Golden Lotuses

I must confess that I sometimes catch myself staring at my students’ feet. Let me be perfectly clear: this happens not because I’ve stayed in China long enough to develop a foot fetish. Besides, the mass foot fetish is mercifully a thing of the past in a China where footbinding is now unknown. The practice was banned with uneven results after the fall of the Qing in 1911 and later was one of the “olds” driven out forever by Mao—this one for very good cause. Though my students’ feet tend to be small, they are naturally so. No, these feet hold my gaze because they remind me that the demographics of my classes at Wenzheng College bear witness to a social transformation that approaches the miraculous. More than ninety percent of my students are young women, and this in a country where little more than a half century ago illiteracy bound the minds of ninety percent of women and girls as surely as custom bound their feet.

Women in China have a long history of experiencing bindings of various kinds. Most famous are the “golden lotuses” or “golden lilies,” as bound feet were euphemistically called. Lately, I’ve been reading The Great Chinese Revolution by John King Fairbank, a frustrating book full of insights and interesting details but written in a style that makes it feel like penance to read. However, even cumbersome prose has the power occasionally to give one pause, if not steal one’s breath. Fairbank’s five-page overview of the history of footbinding had such an effect on me. Fairbank describes in excruciating detail the painful process of footbinding as well as its cultural impact in China generally and on women in particular. But it is a sentence noting the scale of the practice that left the deepest impression on me: “First and last one may guess that at least a billion Chinese girls during the thousand-year currency of this social custom suffered the agony of footbinding and reaped its rewards of pride and ecstasy, such as they were” (Fairbank 71).

At least a billion Chinese girls. Just the size of the number is sobering enough. A billion Chinese girls. That’s something akin to the entire population of China today hobbling about on bound feet. A billion Chinese girls. A haunting figure, but human suffering, for me, is measured best not in sums but instead in the lived experiences of individuals. That’s when it really gets to me—when I think of the individual pain of those billion Chinese girls. To comprehend this, we must reflect for a moment on what it meant to have one’s feet bound.

Typically, the process of footbinding began when a girl was somewhere between four and seven. The earlier the binding was initiated, the less severe the pain, but the pain was severe in every instance:

A girl’s foot was made small, preferably only three inches long, by pressing the four smaller toes under the sole or ball of the foot in order to make it narrower. At the same time it was made shorter by forcing the big toe and heel closer together so that the arch rose in a bowed shape. As a result the arch was broken and the foot could bear no weight except on the heel. (Fairbank 71)

Each of the girl’s small toes was broken in the process and forced by the increasingly tight wrappings to bend down under the foot, driving the broken arch up into the desired lotus shape. I can scarcely imagine the pain this must have entailed, but the initial deformation of the foot was just the opening act of a lifetime of suffering for a woman with bound feet:

After the first two years, the pain lessened. But constricting the feet to a three-inch size was only the beginning of trouble. By this time they were very private parts indeed and required daily care, washing and manicuring at the same time that they had to be kept constantly bound and shod night and day. Unmanicured nails could cut into the instep, bindings could destroy circulation, blood poisoning or gangrene could result. (Fairbank 72)

Like most oppressive practices, footbinding was supported by an ideology that infiltrated the minds of the empowered and the disempowered alike. In fact, it sometimes made them hard to distinguish. Ironically, the actual binder of a girl’s foot was a trusted female relative, typically her mother or grandmother. And in the late-19th and early 20th century, when efforts to abolish footbinding gathered force in China, women with bound feet sometimes were the reformers’ staunchest foes. Perhaps this should not be surprising, as no one had more invested in footbinding than they—few people will immediately embrace a view that requires them to conclude that their own suffering has all been for naught.

