AsiaScoop   

Bound-Foot in China

Photographs by Paul Hu (www.assignmentasia.com)

As the sun rises over the narrow lanes and alleyways of Liuyi village, the morning light falls on a land that time forgot. The houses in this tiny hamlet in China’s southwestern Kunming province are made from mud, hay and crushed sea shells. In this village of 800 families, there are few telephones and, on the streets, ambling cows are the most common cause of gridlock. It’s a place where even rusty, one-speed bicycles are considered high-tech.

But what makes this village unique are its elderly women – the last survivors in China to have bound feet. Through the bustling town square, past steaming tea houses, and around the lettuce and radish fields, they are everywhere: women whose feet are shockingly small, often no more than four inches long, tucked into almost comically tiny shoes.

Most of the 300 bound-foot women in the village are no taller than five feet and sport a variety of footwear, from mini rubber boots to doll-sized embroidered ballet pumps, which they sew themselves. Each of them was a victim of a Chinese custom that came into vogue in the 10th century, a time when having tiny feet was considered a sign of beauty, and when men would not dream of taking a wife with normal-sized feet.

The smaller the feet, the more erotic they were considered to be. Bound feet were seen as the most prized sexual organs, and women would reveal them only to their husbands. The practice is so painful that girls did not follow in the tradition of their mothers and grandmothers out of vanity – they were forced to do so by their parents.

The grotesque process required folding a young girl’s foot in half so that her toes touched the underside of her heel. Then her foot was tightly swathed in a length of cloth to stop any further growth. This excruciating procedure left millions of girls deformed and immobile. Those who did walk on their bound feet had to balance their entire body weight on their heels, inching forward with mincing and painfully slow steps.

In the early 1900s, the practice of foot binding died out across most of China. Today, it is almost impossible to find a bound-foot woman in a major Chinese city such as Shanghai or Beijing and social attitudes toward the barbaric practice have changed radically. (“This is a terrible episode in China’s history,” one Kunming official politely informed us, thereby diplomatically deflecting our request to interview the village’s bound-foot women.) But Liuyi is so isolated that the villagers had no idea the tradition had gone out of style. For at least 30 years after it fell out of national favour, families in Liuyi continued to bind the feet of their daughters.

As a result, hundreds of women, aged just over 60 to nearly 100 years old, still hobble along Liuyi’s quiet lanes. Some are recent entrants to China’s growing middle class and own an electrical appliance or two; others are so poor they must spend hours collecting firewood for cooking. Yang Zhaoshi, a 94-year-old who lives near the town square, is a typical example. Not only was she forced to endure foot binding but also had to support her opium-addicted husband while tending the family fields and raising their three children by herself. Today, she still looks after 20 family members.

But what every one of these women knows – and is almost proud of – is that she is a part of China’s history. Ma Pu, a vivacious 82-year-old with hoof-like feet stuffed into baby socks and tiny black cloth shoes, pithily echoes this collective pride: “After all of us Liuyi ladies die, you’ll never see anything like us again.”

Despite the pain they have endured, Liuyi’s bound-foot women have led astonishingly active lives. Many have fought hard for the survival of their families – and Ma Pu, whose feet were bound when she was seven, is one of these bound-foot warriors. As we enter the courtyard that leads to her house, she limps over the doorstep, pokes her luminous, smiling face out and shouts excitedly. “What kind of people are you? Where are you from?”

The question answered, Ma Pu invites us into her home, which she shares with three generations of relatives, a dog and several chickens. She is holding a cleaver in one hand and a stalk of celery in the other. Tonight, like every other night, she must prepare dinner for her elderly husband, the couple’s three sons and their wives, not to mention eight granddaughters and two grandsons. In addition to feeding 18 people, Ma Pu also works at a pickle factory in the village. “Every day I chop and sort vegetables from nine in the morning to three in the afternoon at the factory,” she says, adding with a grin: “Then I come home and make dinner.”

Asked how she manages, Ma Pu grins again. “I have lots of energy – maybe even as much as a big-footed lady,” she says, flashing a near-toothless smile. And then, without a trace of bitterness in her voice, she adds: “My husband prefers to sit around drinking in the tea house all day.” When her feet ache, as they often do after a long day, she soaks them in hot water – which has first been used to steam the family’s daily quota of rice.Ma Pu has three sisters. “All of us had bound feet,” she says. “That was what feudal society liked women to look like. But I would never ask my daughters to have bound feet. Nor would I do it again if I had the choice. Never. It is torture.”

