From Tea to Coffee by Cheng Wang

Author:Cheng Wang [Wang, Cheng]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781948598514
Publisher: Open Books
Published: 2021-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Eight

In college, I was totally naive and often beyond awkward. As a result, I had two or three close friends and wanted almost nothing to do with the rest. That could have explained why I never had a spark with a girl up to that point. But I believe culture played a larger role in shaping my individuality.

Throughout Chinese history, boys and girls were not supposed to make direct contact. “No direct interaction is the only proper etiquette between men and women,” according to Mencius (372-289 BC), the most well-known Confucian philosopher. As a tradition, matchmakers arranged marriages until the late 1970s.

In the early 1960s, when I was four, my aunt (who was five years older than my father) lived in a remote and impoverished village in Hebei Province, 600 miles southwest of Shenyang. She had six children, all girls. Her husband died shortly after the last child was born.

My aunt often came to stay with our family for a month or two. Every one of her six daughters would come with her to help with our household chores. More importantly, by staying with us they could all have enough food to eat, which was almost impossible to manage for a single, crippled woman raising six daughters in a poverty-stricken village.

The most striking image I have of my aunt was—and still is—the way she waddled: like a penguin, only slower. She clung to anything her hand could reach when she walked, such as a chair, a table, or just the bare wall. Then I noticed her shoes, which looked like small paper boats, less than four inches in size with a point in the front. No one talked about how it had happened, because it was common for women to be like that in those days.

I later learned this was a deep-rooted Chinese tradition. Starting from the Song Dynasty (960-1279 AD), the wicked custom of foot binding was best known as “three-inch lotus.” When a girl was five or six years old, a woman in her family, usually her grandmother, would use long wrapping clothes to bind her little feet all day, everyday, into that shape and size. Like how a boxer tightly wraps his fists before entering the ring; only for those girls, the wrapping cloths were on their feet their entire lives—something they could not take off if they wanted to walk later in life.

The purpose of the custom was to please men in an idiosyncratic and erotic way. At first, only the girls who were selected to serve in the palace would bind their feet. Over time, the idea spread to upper-class citizens, then to ordinary people—if they wanted to see their daughters married into wealthier families. Over a thousand years, this practice slowly became the norm for Chinese women before Mao took over China. I could not imagine how my aunt felt, as it was unbearable to see it then—even to think of it now.

One might wonder what such tiny-footed women could do, other than being restricted to a space no larger than a bedroom or a kitchen.

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