While women may have been responsible for the literal binding of a girl’s foot, the figurative binders were men, and the custom could have evolved into a norm only in a culture that was already deeply patriarchal. Classical Chinese erotic manuals suggest that women with bound feet gained sexual hypersensitivity, but such manuals were written by men for men, and the source of the purported “advantages” for women was likely the male imagination rather than the experience of any real women. Ultimately, footbinding revealed far more about the interconnection between male desire and power than anything else. A woman with bound feet was a housebound woman, a nearly immobile woman, a dependent woman, a woman who would always be small and something akin to a child. Footbinding, then, was an extreme form of eroticizing the subordination of women.

Footbinding disempowered women in terms that are easy to see and—from our vantage today—almost a reflex to oppose. The binding power of illiteracy is more insidious because it is hidden, more difficult to drive out because it is more difficult to see. Yet the binding of women’s minds in China shares a common cultural origin with the binding of their feet. The old Chinese saying, “A talentless woman is a virtuous women,” points toward the connection. Denying education to women, like binding their feet, immobilized women and inhibited their potential for growth.

The founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 offered the promise of change for Chinese women. In the early years of the PRC, Mao asserted that “women hold up half the sky” and instilled laws in support of gender equality—measures that ran counter to the patriarchal currents of traditional Chinese culture. To a large extent, the PRC has delivered on that promise, and the opportunities available to women in China today are unprecedented and would have been difficult to imagine a half-century ago. Even so, the promise has not been completely fulfilled, for the currents of tradition are strong, especially in rural areas. Only in the large cities has China come close to meeting its goal of universal literary, and a gender gap in the literacy rates of men and women has been present throughout the sixty-year history of the PRC. Even today, about fourteen percent of Chinese women are illiterate, compared with five percent of men. Granted, fourteen percent is a striking improvement over ninety, but the nearly ten-point gap between men and women is telling.

Highly educated Chinese women confront their own barriers as well. If women in the West still come up against the glass ceiling, women in China face something similar, though the glass here is tinted red. In both the governmental bureaucracy and the growing private sector, men continue to dominate high-level positions of power and influence. And the exceptional woman who rises to such heights pays a cultural price for her success. Women perceived as choosing career over family are disparagingly called “dragon women.” Perhaps such labels do the greatest harm not to the women so labeled but instead to girls and young women who’ve yet to choose their course in life. The phrase “dragon woman” is as much a warning as an indictment, an assertion that a woman ought not set her sights so high. Not surprisingly, no one ever speaks of dragon men.

Despite these constraints, I feel hopeful about the future for women in China, and my students surely contribute a great deal to this hope. At the beginning of the semester last fall, I asked the students to fill out information cards that included a question about career goals. The young women in my classes expressed a wide range of aspirations. They want to become translators, executives, educators, officials. Many also noted they wish to travel the world. That’s quite a shift in a culture where bound feet once prevented a billion women from aspiring to leave their own homes. Calling bound feet “golden lotuses” was always a misnomer, for the practice stunted growth and nipped lives in the bud. This is what I think about when I look at my students’ feet: in China, the lotuses are only just now beginning to bloom.

Work Cited

Fairbank, John King. The Great Chinese Revolution: 1800-1985. Singapore: Harper Perennial, 1987.

Small Happiness

The birth of a son is cause for celebration;
the birth of a daughter is only a "small happiness."

--John Bryan Starr, Understanding China

For one such as this,
the pangs are no less
nor the first breath
a lesser wonder,

but such a joy's
outstripped by sorrow,
his disapproval,
the scorn of bitter elders.

Such is the small happiness,
the kind that sends her
to the corner with an infant
dressed in swaddling clothes.

Guihua Gongyuan

At Guihua Gongyuan
old men fix time to string
and let it fly.

From my perch a mile north,
I watch flight take form—
bats, birds, demons, dragons

rising above tiled roofs,
fettered yet borne by wind
and in pursuit of cloud.

If old men with sore bones
and weary hearts can soar
in winter to such heights,

where might I go, with hair
still scarcely touched by snow?

