mutilation

Imagine a grown woman with baby feet

/ Yang-May Ooi / Leave a comment

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 →

Bound Feet Blues: Inside the mind of a woman crippled by bound feet in ancient China

/ Yang-May Ooi / Leave a comment

What was it like to be a woman crippled by bound feet? This question has always haunted me ever since I was a child when I  learnt about the bound feet women in China.

I have been researching this question for my story performance Bound Feet Blues.

You can read my essay about the practice of footbinding and how it affected generations of women emotionally and pyschologically over at my main blog StoryGuru.co.uk: see “Bound Feet Blues: What was it like to be a woman crippled by bound feet in ancient China?”

“For a thousand years, women crippled their daughters to create perfect dainty little bound feet which were beloved by men and became the currency for a good marriage. What was it like to be one of those women? Why did they carry on such a cruel practice? 

…. [READ MORE]”

 

 

Photo: flyer for Bound Feet Blues – A Life Told in Shoes – from the author’s personal archive