The first form of foot binding was said to have begun in China in the Tang Dynasty (618-907), when an emperor became entranced with a concubine who danced with silken ribbons on her feet. The other concubines, jealous of the attention she got from their august lord, started binding their feet with ribbons too.

During the Qing Dynasty (1636-1911), this practice was taken to the extreme. Feet wrapped in silk were no longer enough to draw attention or praise. To be marriageable, a girl was expected to have tiny little feet. The ideal was the Golden Lotus, feet that are only 3-inches long.

To achieve this, girls as young as five were subjected to grueling pain. While the big toe of each foot is left intact, the four smaller toes are forcibly bent under with bindings so tight that the bones would break within a year and limit the girl’s mobility for life.

Trying to make sense of it all

Lisa See’s latest novel, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, tackles the subject of foot binding and Nü Shu, the secret language. “I was very interested in this secret language, which was invented by women, used by women and kept a secret by women in this one very remote county in China. For a thousand years, they kept it a secret!”

“And when I first came across that, I just thought, ‘How could this exist and we didn’t know?’ But when I decided to write about it, I realized I had to include foot binding in the story so that people would understand the kind of isolation these women lived in and the hardships that they experienced that then allowed them to invent the secret language and use it.”

Like Nü Shu, foot binding was women’s business. Mothers would bind their daughter’s feet, and the practice was carried on from one generation to the next. Looking back at it now and knowing what pain these women had to suffer for the rest of their life, it is quite difficult to understand how or why a mother would inflict this practice on her own daughter.
Writer Lisa See (Image: L. See)

“Binding her daughter’s feet was the one thing a mother could do to possibly give her daughter a better chance at life. If she could give her daughter a pair of perfectly bound feet, then maybe her daughter would be able to marry into a better family and have a better life. What mother doesn’t want that even today?”

“At that time, the alternative was that a daughter would become what was known as a ‘little daughter-in-law.’ She would be sold as a servant, a slave really, to another family when she was six. She would have no rights and as she grew up, she would become kind of a sexual plaything for the men of the house. The best she could aspire to was to become a concubine, again a woman who had absolutely no rights,” See explains.

“So, if your choice is to bind your daughter’s feet or let her become a ‘little daughter-in-law’ or let her work in the fields till she dies…”

See also points out that the practice of foot binding has parallels in our modern, liberated society. “We just need to look at things that are happening around us even today – female genital cutting in Africa, women wearing very pointy high-heeled shoes all over the world, and in the West, cosmetic surgery, particularly breast enhancement.”

“When you look at women who get to have big breasts through cosmetic surgery, the reason for it is not so different from the reasons that women had their feet bound. It makes a woman believe she is more beautiful. It also makes a woman more marriageable. Isn’t that the real reason that women get those big plastic things on their chests?”

“We don’t have to look very far to know what women will do to themselves to make them conform to what their society considers to be beautiful.”

See believes that foot binding became widespread due to three factors -- it was an economic status symbol for men; the eroticism attached to bound feet; and, as mentioned earlier, the mothers’ desire to provide their daughter with a better life.

“A man could say, ‘I am so wealthy that, look, my wife has bound feet,’ meaning, she didn’t have to work. Or, he could say, ‘I am extremely wealthy that not only does my wife have bound feet, but even our servants have bound feet.’”

“And then, because men are men, there was a whole erotic component to bound feet. There was nothing more erotic or sensuous, nothing more intimate, than holding a woman’s bound but dressed foot in his hand.”

Ending the bondage

One of the factors that contributed to ending the practice of foot binding was education. In the 19th century, China began sending its best students abroad. See explains, “Chinese scholars went to other countries to study. When they were out in the rest of the world, they saw all of a sudden that foot binding, which they had believed showed the sophistication of Chinese culture was actually a barbaric practice.”

“When they returned to China, they brought back not only different kinds of technology and knowledge, but also this belief that foot binding was bad and barbaric and made China look backward. They didn’t want to look backward any longer.”

Foreign missionaries in the 1800s have denounced the practice of foot binding. As early as the Song Dynasty (960-1279), a writer named Che Jo-shui had already objected to it. But it was only with the formation of the Republic of China in 1911 that foot binding was officially banned. In some places though, the practice would continue.

“There were some areas in China that were so remote they didn’t hear about the ban. In Jiangyong County, for example, they didn’t hear that foot binding had been outlawed or that Mao had taken over the country until 1952,” See recounts.

“Another reason the practice of foot binding lingered in some areas goes back again to having a daughter that was marriageable. If you really believed that, you’re not going to give up the practice so easily. It’s quite hard to give up a tradition that was so deep in a culture.”

Open secret

Nü Shu was forged in the suffering and loneliness of the women of Hunan. Through communicating with one another in this language different from Nan Shu, men’s language, women were able to draw strength and support from their “sisters.”

“Women could complain in a secret language. They could talk about the hardships of their lives, but they wouldn’t necessarily get in trouble for it because the men – their fathers, their husbands, their sons – didn’t know what they were saying.”

“Learning Nü Shu gave these women extra value. Like any other language, it’s not so easy to learn, and the women were very proud of their skills. It also opened up other worlds for them. Through Nü Shu, they would be able to express their emotions, their creativity, their intellectual thoughts, when other women had no other way to do that.”

Apparently, Nü Shu wasn’t such a secret from the men either. “Men knew it existed. They saw the women writing it. The women sometimes incorporated it into their embroidery or weaving, so sometimes men even wore it on their clothes. But they didn’t know what it said. They didn’t care what it said because it was something that women did. It had absolutely no importance to them.”

Living history

As part of her research for the book, See traveled to Hunan where she met Yang Huanyi, who was at the time, the oldest living Nü Shu writer. Her feet, too, have been bound but not her spirit. “She was 96 years old when I met her, and it was like being with a living history. She had lived through this time and had experienced so many of these things herself.”

Yang Huanyi, at age 96. (Image: L. See) “Yang had bound feet. She talked to me about the time before her feet were bound. She told me what it was like to have her feet bound, to be part of a sworn sisterhood, what Nü Shu meant to her. She taught me how to make Bound Foot shoes and wedding quilts and talked about the special foods, holidays and traditions that were unique to that area."

See says that Lily, the main character of her novel, was inspired by Yang. “Here she was at the end of her life, 96 years old, and she had this attitude of ‘I can say whatever I want. I’ve outlived everyone in my family. I’ve lasted through all the political upheavals of the last hundred years in China. There’s really nothing that anyone can do to me now.’ So she had this incredible openness but she was also very frank about things that were hard or difficult or sad in her life.”

Yang Huanyi passed away in September 2004.

See said she wrote Snow Flower and the Secret Fan with the hope that young Chinese women today can look back at the women who came before them and see them in a different way. “I think the belief now is that women in the past had no power… they weren’t interesting… they didn’t do anything. Yet here are women who did something unique not only in China but in the rest of the world.”

“Nü Shu is the only writing system that has been found anywhere in the world to have been used exclusively by women. I think that’s something that women, all women, should be proud of. Despite the hardships, the discrimination, these women did something remarkable. Everyone, not only the women of China, should be proud of that and at the same time, recognize how hard it was for these women who came before them.”

“These women have such possibilities and so many gifts to give to the world, but they would not have that if there hadn’t been women before them to pave the way,” See concludes.

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Visit Lisa See’s website for more information about her life and work.