Pain is part of the fabric of daily life for these women. Luo Liu, an 80-year-old with a dark, serious face, lives in a mud-brick house down the lane from Ma Pu. She has two sons, one of whom is the village doctor and who tends to many of Liuyi’s bound-foot women. She embroiders a handkerchief as she recalls the story of her life: “I used to work in the fields alongside my husband. For every moment he toiled under the sun or in the middle of a storm, I did, too. Life was not easy, especially with these small feet.”

Luo Liu’s son, Luo Zhao Yuan, the doctor, shakes his head when he talks about his mother’s past. “When I was a child we were so poor that my mother would climb three hours into the mountains to collect twigs and branches for firewood,” he recalls. “We didn’t even have a horse or a bicycle and mother would walk everywhere.” Intense pain accumulates in the heels of bound-foot women, he says, and they also suffer from twisted ankles, back problems and poor posture. Women who do not cut their toenails properly find them digging into the soft flesh of their soles.

Bound feet are hopelessly fragile and unceasingly painful. “Like delicate peaches,” goes an old Chinese saying. Women shriek if anyone so much as brushes up against their feet. Vindictive relatives sometimes exploit this vulnerability by inflicting pain on bound-foot women. “Whenever my husband was cross with me, he would stomp on my feet,” says one woman, wincing as she speaks.It’s a frosty winter morning and Luo Lin is seated on a teetering wooden stool, warming her hands over a metal pan filled with red-hot coals. She’s 80 years old but is wearing a pair of black suede lace-up shoes made for a three-year-old. Like all her foot-bound sisters, this good-natured grandmother was born with perfectly normal feet. “I used to play in the fields with my brothers, catch hens running through the alleyways, and climb trees,” she reminisces.

All that came to an end some 74 years ago, when Luo Lin was six years old. She will never forget the fateful morning her mother called her into the family kitchen and quietly announced that it was time to have her feet bound. She then told her daughter to prepare herself for the pain.The young Luo Lin was propped on to a chair and her feet placed into a bucket of warm water to soften them. Her mother then grabbed her right foot and slowly started to bend the tender flesh and bones backwards and forwards. Luo Lin shrieked and kicked with her free leg, but her mother persisted until, finally, Luo Lin’s foot was folded completely in half – the toes pressed up against her heel.

When she looked down, she saw that her new foot resembled a clenched fist. Only her big toe remained untouched, creating the requisite “point” that formed a properly bound foot. It may be a gross comparison, but the ideal bound foot looks like a lotus flower.

Her mother then pulled out a two-foot-long piece of white, cotton cloth and wound it around her daughter’s folded foot until it could no longer move. She then began working on Luo Lin’s right foot. At first, the pain was so great that Luo Lin could barely sleep through the night. Whimpering quietly, she would rub her feet together in an attempt to assuage the aching. During the day, when she tried to follow her brothers into the fields, she could walk no more than two steps before collapsing.

“I felt as if the bones in my feet had been smashed into a thousand pieces,” she says, cringing at the memory. In time, she learned how to release the bandages secretly, allowing her feet to stretch and her toes to wiggle freely. But her parents found out and, using a needle and thread, sewed her toes to her heels. Luo Lin’s defiant stunts ceased after that.

One day Luo Lin asked her mother why she had to endure such torture. “I do this because I love you,” her mother replied. “If you bind your feet, you can marry a rich man. If you don’t, no man will ever look at you and you’ll have a very hard life.” Luo Lin was told no family would agree to take a big-footed girl as their daughter-in-law. “If you had large feet, how would the servants be able to tell if you are a bride or merely a newly purchases slave?” her mother explained.