Real Fake

Any day in which one nearly gets bamboozled a dozen times in an hour is a day worth remembering to me. I had such a day and such an hour on an outing to Shanghai last summer. It began with a walk along Nanjing Lu with a couple of American students. There, we learned how it feels to be human magnets, or else thick rolls of 100-yuan notes with heads and limbs sticking out. Every street hawker of wristwatches and wheeled shoes came our way, making the same tired pitch in one or two English words. One man stood apart in diversifying his stock, though, unfortunately for him, this approach yielded no better luck: “Wristwatch? T-Shirt? Massage? Sex?” How’s that for one-stop shopping?

Next, three young Chinese people approached—a tall young man with a warm smile and a twinkle in his eye that I recognized as ironic only in retrospect, and his two vivacious female companions.

“We are art students from Beijing University,” one of the girls said. “There is an art festival in Shanghai this week, and we have an exhibit in a gallery on this street.”

“It is our first exhibit,” said the young man. “Won’t you please have a look? We are so curious to know what people will think of our paintings.”

We had nearly an hour to kill before we needed to meet up with our group, and they were such nice and polite young people and so excited about their artistic debut. What harm could there be in having a look?

Nanjing Lu is a pedestrian street, and, on a sunny summer afternoon, it’s a great place to get a sense of just how crowded Chinese cities can be. It would have also been a great place to get lost, but our new friend was taller than almost any of the other 10,000 black-headed people walking about, and we followed him closely as he cut through the crowd. Somehow, two policemen in a golf cart managed to weave through the mass of flesh and pull up beside our friend. The two girls vanished in an instant, diving deep into the anonymity of that human sea. Both officers spoke to our companion for a moment, and then one broke away to have a word with us.

“Do you know this man?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “We just met him.”

“This man is not an art student. He’s a con artist. He will take you to a gallery full of ridiculously overpriced paintings. Once you’re inside, you’ll find the door bolted and guarded by a muscle-bound man with a pair of nunchaku and a penchant for relieving nervous tension by pummeling foreigners. Your ticket out will be either to buy a painting or take a beating.”

By this point, Ian and I had turned considerably paler than we already are; Jheff had the advantage of possessing dark skin that masked his emotions. The other cop and the tall man were seated in the golf cart, talking animatedly. Our “friend” turned around to glance at us, and it was only then that I realized what I had taken for a smile was actually a sneer. On Nanjing Lu, we discovered, not only the wristwatches were fakes. The same went for friends, too.

We continued our walk, and, within thirty minutes, a half-dozen other groups of aspiring artists offered to lead us to the fate the policeman had described. Finally, we turned around and headed back toward the Bund, having had more than our fill of Nanjing Lu.

Perhaps it was our near-run escape from an art gallery beating that led Jheff to have some vindictive fun on the Bund by bargaining over a wristwatch he had no intention of buying. He talked the vendor down to a preposterous price—about $10—and then turned away.

“That can’t be real,” he said. “A Rolex for $10? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“”Not real,” the man pleaded. “Real fake. Fake real. Real fake.”

We chuckled as we departed, seeing the phrase as a humorous absurdity. However, when I returned to Suzhou and narrated the day’s events to a Chinese friend, she told me that the expression was not absurd at all but in fact communicated an important distinction. On the Chinese black market, there are real fakes and fake fakes. A real fake may not really be a Rolex, but it will tell the time. A fake fake will at best make you late to an important meeting and at worst will burn the skin on your wrist when it oozes acid. Real fake designer jeans may last about as long as their legitimate siblings, while fake fakes will dissolve into threads and strip you to your underwear on the street the first time that you wear them. A real fake person may not really want to be your friend but intends you no real harm. A fake fake, in contrast, will smile as he leads you to ruin. Thus, for the average Chinese person, learning to distinguish between real fakes and fake fakes is an essential life skill.

