One of the reasons I love summer vacation so much is that I finally get to catch up on my reading. I've always been a voracious reader and I'm so busy during the school year (and frankly exhausted by the time I get home and get Mae to bed), that I have a stack of books that I'm just dying to read by the time June gets here.
I've been slowly making my way through some excellent reads. Finally got to "Twilight" and loved it (going to bring the other three books in that series with me when we go on vacation next week.) "Eat, Pray, Love" was next and I thought it was an extremely well-written account of Italy, India and Indonesia (the best part of that book for me was recognizing all the places Liz visits while in Italy).
Yesterday I started "Peony in Love" by Lisa See and I finished it today. I'll preface this blog post by saying that I adore Lisa See: one of my favorite books of all-time is her "Snowflower and the Secret Fan." She is a master at Chinese Historical fiction which is quickly becoming one of my favorite genres. However...there is a aspect to Chinese history that has always turned my stomach. Even more so now that I'm a mommy to a beautiful girl.
The practice of foot binding is mentioned (and actually plays a significant part) in both of See's books that I've read. Honestly, I didn't know a whole lot about the practice until I read "Snowflower." It had such a disturbing account of the barbaric procedure that one of the ladies in my book club actually stopped reading "Snowflower" because she just couldn't stomach it. I read that book before I was a mommy and was disturbed, but didn't really think too much of it. "Peony" has another gruesome account of the practice and I decided that I owed it to myself to find out once and for all what this practice is, who did it, why, and how it affected girls for their entire lives.
Basically, foot binding begins when a girl is 5-10 years old. Her bones are more pliable and soft then. Mom or Grandmother (if the Mother couldn't bear to do it), would take the 4 smaller toes and fold them underneath the foot and wrap it tightly with bandages. Then the child would spend 2 agonizing years walking around on these feet. The bones would eventually break. Death from infections was common. The goal was to achieve the perfect "Lotus Blossom" shaped foot...which was visually pleasing and if her foot was smaller than 4 inches, guaranteed to help her get a valuable husband. I'm not going to go into the procedure much more because I respect the fact that this is a stomach-turning topic, but click here for a link to an excellent essay complete with pictures of foot binding.
I imagine some of you who come to this blog to see pictures of Maelin or to amuse yourself with my latest classroom story are asking yourselves why on earth am I tackling this horrendous topic? Well, it's not because I broke my little toe tonight (oh really, I totally did and I'm in a huge amount of pain right now). As ironic as that would be, that's not why. The reason why I'm bringing up this barbaric (in my opinion) custom is because of the writings that I've read during my research for this post about the opinions and actions of the mothers who carried out this custom for 1,000 years. They have chilled my soul.
Here are a few of the quotes I have discovered that were commonly told the girls or each other as their mothers and grandmothers and nurse-maids were physically holding them down to break their feet:
"Only through pain will you have beauty. Only through suffering will you have peace"
"Give your daughter the gift of your Mother Love"
"Every pair of small feet costs a bath of tears".
"When a Celestial takes into his hand a woman's foot, especially if it is very small, the effect upon him is precisely the same as is provoked in a European by a young and firm bosom..."
The reason I wanted to research and write this blog post was because of the 2nd quote. "Give your daughter the gift of your Mother Love." In Chinese, the written character for mother love is composed of two elements: love and pain. During the foot binding procedures, it was generally an elder female member of the girl's family or a professional foot binder who carried out the initial breaking and ongoing binding of the feet. This was considered preferable to having the mother do it, as she might have been sympathetic to her daughter's pain and less willing to keep the bindings tight. A professional foot binder would ignore the girl's cries and would continue to bind her feet incredibly tightly, thus achieving the ideal "Golden Lotuses" shape. "Mother Love" seems in this case not to refer to the staggering pain the girls went through, but the pain the mothers went through inflicting it.
As parents, we all have degrees of "Mother Love." The first time you tell your child "NO!" and really mean it and you see that little baby face crumple into tears tests your Mother Love. When your kid cries because he doesn't understand why mommy and daddy don't live together any more tests your Mother Love. Discipline in most forms tests your Mother Love (the old, "This hurts me more than it hurts you"). However, reading about these procedures physically turned my stomach. Now that I'm a mommy, I can't imagine inflicting this sort of Mother Love on Maelin. It's staggering. I totally understand why some mothers snatched their daughters away and ran off with them, never to be seen again. That was the minority. Most of the mothers gladly went through with this custom believing it would help their daughters secure their positions in life and achieve higher social standings. Thus the Mother Love.
Now I know there are blogs, essays, articles out there that use this practice as another way to point to how women have been mutilated throughout different cultures, different centuries. I agree with them. However, I wrote and researched this as a way for me to work through the emotions I had when I read about the Mother Love. I can't stand it when Maelin has a cold. I cried real tears when she had the flu and I couldn't help her. When she was 15 months old, she had a seizure in my arms. It was the most terrifying thing that's ever happened to me. At the hospital afterwards, the nurse made me hold her down while she inserted a catheter into her bladder to get a sterile urine sample. I remember holding my baby down while she screamed and fought and cried and looked at me with such confusion in her eyes. She seemed to be asking, "Why Mommy? You're supposed to be the one keeping me safe, not hurting me!" I cried right along with her.
Love and Pain. That's the closest I ever want to get to it again.
So in conclusion I imagine all of us are glad this practice has stopped. We're happy to be Americans and live in a country that has never practiced any severe female mutilations. However, I know I will do some more research on what I can do to help the millions of girls who undergo neck stretching, or genital mutilations, or countless other atrocities that are performed in the name of culture. As I hobble off to bed on my poor little broken toe (just one...not the entire foot) with my ice and my Advil, I know this for certain: sympathy and apathy walk a thin line. Easy to do on two healthy feet.
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1 comment:
Somehow I missed this post, but it was right when I was sick, so it makes sense.
You did a great job researching this and writing about such an awful topic. It makes me wonder why people would put their children through this--but if their only hope was for their child to marry well, it makes sense, as in the case of Snowflower.
No matter what though, it is so hard when our kids have to "suffer" for something that we know is for their good. Makes me very glad that footbinding isn't practiced anymore though.
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