ACHING FOR BEAUTY: Footbinding in China
By WANG PING Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 265 pages, $27.95

Alan Baumler

In 1966, at age nine, Wang Ping attempted to bind her own feet. She had no idea how to go about it, nor any clear idea why she wanted to. Her ignorance of the techniques and meaning of footbinding is not surprising, as China's modern revolutions had cut her off from this knowledge-knowledge that had shaped the lives of Chinese women for a thousand years. But her motivations are puzzling. She wanted her mother and sisters to stop teasing her for having enormous "steamboat" feet, but past that she could not explain why for six months she kept her feet wrapped in elastic bandages tight enough to make her feel like she was walking on broken glass. Had she been caught by agents of the state, they would have been mystified as to her motives. By 1966, footbinding was a feudal remnant, a vestige of the old society and its oppressive sexism. For a man to do this to a woman would have been a crime, reprehensible but perhaps understandable. What possible motive could a young girl have for doing this to herself? In Aching for Beauty, Wang Ping presents footbinding as central to the meaning of femininity in China, "a roaring ocean current of female language and culture."
The custom of footbinding, crushing a young girl's feet to create the "three-inch golden lotus," arose in the Song dynasty (960-1297) and only began to disappear in the late Qing (1644-1911). The pain inflicted by the procedure was proverbial: "a pair of tiny feet, two jugs of tears." The custom was denounced by late-nineteenth-century reformers such as Liang Qichao as one that tortured Chinese women and weakened the Chinese nation. In the West, footbinding was the ultimate sign of the degenerate otherness of Chinese civilization.
Wang is perfectly aware of the notorious reputation of footbinding, but for her it is only one facet of a complex custom. Although footbinding was later defined as the central symbol of Chinese men's subjugation of Chinese women, footbinding was entirely a woman's matter, performed on young girls by their mothers. Women did this, in part, to make their daughters into acceptable wives: bound feet symbolized the submissiveness and tractability considered appropriate in a bride. Footbinding also empowered women, however. The bound foot was intended to control women's sexuality; instead, it concentrated it. The three-inch lotus foot was an erotic obsession for Chinese men, and it was through their feet that the heroines of novels such as The Carnal Prayer Mat and The Golden Lotus were able to dominate and eventually sexually destroy the men who supposedly controlled them. Rather than marking women as inferior, footbinding was proof of women's self-discipline and self-cultivation. The late-imperial cult of exemplary women revolved around their ability to control their desires and their bodies in the name of virtue, above all, if widowed, by avoiding remarriage. Widows gouged out their eyes, cut off their noses, ears, or arms, hurled themselves into fires or over cliffs to avoid the shame of remarriage. Through drastic acts like these and through the everyday act of footbinding, the female body became, literally, a model of virtue; women used their bodies to demonstrate their morality. Since footbinding was a symbol of the superior refinement of Chinese culture, it was women, not men, who distinguished the Chinese from the barbarians, and the unbound feet of Manchu women were the most obvious sign of the distinction between Manchus and Chinese during the Qing dynasty.

Starting from footbinding as a place to explore the meaning of Chinese women's lives, Wang Ping surveys much of the corpus of Chinese literature and delves into countless topics, including food, language, sex, eroticism, Daoist sexual practices, Freud, The Golden Lotus, women's literary production, and nu shu, the secret women's script found in Jiangyong County in Hunan Province. She rescues many interesting topics that had been imprisoned in the specialist literature, making the book an introduction to some of the best studies that have been done on Chinese women's history in the last decade. Some of these topics are only loosely connected to footbinding, and Wang ranges all over China's modern and premodern history as if there were a single meaning for footbinding and Chinese femininity that remained constant over space and time. A more historically grounded discussion of footbinding might have made for a deeper book, but, as it is, Aching for Beauty provides a literate and provocative introduction to many aspects of the lives of premodern Chinese women.

Alan Baumler is an assistant professor of history at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and the editor of Modern China and Opium, to be published by the University of Michigan Press later this year.