How does a woman with bound feet “run away” from her family?
This is the question that has haunted me ever since I was a child when I heard the story of my great-grandmother who had bound feet.
Here is the story that has been passed down in my family, which I pieced together from different family members:
Great-grandfather was a hospital orderly in Taiping (a small town in Perak in Malaysia) when he came across a young woman with bound feet who 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
I had never heard of barefoot sandals before until my pal Vincent posted a photo on Facebook. As I am obsessing about feet and shoes and all things pedial these days due to Bound Feet Blues, I set off into the web universe to find out more.
There are some amazing and gorgeous foot adornments that can be found – here is an example. Isn’t it just gorgeous?
With this current rare heatwave in the UK, this summer might Continue reading
I’m delighted to share with you the showreel of Bound Feet Blues from the work in progress performance back in March.
Enjoy!
You can see what the audience said about the show at the Audience Reviews page
The video was filmed and edited by the very talented Claudia Rocha and her team
I was fascinated by the stories she told in between her songs about travelling the Mississipi Delta exploring the roots of the Cash family. The songs tell stories from that meditative journey – about her grandmother who
picked cotton in the Sunken Lands and her ancestors who lived and died during the Civil War.
As I’ve been finding in my current project Bound Feet Blues, discovering and retelling stories from your roots/ heritage can be profoundly life-changing. In connecting the past with the present, it gives us direction for the future.
Find out more about her album:
The River & The Thread – Rosanne Cash.
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Yang-May Ooi is a mixed media author & story performer. Her work explores the power of personal narrative to enchant, inspire and transform. Bound Feet Blues is her first full length solo story performance.
I am now working on the second half of Bound Feet Blues. There is very little factual information or evidence in our family stories about my great grandmother. All we know is that at some point, as an adult, she left China and travelled to Malaya where she would meet the man who would become my great grandfather. We have no information about where she lived in China or which port she would have left from or arrived at.
I want to insert a line in Bound Feet Blues about how long the journey by sea would have taken her eg “It was a ….. days or …. weeks journey”.
For that single sentence, I looked at Continue reading
I have added a page to my blog giving the background to the development of Bound Feet Blues.
My vision for the piece is as a pure form of storytelling with no costumes or props and minimal lighting and music or sound effects. As a child, I loved listening to the stories my mother and Continue reading
Researching the crippling effect of bound feet on women in ancient China for my story performance Bound Feet Blues has made me appreciate the freedom I have as a modern woman have to enjoy the simple pleasure of going for a run
I went for a 3 mile run on Easter Sunday in the pouring rain and came back utterly drenched. You may not believe me but I thoroughly enjoyed it!
Why such seeming madness?
Of course I’d prefer to run through a sunny landscape, with the warm sunshine on my face and the vibrant colours of spring bursting around me. But there’s something tactile and Continue reading
Bound Feet Blues - A Life Told in Shoes 