The cruellest aspect of footbinding was that . . . peasant[s] . . . imitated the upper class. [A]mong Chinese farm women who had to lead lives of work, footbinding . . . was a widespread practice in the nineteenth century, and its effects were still visible in the 1930s.
FOUR
Grandmother’s Golden Lilies
AH THLOO AND AH NGANGE: CHINA, 1923–1928
Of all the adult family members, Ah Thloo felt closest to her grandmother, whom she called Ah Ngange. As the oldest person in the household, Ah Ngange was recognized as the Elder. A wise and giving person, she held this position graciously. She declined to be served first at mealtimes, choosing to eat with the rest of the family. She could have lived a life of leisure, bossing around her daughter-in-law, the servant girls, and the rest of the family, as most women in her position did. She had earned the right, having lived in a subservient position to her own mother-in-law in this very house, before that venerable lady had passed on.
Her life had been especially difficult because she had jat giek, bound feet, which made standing painful and walking excruciating. Before she was married, she had rarely left her house, but as a young newlywed, she had had to work in the vegetable gardens that her new family leased. Those had been terrible, agonizing years.
Fortunately, when her son was born, her mother-in-law had allowed her to stay in the house, even though he remained an only child. She was good at managing the household servants and maintaining a harmonious home. In addition, she was good with her hands and an excellent cook.
Her dim sum, dumplings, were works of art. Every variety—whether it was sweet or savoury, steamed, boiled, or deep-fried—had a different wrapping or finish. Many of the wrappings required the creation of pouches to hold different fillings. No matter what the design, Ah Nange’s finished pouches were uniform in size and shape, and their simple beauty made them even more appetizing.
She was also an expert seamstress; her handmade stitches were even and almost invisible. Her embroidery featured realistic-looking flowers, butterflies, and birds, all decorative without being gaudy.
When Ah Poy Lim, her son, brought his bride to the house, she had nurtured a warm relationship with the young woman, sharing the household duties. She maintained control of the house, while her daughter-in-law, whose feet were not bound, worked in the family’s fields and gardens. Ah Ngange had specifically chosen for her son a bride whose feet had not been deformed.
Ah Ngange helped raise all the grandchildren once they were weaned from their mother’s breast. Staying at home, she supervised their care, which was undertaken by servants (daughters of poor relatives). Everyone naturally doted on the first grandson.
When the granddaughters were born, Ah Ngange did not allow their feet to be tampered with. Although the practice was going out of favour, some families in the village reverted back to the tenth-century custom when they started to gather some wealth. Ah Ngange taught the girls the domestic arts. Ah Thloo learned the appropriate use of herbs, roots, and precious animal by-products for illness prevention, health, and healing. For example, mushrooms, because of their dark colour, nourish the kidneys. Similarly, green foods like vegetables benefit the liver, yellow soybeans help the spleen and stomach, red dates are good for the heart, and so on.
Ah Ngange treated the boys the same way as she treated the girls, but this was not customary. It was understandable that destitute families dreaded the birth of female children: girls were generally looked upon as belonging to another family—that of their future in-laws. As children, they had to be fed and clothed, and when they grew up, their parents had to provide dowries to marry them off. Granted, a bride price was paid, but when everyone was poor, how much could a family realistically get? Parents were never fully compensated for the care and attention a girl received at home, so it was little wonder that families sometimes took drastic measures. Occasionally, tiny, discarded corpses would be found, their small heads lying at odd angles to their perfect bodies, along the slopes of the rice paddy paths. Strangled and abandoned. All female. Dead male children were buried.
“Sons are important,” Ah Ngange once said to Ah Thloo. “Unfortunately, no one remembers that women actually produce the sons.”
When Ah Thloo was twelve years old, she was summoned to Ah Ngange’s room one evening before bedtime. “Ah Nui, you are now old enough. Come, help your Ah Ngange wash her feet.” By her tone, Ah Thloo knew that the term Ah Nui, meaning girl or daughter, was said with affection.
Ah Thloo did not hesitate, as she was honoured to help. “Ah Ngange,” responded the girl. “What do you need?” She had always admired her grandmother’s tiny feet; they were like a baby’s, only daintier. Her own were square and blunt, ungainly in comparison. Also, she was secretly eager to see a golden lily, the term she had heard whispered by the village children. There was something exotic but also shameful in the term that she did not understand.
On the floor by her grandmother’s wooden pallet bed, an enamel basin was filled with warm water and sweet-smelling herbs. In the corner of the room was a rough, three-legged stool that normally served as a chair. Ah Thloo was not invited to use it so she crouched on her haunches in front of Ah Ngange, who sat on the low bed. Her wide, bare feet were sturdy on the ground. This was a natural and comfortable resting position, and she could squat like this for long periods, with intermittent stretches.
