When We Were Strolling Players in the East by Louise Jordan Miln

Author:Louise Jordan Miln [Miln, Louise Jordan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Travel
ISBN: 4064066167202
Google: xff3DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Good Press
Published: 2019-12-16T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XX

CHINESE SHOES

The Chinese women have enormous feet. They are reputed “small footed,” but our reputations often wrong us. No Chinese woman has a small foot. But even a Chinese woman’s huge great toe looks small when in its solitary deformity it masquerades as an entire foot.

There is nothing so characteristic of the Chinese as thoroughness. The Chinese are the least beautiful of all civilised peoples; but when they undertake to be beautiful—even in the mere matter of their women’s feet—they do it thoroughly. They don’t put a heel in the middle of a shoe to make a foot look small, nor do they point absurdly an empty satin toe. No! They bend four of the human toes back and leave the one big toe to do apparent duty as a lovely, diminutive foot.

To us the small-footed women of China appear twofold martyrs. We think them martyrs because they suffer when the foot deformity is inflicted upon them. We think them martyrs because their deformed feet are useless, and disable them from taking exercise.

We regard exercise as a blessed privilege. The Chinese regard exercise as a dire necessity.

We, in the West, do most things because we like; they, in the East, do most things because they must.

That makes the great racial difference. It is not often justly appreciated. Ignoring it causes us to do the people of Asia innumerable injustices.

Chinese women know as little of tennis, of golf, of riding to hounds—even of dancing in its fast and furious Western sense—as we know of fish-eye soup and of birds’-nest stew. And they care less.

The majority of Chinese women whose feet are bound endure temporary pain, but they suffer no permanent deprivation. To take voluntary and unnecessary exercise—to take it as a pleasure—could never occur to a well-balanced Chinese mind. The Nirvâna of which the Brahmins dream is the idleness which the most favoured-by-fortune of the Chinese women realise.

Milton might have written of the small-footed women of China (had he known them—had he felt an interest in them), ‘They also serve who only sit and wait.’ They serve indeed a great racial purpose of repose as they sit and wait for an Occidental enlightenment for which they have no desire.

The Chinese are the hardest working, the most indefatigable race on earth. Consequently the grandes dames of old Cathay do even less material work than the leisured women of any other country.

Nature is the great giver of recompense; Nature saves us from universal insanity; Nature whispers in the ear of the tired, overworked Chinaman, “Rest is the superlative form of happiness. To be idle is to be in paradise.”

The Chinese bind the feet of their women not out of cruelty; they do it partly out of a deformed, over-civilised, national vanity, but still more out of a tender kindness. The woman whose feet are “small” can perform no great physical labour; she cannot trudge beneath the burning sun to tend the young rice plants; nor can she pole the heavy sampans up and down the crowded Chinese rivers.

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