I’ve been reading so much this summer that I’ve forgotten to blog. But with all the interest in the Olympics in China beginning on 08-08-08, I thought I should share about a particularly enlightening novel I just finished: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See.
Although I have a granddaughter adopted from China last year, I don’t know much about Chinese culture or history. For example, I thought when they bound girls’ feet, it was from infanthood. However, from reading this novel, I now know that they began the binding process at 6 or 7 years old, which made it extremely painful. I won’t go into the details, since Lisa See does that especially well, but this custom was still going on as late as the 1950’s.
We might think we’re way past this kind of torture in order to have beautiful feet and a lovely walk, but have you seen the shoes women continue to wear? Not only that, but in THIS CENTURY, women are actually opting for cosmetic foot surgery which sometimes includes amputation of foot parts to fit into some particularly pointy stilletos. I remember first hearing about this on 60 Minutes. Here’s a blog with a couple of links if you want to read about this further.
So although women are now educated and have the opportunity to run for President of the United States, they are still doing stupid things that cost a lot of pain and money in order to be beautiful, I assume to attract men of means, which was the reason Chinese girls feet were bound. So have we come a long way, really? At least Hillary Clinton wears sensible clothes and doesn’t let the press or comedians deter her from being who she really is.
I, for one, have seldom worn heels higher than an inch. Whenever I’ve tried, I hurt so much that I ended up taking them off when I was out on the town and then putting them in the Goodwill box as soon as I got home. My mother, almost crippled from wearing pointy high heels to do housework in in the 1950’s, warned me to never wear them. So even though my son who likes girls in high heels has made fun of my granola footware, I sort of like not having deformed feet and being able to walk a mile or more in any shoes I own.
Which brings me back to Snow Flower and the Secret Fan: Besides the pain, infection, and even death brought on by foot-binding in China, women could not walk far or even hold their balance should they find themselves on tricky terrain. Lisa See brings this reality to life when the main character of her novel witnesses other women falling to their deaths when fleeing revolutionary soldiers. At least women in our times would wear sensible shoes should they need to take a long hike, say a hurricane flooded their city and there was no more gas to fill their SUV’s… or would they?
I highly recommend this novel. I’ve only touched on one aspect of Chinese culture that I believe continues in our world today, but there is so much more the author offers her readers concerning the status of women in recent Chinese history – which made me grateful for the social freedoms women enjoy in the West and even China today.
