honed over centuries of betrayal and repression.
Emerald thrives in the margins—embracing the monstrous, leaning into performance, and refusing to be bound by conventional morality. Her queerness is expansive, rooted in time-traveling memories of lovers and identities that defy static categorization.
Despite her cynicism, Emerald craves connection, especially with Su. Her emotional vulnerability emerges in rare, piercing moments of grief and longing.
She becomes a tragicomic mirror to Su’s desire for respectability—a creature who never stopped evolving and never stopped hurting.
Su (Bai Suzhen)
Su, the white snake and Emerald’s sister, presents a study in discipline, repression, and the painful quest for assimilation. Initially the more reserved of the two, Su constructs a human identity that is meticulously controlled.
She marries a Singaporean politician, crafts a life of perfection, and suppresses her supernatural roots. Her inexplicable pregnancy becomes the fulcrum of her unravelling, forcing her to confront long-buried traumas and desires.
As the novel progresses, Su’s need for propriety collides with her innate power. Scenes where she reclaims her qi-feeding abilities or reflects on past abuses underscore her internal struggle.
A key moment reveals that Su became human to escape the violation she experienced as a snake. This choice makes her arc not one of simple repression but of wounded survival.
Her journey is not toward full liberation like Emerald’s, but toward integration. She seeks a synthesis of her snake nature, human ambition, and maternal instinct.
Su is also a reluctant revolutionary. Her final acts of stepping back from politics and embracing her child signal not defeat, but a subtler, internal transformation.
Bartek
Bartek, Emerald’s artist roommate, functions as a human foil to the sisters’ mythic identities. Queer, creative, and open-minded, he accepts Emerald’s strangeness without fetishizing it.
His flat becomes a site of sanctuary, healing, and eventually subtle revelation. While not as dramatically transformed as Su or Emerald, Bartek undergoes his own arc of recognition.
He comes to see the mythological underpinnings of the world he inhabits. He grapples with the fluidity of identity and love.
His relationship with both sisters is grounded in compassion. He often serves as the voice of sanity amid their chaos.
Bartek’s gift lies in his refusal to categorize—he sees people, not monsters or myths. This perception allows him to serve as a mirror that reflects back the humanity both sisters are trying to navigate.
Giovanni/Gabe
Giovanni, or Gabe, represents the exploitative capitalist male—rich, entitled, and predatory. He is Emerald’s target in the opening chapter, embodying the type of man who feeds on power imbalances and objectification.
His demise at the hands of both sisters—first attacked by Emerald, then finished off by Su—marks a turning point in both their journeys. Giovanni is not a deeply nuanced character, but he is important as a narrative symbol.
He is a catalyst for confrontation and transformation. Giovanni becomes the embodiment of the masculine world both sisters must navigate and ultimately resist.
The Baby
Though unnamed and silent, Su’s child represents a seismic shift in the story’s emotional and symbolic landscape. As a possible snake-human hybrid, the baby becomes a vessel of future possibility.
It challenges the limits of identity, reproduction, and mythology. The child forces Su to revisit not only her trauma but also her potential for healing.
It also becomes a bridge between the sisters. The baby softens their conflicts and reminds them of their shared past and mutual dependence.
In the epilogue, the baby’s quiet presence is a reminder of continuity and hope. It offers a delicate yet radical suggestion that something new and undefinable can emerge from centuries of pain.
Themes
Sisterhood and the Complexity of Kinship
The central axis of Sister Snake is the bond between Su (Bai Suzhen) and Emerald (Xiaoqing), two immortal snake spirits who choose to live as human women across time and geography. Their sisterhood is not portrayed as idealized or straightforward, but rather as layered, often antagonistic, and deeply affected by the shifting tides of power, gender, and identity.
The novel presents their relationship as a constant negotiation—between loyalty and resentment, closeness and distance, shared origin and individual divergence. Though they are mythologically connected and committed to each other through an ancient promise, centuries of divergent experience have complicated their connection.
Su, who leans into control, domesticity, and social propriety, becomes emblematic of someone who copes through assimilation. Emerald, who embraces chaos, queerness, and fluidity, lives in open defiance of societal norms.
Their bond, then, is one of contrast: not a mirror, but a doubling that holds tension. Yet, the endurance of their sisterhood becomes its own form of survival.
The novel doesn’t offer resolution in the traditional sense. Their conversations remain evasive, full of emotional landmines, and even their moments of reconciliation are tinged with ambiguity.
Still, despite betrayal, abandonment, and vast ideological differences, they remain tethered. The narrative reinforces that kinship is not always about harmony—it can be about the refusal to let go, the choice to stay connected even when doing so hurts.
By the epilogue, their bond becomes quieter but no less powerful. The suggestion is that while love can be inconsistent, sisterhood persists not as a state of peace, but as a shared history neither can fully escape or reject.