With a grunt, her grandmother crossed one leg over the other and, hunching down, reached toward her foot to remove a tiny, embroidered, black cloth shoe. It was about three inches long, only slightly larger than a toddler’s shoe. The foot was still encased in cloth. Ah Ngange found the end of the soft binding and started to unwind it carefully from around her foot. After a few turns, she stopped and handed the well-worn, yellowish bundle to Ah Thloo, indicating with a nod of her head that the girl should complete the task.
Pressing her lips together tightly in concentration, Ah Thloo took the roll from her grandmother and, as she had observed, held the unravelled end tautly in her small hands as she completed the task. When the last of the binding fell away to reveal the deformed limb, her body tensed and she felt tears of sorrow flowing like hot lava down her face, splashing down on what remained of her grandmother’s foot. Still, she said nothing—no words could express her horror. This . . . this thing was as white as a lily, but it was like no flower Ah Thloo had ever seen.
Dangling from a pale, bony, atrophied calf was something that resembled a large white shrimp. The foot was bent, doubled over on itself, so that the front—where the toes should have been—was facing down, all the digits except the big one turned under. The toe-encrusted ball of the foot faced the flat of the heel, with only a narrow space between them. The big toe itself was stunted.
Looking at the broken foot, Ah Thloo realized that her grandmother walked, if her hobbling could be called that, on the base of her heels. Sighing audibly, Ah Ngange dropped the naked foot into the warm footbath.
“No need to cry, my girl,” Ah Ngange said. “Grandmother’s feet don’t hurt now.”
For once, Ah Thloo was reluctant to ask how and why, but Ah Ngange told her story quietly, as her weeping granddaughter continued to gently release the other foot from its bindings.
“I was four years old when my feet were first bound. Before that, I was free to walk, run, and jump, just like you. First, my feet were cleaned, the toenails cut, and then warm, wet cloths were wound around my feet. They were still small, but even so, the bindings chafed and I couldn’t walk as before. My balance was all wrong. The first time my feet were released, I thought they were on fire. I was taught how to rub them and my legs to help the circulation. Just when I hoped the people had changed their minds, the bindings were put back on again. Each time, the wrappings were bound tighter. As my feet grew, they turned the four small toes under each foot. Whenever I walked, each step crushed the bones of my toes, but I never gave up trying.”
She stopped speaking when the other foot was freed and submerged it eagerly.
“How horrible! It must have been so painful!” cried Ah Thloo, starting to get up to regain circulation in her haunches. Her grandmother laid a hand gently on her shoulder to restrain her.
“Yes, very painful. If you want to know how it felt at the beginning, try not to move at all, even when your legs start to hurt.”
Ah Thloo lowered herself down and settled back to learn more, trying to ignore the tingling of pins and needles in her legs.
“I don’t remember when the bindings started to force the front of my feet down to meet my heel. I learned how to care for them. Eventually, my feet needed the bindings to feel supported. The whole process must have taken about ten years. At least, that’s when the pain started to dull. My feet stopped growing when I turned fifteen or so. In all that time, I don’t remember ever sleeping through the night.”
Hiccupping from her crying, Ah Thloo asked, “Ah Ngange, hu-uck, who did, hu-uck, this terrible thing to you?” She thought surely it must have been evil people who had forced such cruelty upon her beloved Ah Ngange. Hadn’t she heard that bandits did unspeakable things to girls? “Didn’t, hu-uck, your mother try, hu-uck, to stop them?” She was feeling shooting pains in her legs now and her back was throbbing, but she did not get up.
“It was my grandmother and my mother, of course.”
Ah Thloo’s eyes opened wide with disbelief, but she knew that her grandmother was telling the truth. “But it’s so unfair!”
“Yes, unfair and unjust, because only girls suffer like this. It was tradition. Their own feet had been bound. Some traditions are good, some aren’t. Unfortunately, we can’t always tell the difference until it’s too late. They believed this would help me find a good husband. I don’t blame them. In one thing they were right—I was content with my life and marriage.”
Then she whispered into her granddaughter’s ear, “But I don’t think the size of my feet made any difference! Times are changing and none of you girls will live with this tradition! When you’re older, you’ll understand that justice is worth fighting for. Get up now. Slowly . . . hold on to my hand. There you are.” Her grandmother’s strong hands gripped Ah Thloo’s small ones. “How do you feel?”
“Thank you, Ah Ngange,” murmured Ah Thloo, tears welling up again. “It feels like ngai, ants, are crawling up and down, pinching and biting!” Placing her weight on one foot, she cried out, “Aiyahh ! How could you bear this for so long?”
