Bound beauty: The exquisite, painful legacy of a Chinese custom
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The first thing Jeni Fung remembers about her mother's bound feet is how hard it was for her to buy shoes.
It was on a shopping trip during the 1930s that Fung first realized her mother's feet were different. The toes curled under, compressed into the balls of her feet, and the arches were high and sharply bent.
"Her instep was so high she had to buy a shoe big enough that her foot could fit in. Then we used quite a bit of padding to fill in," Fung recalls. "She had to walk on her heels. She couldn't put a lot of weight on her toes — that's where the damage was."
Fung, 77, of Mercer Island, and her friend Anne Wing, 83, of Seattle, both had mothers who came from China to Western Washington as young brides in the early 1900s. Now they're among the last generation of Chinese women who still have personal experience with the practice of foot binding. Their mothers didn't talk much about it — it was a fact of life. Moreover, most of the literature on the subject was written by men. That's why three recent books, two by women, are making a splash.
Two of those books — "Every Step A Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet" by Dorothy Ko and "Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China" by Wang Ping — re-examine foot binding and the artistry involved in making shoes, from a feminine point of view. The third, "Extreme Beauty: The Body Transformed" — an exhibition catalog by Harold Koda, curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, N.Y. — places the tiny, exquisite lotus shoes in a more global perspective. Foot binding, Koda shows us, is just one of countless radical practices people worldwide have engaged in to satisfy their own standards of beauty.
The price of beauty
"I've been writing about foot binding," I told a smart, athletic young woman reporter who sits near me at The Times.
"Really?" she replied in all seriousness. "I thought about doing that when I was a kid, because I had such big feet."
It's not some foreign impulse that leads people to want to change their bodies. We disguise our shapes with the clothing we wear — padded shoulders, cinched waistlines, high-heeled shoes — and, sometimes, by reforming the body itself. Think of the rib-crushing corsets American women wore in the 19th century; the five-inch spike heels, latex girdles and conical brassieres of the 1960s; the use of purging, starvation, silicone breast implants, body-piercing, tattoos and all manner of cosmetic surgery that's rampant today.
The French performance artist Orlan, included in the 1999 Bellevue Art Museum show "The Self, Absorbed," had videos made of her face being surgically altered, over and over again, as she directed the surgeon what to do. Those videos, gruesome to watch, nevertheless reflect back to us a bit of truth: That humans — particularly women — may sometimes view their bodies the way sculptors contemplate a lump of clay.
Binding was about the shoes
Historically, women have had less power over their destinies than men; but one thing they have always been able to change is their appearance. In China, mothers did the grim work of binding their daughters' feet, starting around age 6. The process of shaping and restraining the feet usually continued until puberty. The girls would sew and embroider their shoes, using gorgeous fabric and designs, making smaller and smaller slippers as the binding progressed.
A three-inch lotus shoe was considered the height of beauty and perfection and occasionally engendered a kind of self-torment similar to anorexia — where a young woman, whose self-image relied on the praise she received for her tiny feet, became obsessed with making them ever smaller. Of course, part of that tiny size was an illusion, with the bulk of the foot arched up above the shoe-bed, just as our high-heel shoes bend the foot so that little of it actually impacts the ground.
The first pair of lotus shoes a girl wore would be a gift from her mother, a rite of passage that accompanied the binding of her feet. But after that, a girl would learn to sew her own shoes, and much of her day would focus on needlework, making exquisite shoes and clothing to wear and give as gifts. When China first began trading with Egypt and Rome via the legendary Silk Road, the silk textiles and embroidery made by Chinese women were considered the most prized item of commerce. Museums around the world collect Chinese textiles, including the many styles of embroidered shoes.
The shape, color, and embroidery of lotus shoes all had meaning: Red satin for a woman's wedding, red cotton for sleeping, white for mourning. Embroidered designs expressed fertility, longevity, happiness, wealth. The eroticism of the shoes was even more important than it is with women's shoes today, because Chinese women kept their bound feet covered and private. They even wore their bindings and special slippers to bed. That enhanced the sense of mystery and vulnerability of the bound foot and gave the delicate lotus shoes great seductiveness.
"In a sense, foot binding is more 'about' the shoes than the body," Ko explains in "Every Step a Lotus." "We tend to dwell on the flesh and bones when we discuss foot binding — the deformation and pain, which in some ways is a projection of anxieties about our own bodies in our modern society. But in traditional China it was not nature but culture — or shoes as cultural artifacts — that lay at the heart of footbinding's attraction and meaning."
Simply as objects, the shoes are amazing for their fine needlework and sculptural forms, with styles as varied as women's shoes today. One type of boot, common in the north, featured a wide cylinder encasing the arch and lower leg. Another type of shoe had to be laced up like ballet slippers. Some have toes that curl upward; others arc downward like crescent moons. All created the illusion of the foot being smaller than it actually was.
'Her feet were deformed'
Here in the Northwest, Fung's mother, Lam Shee Kay, and Wing's mother, Li Shee Chinn, were part of a generation that suffered twice for the sake of beauty. Born into a tradition that predominated in China for perhaps 1,000 years (even though there were numerous attempts to suppress the custom) those women grew up at a time of transition. In 1911 the Chinese government banned foot binding, but the practice continued in isolated areas into the 1950s.
For women born in the late 19th century, tiny curved lotus feet were still considered the mark of grace, delicacy and desirability. And if parents wanted to arrange a good marriage for their daughters, it was important for them to have bound feet.
"It was an indication of an aristocratic family, that you didn't have to work," said Wing, who believes the practice began so that women would appear dainty and attractive to a suitor. "And I also heard it was so you couldn't run away."
Chinese men who immigrated to the United States often would return to China to get married. "A lot of the women who came over like my mother had bound feet," Wing said. "Of course, the men would seek out women with bound feet (to marry). If they weren't, they'd be servants."
But when the young brides arrived in this country, their small, curved feet were seen as a disfigurement. When they tried to adapt to their new culture, to stop the daily wrapping and "let out" their feet, the discomfort grew without that added support for the already misshapen bones. "My goodness," Wing said, when asked if her mother was in pain. "When she walked, she limped and held on to my arm so tight. She couldn't walk fast. Her feet were deformed."
Fung said that the women of that generation were stoics and didn't complain. An old matron from China who was a friend of the family told Fung's mother how to get rid of the pain. "Have your toes cut off," Fung remembers her saying. "I had mine cut off. Now I'm comfortable."
Curiosity about the past
The Wing Luke Asian Museum and the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington keep small collections of traditional Chinese shoes. At Wing Luke, collections manager Robert Fisher says that some Chinese Americans prefer not to dwell on the tradition of bound feet and think Caucasians are the only ones who are curious about it.
Fung doesn't think that's completely true. "For my generation, it's because we grew up with it," she said. "But when you're talking about this generation, they don't know about it, and I think they'd be very interested."
One thing about bound feet that everyone agrees on is that it can't be undone. "There's no return. It's a permanent thing; and it's painful," says Wing. "But it was generally accepted. That was a way of life."
Sheila Farr can be reached at sfarr@seattletimes.com.