As part of my inquiry what it would like to walk with bound feet for my performance of Bound Feet Blues, I found this video of an elderly Chinese woman with bound feet.
I have been watching it to get a sense of her movement so that it can help me portray the walk of a woman with bound feet in my show.
The main thing that I notice is that she does not Continue reading
This is the question that I am thinking about at the moment during the development of my performance for Bound Feet Blues. How would having bound feet have affected the way you would walk? How would it have affected your outlook on life, going through the process of the brutal procedure over a number of years and then having to live the rest of your life crippled in this way?
You will have seen my earlier blog post about the film Snow Flower and The Secret Fan and also the clip which I posted showing the footbinding scene from that movie.
That film has been a useful resource in depicting the way that women with bound feet would have walked.
The movie seems quite careful and meticulous about depicting bound feet – after all the whole premise of the story is founded on the women having bound feet. They show what bound feet would have looked like in their little socks and slippers. In long shots, we can see the tiny feet under the women’s gowns (I’d love to know what special effects they used to make the women’s feet seem so small). It looks like in the performances as well, care was taken to depict how women would have moved with bound feet.
I watched those sequences carefully where the bound feet protagonists Snow Flower and her friend Lily are in movement and here are my impressions:
# They move faster than Continue reading
“Only through pain will you find beauty,” says Snow Flower’s mother as she makes her daughter walk with her feet bound.
In my research for Bound Feet Blues, I’ve been looking into what it was like for young girls to have their feet bound. I came across the movie Snow Flower and The Secret Fan – see my blog post from earlier this week “Beaches” with Bound Feet – footbinding and female friendship – which is all about footbinding.
Here is a clip showing the sequence where one of the girls has to endure footbinding:
It is painful to watch and is a moving dramatisation of what it must have been like for little girls who had to endure this brutal process.
The one comment I would have, however, is that from my research, footbinding is a process and not just a one-off as the film suggests.
As a girl grow up, her feet keep growing so Continue reading
In Chinese tradition, where marriages were made for social or business reasons and where women – especially those with tiny bound feet – were seen as trophies, there was a recognition that women would not find much emotional comfort, love or meaningful human connection with their husbands.
So as part of this tradition, girls were given “sworn sisters” who would be their emotional partner – rather like the “blood brothers” relationship that boys would have. These formally sanctioned and socially accepted partnerships were known as “laotongs”.
I learnt about this intriguing custom from the film Snow Flower and The Secret Fan which I discovered over the weekend, based on the novel by Lisa See. How had I not known about this touching tradition before now!
Here is the official movie trailer:
The movie is about two female friendships, one set in modern Shanghai and the other in 19th century China, during the Boxer Rebellion. The same two actresses portray the two pairs of friends. The arc of the story has echoes Continue reading
I will be giving a TEDx style talk inspired by my research for my solo show Bound Feet Blues at the Inspiring Speakers Gala on Wed 9th July. The talk is called Breaking Tradition: How to Live Unbound and looks at the life lessons that I learnt from exploring the story of my great gandmother who had bound feet.
Yang-May Ooi talking about bound feet – her left hand stands in for a crippled bound foot
If you enjoyed the work in progress performance of Bound Feet Blues on 26 March, my talk will look behind the show at my personal crisis that led me to find out the story of my family heritage. I also talk about the life lessons that I was able to draw from the courage and spirit I saw in my great grandmother who was able to transcend the brutal limitation imposed on her by her cultural tradition.
If you haven’t managed to see the show but would like to get a flavour of what is in store when the full length performance of Bound Feet Blues is showcased later this year, Breaking Tradition will give you a feel for what lies ahead. Someone who saw me do a snippet of the talk said: “I feel as if I’ve just seen a feature film in 4 minutes!”
I’ll be giving this talk as part of … Continue reading
Over on my main blog StoryGuru.co.uk, I’ve just written about the differences between writing for performance and writing novels. As a novelist, I had a steep learning curve working on the script for Bound Feet Blues and found lots to love about this fresh genre of story performance, and also lots that has been a challenge in terms of creating the text.
In contrast to 180,000+ for each of my novels, I have had to…. Continue reading
As an author of memoir or true stories that is the big dilemma: how do you tell stories about your life without upsetting the people you love who may be an integral part of those stories – especially because they are an integral part of your life?
I’ve mulled over this long and hard as I’ve been working on Bound Feet Blues, which tells stories from my life – and which inevitabley involve those people who are an important part of my life.
My blog post on my main blog StoryGuru explores this dilemma in more depth: see True Stories Told Live: Innocent Bystanders May Be Written Into This Story [Bound Feet Blues]
“One of the challenges about true stories told live – ie telling stories from your own life – is that they involve other people. And while these people may have signed up to your life as a friend or enemy or lover or relative or colleague, they may not have signed up to be in your story, whether that story is a written memoir or an oral story told live to others. So, how do you tell stories or write books about your life without upsetting those who appear in them because they happen to be around during the incident you are talking about?…
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Photo: thanks to flattop341 on flickr.com (CCL)
In Chinese tradition, women with tiny bound feet were desirable as wives and lovers, their delicate feet seen as objects of both status and sexual fetish. In her first full length storytelling piece Bound Feet Blues – A Life Told in Shoes, Chinese-Malaysian story performer Yang-May Ooi explores themes of female desirability, identity and empowerment in this personal story told through the shoes in her life.
The image of Chinese women with bound feet has haunted me since I was a child. I think of these women who have been crippled for life ever since they were 4 years old, unable to walk, with broken stumps for feet beneath the delicately embroidered silk shoes. Just so they can appear to have little, dainty feet and seem to be elegant and graceful – and therefore desirable and marriageable.
I’ve always had small, delicate feet. My shoe size is 3.5 and it’s a real problem trying to Continue reading
Images can help the creative process. Artists, writers and other creatives use Mood Boards to help them in their work. Discover how Author and Story Performer Yang-May Ooi has been using Pinterest to collect pictures in a Mood Board for her current project, Bound Feet Blues.
For Bound Feet Blues, I’ve found it helpful to collect images of bound feet and the Chinese cheong sahm (long dress) as well as other images – no matter how tangently – that relate to the various themes I’m exploring:
# Chinese Continue reading
Bound Feet Blues - A Life Told in Shoes 