“Wipe away those tears.” Instead of answering, Ah Ngange reached over to massage Ah Thloo’s legs and feet firmly. “This’ll help you get back to normal. Do it this way. I need your help now. My bones are tired and I can’t reach my toes. I’ll show you what to do. My feet no longer like to be as free as a child’s. We must work quickly to dry them, bind them up, and put them to bed.”
Every night, until her grandmother died, Ah Thloo lovingly tended to the older woman’s feet. While they were together, her grandmother talked about her own life, teaching Ah Thloo the womanly arts and much more. As she learned more about her grandmother, she learned about herself. Later, Ah Thloo would say, “Ah Ngange taught me how to survive, how to keep going. I learned that even people who love you will hurt you. She taught me about forgiveness. I am still learning.”
• • •
AH THLOO: CHINA, 1925–1929
Girls were very rarely educated in the Guangdong countryside, but their move out of their family homes and into the nui oak was a type of finishing school. There, they learned about what the next part of their lives would be like, as wives and mothers.
The nui oak, similar to a bunkhouse, was mainly a place for the village’s single girls to sleep at night. A building, perhaps an empty house left by a dead widow, was designated for this purpose. In large villages, each neighbourhood might have several such buildings, varying in size and capacity. It was traditional, in families with boys and girls, to separate them when they reached a certain age, usually when the girls started their menstrual periods. During the day, the girls returned home to perform their chores, work in the fields, and eat with their families.
They might be chaperoned by a local widow, who shared her knowledge, wisdom, and old wives’ tales with the group; occasionally, an older, unmarried woman would move into the house permanently, to relieve the burden on her parents. An unmarried woman was a continuing encumbrance; at best, an embarrassment and at worst, a curse on the family. It was unlucky to include her as part of the family’s ancestral tablets because it was believed that when an unmarried daughter died, she produced an inauspicious ghost. Women who had been abandoned by their husbands, or were widowed, might return to the nui oak to escape their in-laws, although this was rare.
At the nui oak, the girls had their own bed linens and kept their personal belongings in a semi-private space. But like girls everywhere and at any age, friends shared and borrowed things. They shared beds too; they had to, as there were never enough, not even in their own homes.
Their evenings and nights were spent in the company of females, and here they completed their education about womanhood. From traditional songs, they learned about the realities of marriage, how to cope with a difficult mother-in-law (all mothers-in-law were expected to be difficult), and how to be a “good wife”: a good wife made sure her husband was fed, looked after his parents as if they were her own, produced sons, and worked hard. They memorized bridal laments and funeral dirges and learned how to mourn, thus enabling them to carry on two of the most important social customs in China.
While they sang, their hands kept busy, with embroidering, sewing, or weaving. They shared designs and techniques to make practical items for their dowries, such as slippers, quilts, or baskets. If they were lucky, they might sell their extras at the market town, earning some cash.
There were six to eight girls living in Ah Thloo’s nui oak. One of her day moy, sister friends, was Ah Kange. They had different personalities: whereas Ah Thloo was quiet and contemplative, Ah Kange was boisterous; while Ah Thloo was diligent in her work, her friend loved to play. But they became inseparable.
Ah Kange’s father was a rich merchant and landowner who often travelled to the cosmopolitan city of Guangzhou, and his contact with business people and foreigners exposed him to new ideas, one of which was to educate his daughter. However, he progressed prudently. Rather than send the girl to the village school where she would be in the company of boys, he hired a tutor to teach her reading, writing, and arithmetic at home, where his wife could chaperone. With enough servants to do the field and house work, Ah Kange went home each day to memorize written characters and learn arithmetic. She applied her knowledge of numbers to enhance her gambling winnings in games of chance during Gwoh Nien, the New Year festival, when itinerant peddlers, performers, jugglers, and hawkers set up business in the village.
Ah Kange brought a game of Mah Jong to the nui oak. Played with small oblong tiles, it has symbols depicting various suits (circles, bamboos, numbers, the four winds, flowers, and dragons). It is similar to the card game of gin rummy. Scoring is based on the combination of suits with winds, flowers, and dragons, and the winner is the first to collect a series of matching groupings using all her tiles. The game is played vigorously and quickly; the click-clacking and slapping of tiles adds to the excitement and fun. A quick eye and a good memory enhance strategy and the chances of winning.
Ah Kange loved to play, and her animated and good-natured vocalizations were infectious. When her time came to marry, she knew her parents would buy her trousseau items so she didn’t need to make them. While some girls worked with their hands, she could always persuade three of them to spend their evenings playing with her. Most of the girls did not have cash to gamble with so they played with peanuts, an inexpensive and readily available snack.
