In this video, a 90+ year old Chinese lady in Malaysia is interviewed, talking about her experience of having her feet bound.
The practice of footbinding did not take place in Malaysia but many women who had had their feet bound as childre migrated to Malaya (as Malaysia used to be called before independence from British rule) in later life.
I perform Bound Feet Blues without any costumes or props – or even any shoes. My aim is to invite the audience to experience the show in the way that we have all experienced stories being told to us when we were children – that is, by co-creating the characters, events and landscapes in our imaginations.
I use my left hand to map the process of footbinding – it starts off as a normal “foot” and is steadily contorted and “broken” into the twisted shape that you see in the photo below. For comparison, I’ve also found a photo of an actual bound foot – also below.
This performance photo was taken at the scratch night in March at Conway Hall.
The most prized foot was called “the golden lotus” – it was Continue reading
Did you know that one of the earliest recorded versions of the Cinderella story was written down during the Tang Dynasty in China around 850 AD? It was recorded by Duan Chengshi but he says it is about a woman who lived a thousand years before.
The two most famous versions of the Cinderella story are the ones by the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault involving glass slippers, pumpkins and mice as well as a wicked stepmother and two ugly stepsisters – seared into our collective memories by the Disney animated movie. Both these versions were recorded around the 1700s and 1800s AD in Western Europe.
In the Tang Dynasty version, the heroine’s name is Ye Xian. The key elements are as in the Western version although the twists and turns of the story differ. The Chinese Cinderella is bullied by her wicked stepmother and two evil step-sisters and she goes to a ball in disguise, wearing a sumptuous Continue reading
I have been working on the slides for my talk The Allure of Bound Feet, which I will be giving as part of the SEA ArtsFest 2014 Panel on Heritage in Asian Diasporic Performance.
Here is one of my slides where I will be talking about the process of footbinding and the fact that it can take up to ten years to be fully completed. The photos show girls at different ages with bound feet to illustrate the passing of time.
At the moment I have about 17 slides in total. The other slides will include woodcuts of ancient Chinese erotica – you can’t really talk about footbinding without talking about the sex appeal of the tiny foot – and also cross-gender Continue reading
My solo show Bound Feet Blues asks the question: how do we as individuals, and as women, live authentic lives true to ourselves within a dominant culture that seeks to control our bodies and our spirit? Foot binding in ancient China broke a woman’s body physically – but also broke her spirit over the course of the many years it would take to create the perfect tiny foot. What dominant cultural traditions in our modern era play a similar controlling role in who and what we can be?
I’ve just received the proofs of the e-book of my second novel, Mindgame, the first and only lesbian Malaysian thriller. It is soon to be re-issued by Monsoon Books and I am now reading through the proofs – all 450+ pages of the book – to check it before publication. On re-reading the book, I see that this same theme that I explore in Bound Feet Blues also Continue reading
It’s difficult for us in the modern world to imagine how small bound feet were. Whenever I say to people that some of the smallest bound feet were only 3 inches long, they register that that is small but it’s only when they see exactly how small 3 inches is, that the horror of it hits them.
In order to illustrate how tiny bound feet were for “Breaking Tradition”, my award-winning talk inspired by the stories in Bound Feet Blues, I went online to order a pair of baby shoes. I searched and searched for baby shoes that were 3 inches long but the smallest size that I could find came to just over 4 inches.
The photo above shows me holding those 4+ inch baby shoes during Continue reading
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
Bound Feet Blues - A Life Told in Shoes 