In Liuyi, such thinking was the rule, not the exception. During the first half of the 20th century, the town elders were so patriarchal that girls did not even have a proper first name. Most parents addressed their daughters merely as “daughter.” Only the children of the lowliest families were left with their feet unbound. Even today, Liuyi’s men are proud of their bound-foot women.“

Of course my wife has bound feet,” chuckles Liuyi’s 81-year-old village chief, a lively man whose gold and silver teeth glint when he laughs. “In the past, we believed that no matter how beautiful your face, if your feet were not bound, who on earth would want you?” Few men, he says, would deign to marry a girl with ordinary feet. Those who did were certain to become a source of ridicule for the whole town.

History has it that the practice of foot-binding began during the Tang dynasty, when one of the emperors kept a concubine who had naturally small feet. The emperor developed a serious fetish for them and she quickly became a favourite, performing elaborate dances in court, her feet bound with cloth. Soon, other royal concubines began to break and bind their feet in the hope of capturing the emperor’s heart. Tiny bound feet became the hallmark of the well-bred girl, a physical symbol of respectability. Over the last 10 centuries, hundreds of millions of girls were subjected to the custom.

A minuscule three-inch-long foot earned the coveted title of Golden Lotus; a four-inch foot was called Silver Lotus, and anything bigger was relegated to lowly Iron Lotus status. Bound feet were not only a symbol of beauty and refinement; they were also a means by which women were tightly controlled. Generations of girls were forced to remain indoors, languishing like flowers on daybeds, or practicing spinning and embroidery in the parlour. If women ventured out at all, they had to lean on canes. (Large gatherings of bound-foot girls were known as A Forest of Canes.)

For the most part, bound-foot women were utterly reliant on their fathers, husbands, brothers and servants – which was precisely the point. A bound-foot woman was at her most attractive when she was helpless and submissive, like a bird in a gilded cage. For male admirers, the tiny foot also became an erotic plaything – it was viewed as a sexual organ in itself, and possibly the most forbidden zone.

Men used to say that in tiny foot you could find a heightened form of female beauty: it was rounded like a breast, small like a mouth and more mysterious than any other part of the body. Some fetishists delighted in the musty odour that came from a bound foot. There were even gentlemen’s handbooks devoted to the most effective ways of arousing a bound-foot consort. One such technique was called Eating the Golden Lotus. A man performed it by placing a woman’s naked foot in his mouth – considered the pinnacle of erotic pleasure.

When Luo Lin is asked if her husband ever put her Golden Lotus in his mouth, she blushes and turns her head. But, dutifully, she answers: “No, he never did that. But when I got married, I would show my feet only to my husband. Throughout my life, I had to make sure that no other man could ever see them. They were so private that I could never wash them in public or go swimming. In fact, I could never hang my shoes or bindings in a public place where other men might see my feet. They were a special sight – only for my husband’s eyes.”

Most of Liuyi’s bound-foot women are not content to remain helpless daughters or erotic wives, despite their immobilizing condition. Luo Lin, for one, managed a passable hobble only two years after her feet were first bound. “By the time I was eight, I could resume my household duties,” she says proudly. “Every morning, I managed to take the family night-soil out to the fields for fertilizer.” And when the family fell on desperate times, it was Luo Lin who gathered together the household valuables and took them to the town market to sell.

Foot binding had begun to go out of style by the time Luo Lin’s sisters were born, so she was the only daughter who had to suffer. But she remains philosophical about her fate. “In time, I came to admire big-foot girls,” she says. “They were so strong and capable. But I can’t regret what has happened to me. I have to just let it be.

”From the way the women of Liuyi go about their business, you would never guess at the misery they have endured. Every day, at 6 a.m., some 100 of them gather at the town’s activity centre for the elderly, where they hobble into formation for the morning’s activities. Years ago, these women could barely stand upright – now they do t’ai chi, sword dancing, fencing, even disco dancing. They are fierce lawn bowlers, and have won several provincial competitions.

“We small-foot ladies even beat those with big feet,” says one elderly woman, toting a 1 kg bowling ball in one hand. “When I perform sword dancing, I think of so many things,” says an ebullient Luo Lin, as she waves her sword through the crisp morning air. “I dream of flying over the clouds and the mountains.” Sometimes, she adds, “I even dream of being a warrior.”

About the Author

Alison Gee is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in People, InStyle, the International Herald Tribune and Los Angeles Times. She is a former editor of Asiaweek magazine and is presently writing an India-based literary memoir, The Peacock Sings for Rain (St. Martin’s Press, 2009).