Ah Thloo, although interested in watching the strategy from the sidelines, rarely played. Always frugal, she preferred to keep busy with her hands. Ah Kange, who won often, was generous with gifts of food or sewing supplies to Ah Thloo. At New Year’s, Ah Kange insisted that Ah Thloo try her luck, and gave her cash with which to gamble. Ah Thloo found she actually enjoyed playing, but never got carried away and saved most of her winnings.
• • •
When Ah Thloo first moved into the one-room nui oak, the older girls were trading old wives’ tales about men and women, and Ah Thloo heard more stories about “golden lilies.” Getting ready for bed, they took turns washing their faces, hands, and feet in a communal basin on a corner stand. As each girl completed her cleaning routine, she emptied her dirty water into a collecting trough outside, so the next user could fill the bowl with fresh, cold water from a pitcher below the stand. There was a communal chamber pot on the floor behind a roughly woven cotton curtain. The contents of that pot were also emptied into the trough, and the mixture was collected each morning to fertilize the fields.
As usual, Ah Thloo was the last to come in, after helping Ah Ngange. Being a newcomer, she kept mostly to herself. She was often teased—it was the girls’ way of getting the measure of a person. There were few secrets in a house of females. While some had grandmothers and mothers with bound feet, all the girls were unimpaired and none had seen an unbound foot. Ignorance made them variously curious, disgusted, and envious about Ah Thloo’s secret knowledge.
“Well, the youngster has come in at last,” said Pure Light. “I can smell her.” At seventeen, the oldest girl in the nui oak, she was in danger of becoming an old maid. Her family, though fairly well off and anxious to have her wed, had yet to find her a willing husband. Unlike her name, she had a dark complexion with a personality to match. As the longest resident, she was the only girl who did not share a bed.
Ah Thloo still smelled of Ah Ngange’s medicinal herbs. The allusion to her grandmother’s bound feet was not lost on her, but she stayed quiet and commenced her own ablutions.
“I’ve heard that women with golden lilies do depraved things with men,” taunted Pure Light. “I’ve heard that binding the feet produces muscles that normal, proper girls don’t have—muscles that fuck!” The coarse word produced raucous laughter among most of the girls. Only Ah Kange remained solemn. She stayed seated but was poised to help her friend.
Ah Thloo couldn’t ignore the remark; the spiteful words were dishonouring Ah Ngange. She hurled the bowl of water in which she had just cleaned her feet at the older girl, shouting, “Shut your ignorant mouth, you ugly old maid! If you, or anyone else, says anything disrespectful about my grandmother again, I’ll pour the contents of the chamber pot on all your belongings,” and she pointedly looked each girl in the eye. “And you’ll never know when I’ll do it.” She braced her feet on the bare floor, preparing for a fight. Her face burned red, her eyes were hard slits, shooting daggers of defiance. She stared at Pure Light.
Pure Light sputtered and cringed from the cold, dirty water but didn’t get up from her wet bed. For once she was speechless. No one laughed at her expense. A few of the girls stole furtive glances at one another, then at Ah Thloo. Their lips twitched at the corners, but no one spoke again that night. Ah Kange smiled at her friend.
• • •
In the nui oak, Ah Thloo also learned some radical and unusual ideas. One evening, Ah Kange held up a pamphlet that she had surreptitiously taken from under a pile of new books her tutor had brought. It was from the Kuomintang, a political party. The words nui ngange, female person, on the cover had caught her attention.
While Ah Kange read the dull, political contents out loud in an increasingly impatient and bored manner, Ah Thloo was astonished to hear such radically new concepts as equality between the sexes, a woman’s right to inherit property, and protection for women who escaped from oppressive marriages. The pamphlet was probably a set of resolutions regarding women’s rights put forward by the KMT Party’s Central Women’s Department. Written in formal language, the pamphlet’s words were difficult for the girls to understand. Their lives up to that time had focused on hard physical labour just to survive; the concepts were confusing. What did “equality” mean? How could women “inherit” property when everyone knew everything belonged to the man’s family?
They speculated about the meaning of “oppressive marriage.” One of the girls reminded them of the night her mother had lost an eye. Her father had poked it out with his chopstick, blaming her for their poverty; he was enraged at having to eat watery rice and mung beans for six months. That night, and for some time afterwards, the girl had returned home to sleep with her mother.
Escaping bad marriages sounded like a good idea, but how would it actually work? Where would women go? How would they feed themselves and their children if they had no land to work, tools to use, or houses to live in? The girl’s mother certainly had nowhere to go.
When the girl first told the story, Ah Thloo had been incredulous. Her own family members were civil toward one another and she had not been exposed to that type of cruelty. She wasn’t sure how she would react if her future husband were to beat her. Working on the land had made her physically strong. Would she hit back? While Ah Thloo did not fully understand the concepts they gossiped about as teenagers in the nui oak, she never forgot them.