QING DYNASTY, LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY
My gargantuan, non-lotus steps banged onto the rigid, unyielding floor, little jolts of satisfaction that, though painful, reminded me how immensely lucky I was. Still, as the class discussion of Su Dongpo’s poem grew into a broader analysis of foot-binding, it had taken every last drop of self-control to keep from voicing my unpopular opinions.
“Shunan,” Shanbo said gently from behind me as I reached the door to our room.
Stuffing my anger back into its box—a skill that I, as a female, had been forced to deftly hone through the years—I turned to him and responded to my fake name with a fake smile. “What can I do for you?”
“What is troubling you?” The genuine concern in his eyes was as frightening as his ability to read me so accurately.
A deep laugh made its way out of my mouth, slightly strained from the revelation that Shanbo saw more than he let on. “Nothing is troubling me. Don’t waste your time worrying about matters that do not exist.”
Shanbo put a hand on my shoulder, and I just barely fought off the urge to shrink away.
“You can tell me,” he said, entering our room and perching on his bed such that his right ear seemed to be leaning toward me, waiting.
My mind churned, struggling to stay one step ahead of my mouth. “I have a sister. We’re close.” Almost one and the same, in fact.
And before I knew it, almost as if I had become a puppet and somewhere there was a god manipulating me for his amusement, I was weaving Shanbo a tale… except it wasn’t a tale in the least. As I told him about how my “sister” with a warrior’s spirit had refused to bind her feet into “tiny deformed claws,” I glanced down at my gigantic, twenty-three-centimeter feet, so many lengths larger than those of every other girl my age. Eight centimeters: that was what the men preferred, half the length of my hand. They liked them dainty and monstrous, a weapon of submission and humiliation.
I hadn’t begged to get my way, but I had manipulated. Even though I hated the different places women and men had in society, I knew how to use that same separation to my advantage.
“They have to break my bones,” I had cried to my father, adding extra tears to gain sympathy. “Please save me, Fùqīn. You are the only one who can. Surely someone as wealthy and successful as yourself will be able to marry me off without difficulty regardless of the size of my appendages. I throw myself at your mercy, Honorable Wěidà de Fùqīn.”
It may have been hard to stomach, but I had saved my feet, and even though I hadn’t known it at the time, my life. Otherwise I could never have passed for a man, could never have snuck my way in here.
“Your sister sounds wonderful,” Shanbo said, his eyes unfocused, dreamy. “Quite the spirit.”
My mask dropped for a moment and a tiny gasp escaped from my lips. Obedient, sān-cóng-sì-dé kind of women were the coveted brides, not boisterous women like myself, whom my mother deemed too manly to be married off. (The irony of that comment was not lost on me—she didn’t even begin to understand just how manly I could be.) I was already breaking the first third of the three obediences—I wasn’t obeying my parents before marriage—so how could my future husband expect me to obey him in matrimony, and then my son after his death?
“You’re lucky we’re rich,” my mother would always say, meaning that at least some poor family—poor both in wealth and in luck—would maybe accept my disobedience for the large dowry that would accompany me. When my father had told her we wouldn’t be binding my feet—yet another obstacle in her life goal to, essentially, sell me off to another family—she had fainted. I wondered if she had always had that instinct, or if she had developed it because of society. I wondered if, like me, she wanted to scream and stomp and fight. She had tried to manipulate my father by stroking his ego, but he was wrapped around my finger, not hers.
Which was why I was here, and my mother didn’t know. She believed I was away learning how to be a better bride, if a place like that even existed. The irony of it all almost felt like a farce.
Shanbo scratched his face with twitchy fingers, and his eyebrows furrowed as he stumbled to find a way to take back his blasphemous words about a non-sān-cóng-sì-dé woman being wonderful.
Before I could think too long and ultimately change my mind, I smiled at him, genuinely, a smile that reflected the inner warmth his words had created. My voice cracked as I said, “My sister… she’s one of a kind. Ahead of her time.”
Shanbo nodded in agreement, then turned away and opened a book, completely oblivious to the pitter-patter pulse on my side of the room. Alas, I couldn’t decide if I was happy or disappointed that he hadn’t noticed. Or had he?