In this way, Koe challenges the reader to rethink familial ties not as stable, but as evolving and deeply human.
Desire, Autonomy, and the Female Body
Desire in Sister Snake is presented not simply as a force of attraction but as a form of power, survival, and even vengeance. Both Su and Emerald, as former serpents now inhabiting female bodies, confront a world that fetishizes, regulates, and violates those bodies.
Their sexuality is often weaponized—Emerald literally feeds off men’s life force during sex, while Su’s mysterious pregnancy disrupts the controlled image she has cultivated as a politician’s wife. The novel examines how desire intersects with autonomy, especially for women whose bodies are continuously politicized and objectified.
For Emerald, queerness becomes an act of reclamation. Her journey through various relationships, with both women and men across time, reveals her refusal to be confined by binaries—of gender, of love, or of power.
She claims pleasure on her own terms, and when necessary, uses it as a form of domination rather than submission. Su’s path is more tortured.
Her desire is buried under the weight of trauma and social expectation. Her rape in a snake mating circle prior to becoming human establishes a foundational wound—her transformation is not just a spiritual evolution but a defense mechanism against further violence.
Her later discomfort with sexuality, her need to control her environment, and her resistance to Emerald’s chaos are all expressions of that history. Even her pregnancy, which should symbolize fertility or renewal, becomes a site of dread and disbelief.
Over time, though, she begins to reclaim her body, not in the sexual sense alone, but in choosing how to inhabit it without apology or fear. The novel never pretends that such reclamation is easy or complete.
Instead, it posits that autonomy is something one must continuously fight for—against both external forces and internalized shame.
Assimilation versus Otherness
Throughout the novel, Su and Emerald embody contrasting responses to the human world’s pressures: one seeks assimilation while the other embraces otherness. Su, who lives in Singapore’s elite circles, attempts to blend into the fabric of human society.
She suppresses her snake identity, adheres to social norms, and constructs a life that appears respectable and unremarkable. This life is ultimately unsustainable.
Her supernatural pregnancy, her repressed desires, and the intrusion of her sister into her carefully manicured world expose the fragility of her camouflage. The narrative critiques this form of assimilation not as inherently dishonest, but as a form of self-erasure—one that comes with psychological cost.
Su’s transformation into a figure of power through conformity underscores how social structures reward sameness while punishing difference. In contrast, Emerald refuses such compromise.
She moves through cities, sexualities, and social roles without apology. Her life is messy, erratic, and often painful, but she retains her identity, however monstrous or fragmented it may appear.
She feeds on humans, embraces queer and trans subcultures, and revels in being feared or misunderstood. For Emerald, otherness is not a curse—it’s a source of strength and freedom.
Koe uses this contrast to explore the cost of passing versus the cost of resistance. Neither path is idealized.
Su’s internal decay mirrors Emerald’s physical wounds, suggesting that assimilation and rebellion both come with sacrifices. However, by the novel’s end, both characters seem to move toward a middle space.
Integration doesn’t mean erasure, and otherness doesn’t require total rejection of belonging. The novel thus suggests that true identity might lie not in either extreme but in the freedom to move between them.
Myth, Memory, and Historical Rewriting
Sister Snake functions as a reimagining of the Legend of the White Snake, but Amanda Lee Koe’s approach is neither reverent nor nostalgic. She uses myth as a framework to interrogate history, memory, and transformation.
The novel situates its immortal characters in various historical and geographical settings—Victorian England, Berlin, colonial India, contemporary New York—and through them critiques the eras’ gender politics, colonial legacies, and cultural hypocrisies. Myth becomes a living organism, capable of adapting to time, language, and sociopolitical change.
Rather than being locked in the past, Su and Emerald carry that past into every encounter, often haunted or shaped by it. Their centuries-long lifespan allows Koe to examine how history repeats, evolves, or stifles—especially for those who live on the margins.
Memory in this context is both a gift and a burden. Emerald frequently references past lovers, traumas, and acts of rebellion.
Su, on the other hand, attempts to forget or suppress history, only to find that it resurfaces. These divergent relationships with memory shape their worldviews: one uses it to maintain identity, the other tries to escape it to maintain sanity.
The novel plays with the idea that history is not objective—it is curated, misremembered, or overwritten, especially by those in power. In reclaiming myth from patriarchal retellings, Koe makes space for queer and feminist counter-narratives.
The inclusion of queer love stories, drag shows, and queer-coded violence isn’t just stylistic—it’s political. The ancient myth becomes a vessel for stories that have often been erased.
In this way, Sister Snake is not merely a reworking of a legend, but a challenge to how stories are told, who gets to tell them, and how the past informs the possibilities of the present.