The pain of foot emancipation has been described in an earlier essay. The pain after letting out the feet varies with the seasons. The blood circulates poorly in winter, making one particularly sensitive to low temperatures and causing nine out of ten to suffer from cold sores. In spring, the flesh decays, and this makes it hard to take a single step. Very quick binding alone can prevent this from happening. Emancipated feet take unsteady steps. No matter how they are let out, tiny feet have a bowed bone structure which can never be restored to what it was originally. The flesh may expand in shapeless lumps, but strengthening the foot is virtually impossible. If larger shoes and stockings are worn which, however, fail to fit, the woman stumbles about, twisting unsteadily in every conceivable direction. She is better off with feet tightly bound and relatively vigorous. Another point to mention is the swollen appearance. From antiquity to the present, woman clearly has done everything to please the opposite sex. Beautiful feminine make-up, for example, is still highly regarded by our contemporaries. The natural foot in high heels is well-suited to modern concepts of beauty. My generation, maltreated by custom, can never attain this new standard, but even a cripple doesn’t forget to wear shoes. That is why we embellish these old-fashioned feet, to make them slightly more attractive. But when the tiny foot is liberated, the instep swells and the flesh becomes shapeless, like a camel’s hump or a pig’s foot. The poor woman stumbles about crookedly. Now while bound feet cannot achieve the natural size, they still have the qualities of being cute and petite, preserving the aesthetics of a bygone age.
Perhaps I should explain here that what I have said above pertains only to feet four-and-a-half inches or less in length, where the bones are already broken. If they have been only roughly bound to accord with former dictates of style, they can be easily let out by gradually loosening and shortening the binding. The previous essay requested that foot investigators be strict in demanding foot emancipation from the young and more tolerant toward the middle-aged. I think that such a method would still be unsatisfactory. If the foot is not small and the toes are unbroken, even a forty or fifty-year-old can liberate it. But for a girl of twenty who has very tiny feet, the reverse is true. It is wrong to think solely in terms of age, as wrong as it is to think of cutting the queue and liberating the feet in the same terms. The decision whether or not to liberate the foot should depend not on age, but on the way in which the foot was first bound. The best thing to do is prohibit it for the unbound, and in cases of violation severely punish the head of the household. Consider others on their individual merits; those with feet under four-and-a-half inches are few and will sooner or later die off.
The experimental Wan-tzu-fou area of the Kiangsi Agricultural Improvement Society has been very effective in encouraging abolition. It reported that, “The abolition of footbinding is entirely different from the abolition of gambling or opium smoking; coercive methods should not be employed, for the change should be made voluntarily.” This is true, for with a new outlook and psychology the change will be permanent. May ladies in the women’s movement take heed, to avoid making tiny-footed women like me again have to endure suffering.
Having told the story of my wife, I shall now describe the suffering revealed to me by my younger sister. My family lived for generations in northern Peiping, with Manchus as our principal neighbors. That is why, in my childhood, I was never fully aware of the tiny foot. I once went with mother and younger sister to the home of my maternal aunt. There I noticed and marveled that the women all had tiny bowed feet. The next morning, I saw auntie arise and bind her feet and I stared curiously. I noticed that the shape of her foot was much different from feet in my family; only the big toe extended straight out, while the side of the foot had fleshy petal-like protuberances on it [the other toes]. Mother told me that my aunt’s foot as a child was the same as mine and that binding had caused the change. Auntie said that we, as a matter of fact, were not Manchu and that all Chinese women should bind their feet. Otherwise, a big-footed woman who could walk quickly like a man looked coarse and uncivilized. While she was speaking, my younger sister ran into the room. Said mother: “She is already seven, the perfect age for binding, but I haven’t started yet because it is so time-consuming.” Auntie replied: “Her form lacks beauty; if you don’t make her feet tiny and attractive, I’m afraid that it will be difficult later to arrange a proper marriage.” Mother, deeply impressed, returned home and consulted with father. Sister began binding in February, 1908, and from the start obeyed mother’s will in diligently binding, washing, and walking. Within six months, she could walk with a swaying gait. But the two smallest toes on both feet suddenly developed corns, hurt intensely from the slightest touch, and caused her to cry incessantly. Poor sister was sunk in despair. When auntie visited, and mother asked for her expert advice, she advised that, “When a girl first has her feet bound, one must exert pressure to make her oblivious to pain. Then success is relatively easy.” She opened sister’s binding cloth, looked over the foot, and said:
Because she places her body weight on the heel when she walks, the fourth toe is not yet deeply bent. With every step she takes, her little toes rub against the sides or soles of the shoe, causing the corns. The way to alleviate this is to clear away the corns and very tightly rebind the four toes so that they bend under. This will make them coil deeply toward the plantar. Try to force them to become narrow and thin, and then force them toward the heel of the foot, curving the arch downward. The foot will naturally become smaller.
She requested a pan of boiling water and personally washed sister’s feet in it. She cautiously rubbed where the flesh protruded, vigorously pressed on the ankle, and lanced the corns. This took her more than ten minutes, with mother pinioning sister’s arms so that auntie could work undisturbed. She then used a cloth five feet long and two inches wide to force the heel and four toes to arch downward. She bound the arch and toes twice for each time she wrapped the binding around the heel. With each complete turn, she added a little sputum to make sure that the binding wouldn’t work loose. The shoes which had to be worn were hard to get into because of the increased amount of binding cloth, and sister had to be supported before she could stand on her feet. Auntie dragged her hobbling along, to keep the blood circulating. Sister wept throughout but mother and auntie didn’t pity her in the slightest, saying that if one loved a daughter, one could not love her feet. Mother gradually also became adept at binding, cajoling sister with sweet-sounding words. As she got older, sister became deeply aware of mother’s fondness for it and became more cooperative. The ugly, coarse cloth shoes which had first been worn were replaced by elegant looking ones with wooden soles. [This replaced the older netted tip style.] By fourteen, her feet had already become models. Her soft toenails were sunk into the shriveled flesh; her thighs were very thin; and the plantar was as smooth as a flat board. At eighteen, she married a Mr. Chen and had to wait on her mother-in-law daily. She was always on her feet and could rest only noon and night. Her complaints because of ailing feet annoyed her husband, and he ordered her to let them out. However, her mother-in-law not only opposed this, but ordered sister to make new shoes just slightly smaller than her actual foot size. And she would revile her for not binding tightly enough. When sister gave birth, before the one-month period of prescribed rest had ended her mother-in-law personally bound both feet tightly for her. [There was a common belief that the bones opened up at childbirth and that, since the feet were somewhat relaxed, vigorous binding might make them even smaller.]