Among the many pirated goods in China, none are more numerous than DVDs. Most pirated discs fall somewhere in the middle on the real fake-fake fake continuum. A purely fake fake DVD won’t play at all if it doesn’t melt down your hard drive, but even the best real fakes are imperfect imitations and have something wrong. Problems occur most frequently in the packaging. Perhaps due to the language barrier, the producers of pirated English DVDs have great difficulty matching up the credits on the jacket with the actual film. Consequently, your pirated copy of Schindler’s List may display the cast of Meet the Parents and include among its catalogue of special features the promise of hilarious outtakes. The jacket of Nanking—a recent documentary about Japanese atrocities in China in the winter of 1937-1938—suggests that the disc offers a “never-before seen alternate ending.” Unfortunately, for the victims of the “Rape of Nanking,” history affords no such opportunities.

Even when the packaging happens to connect with the right film, the content choices are often questionable. The jacket for Atonement lists the proper cast but includes as a description of the film a user posting from a movie fan web site: “My brain tends to turn to mush in the presence of greatness. This makes it difficult when I want to write about something that I thought was truly great. It is so much easier to write about something that is rubbish.” Needless to say, I watched the film despite rather than because of this unhelpful blurb. But what do I have to complain about anyway? For about seventy-five cents, I viewed on DVD a fine film that had just begun to run in theaters back home.

Typically, I would not seek out pirated goods and do believe that the artists who make films deserve a fair cut of the sales. In China, however, it’s actually rather difficult to find non-pirated discs. Even Auchan—a large supermarket similar to Wal Mart—has bins stuffed with thousands of DVDs priced so low that they surely must be pirated. When Americans hear the words “black market,” they envision places that can be reached only in darkness by boat or can be entered only by people wearing trench coats with the collars turned up. That is not the case at all in Suzhou. On Shi Quan Jie, the tourist street where I live, there are more than a half-dozen well-lighted places selling pirated DVDs in plain view, with each disc priced at less than one US dollar. Apparently, the government has periodic crackdowns on such operations, but there are no real consequences. The shops stay closed for a week or two, and then it’s back to business as usual.

Most of my Chinese friends see no problem with piracy. It is a simple matter of cost to them. One friend, in fact, was genuinely perplexed by the high price of DVDs in America. I explained that the price was so high because many people take a share of the proceeds when a legal disc is sold, while the pirated discs earn money only for the copier and the store. This seemed to make an impression on her, but the impression didn’t run very deep. By the end of the conversation, she was telling me how I could avoid paying such high prices for movies when I return to America by downloading them for free on Chinese web sites. I’m sure I will not do this, but while in China, I’ve learned to do as the Chinese do. I’ve made my peace with the real fakes; it’s the fake fakes that I seek to avoid.

Great Walls of China

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out.

--Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”


Recently, I returned from my second excursion to Beijing. After my first visit in late October, I had a conversation on the bus to Wenzheng College with a Chinese teacher, and this exchange ensured that I would have to go back to the capital during my time in China. “Did you visit the Great Wall?” my colleague asked. He looked at me with profound disappointment as I explained that the weather had been so foggy all weekend that it would have made little sense to take the relatively long trek north of Beijing to the wall. “Well,” he said after a long pause, “you are not a real man until you have been to the Great Wall.”

Today, I can report with pride that, as I approach my fortieth birthday, I’ve became a real man at last, at least by the Chinese measure. I have climbed the long ascent at Mutianyu to the crest of the wall and walked for hours on stones that weave through the mountains like a twisted spine. In winter, tourists are sparse, and once one passes through the stands of dispirited souls selling trinkets without luck at the base of the hill, it’s actually possible to take a contemplative walk on top of the wall. As I walked, I pondered what I’d read about the wall before coming to Beijing. Somewhere between two and three million men died during the long history of the wall’s construction. Surely, the impressed laborers who built the wall felt no investment in the project, but many gave their lives for it nevertheless. At its peak of military use during the Ming dynasty, more than a million men were garrisoned along the wall’s 4000 miles of stone. Was I walking in the footsteps of such masons and soldiers?

The short—and literal—answer is, no. There is, in fact, no Great Wall in the singular. Instead, it would be more accurate to speak of great walls. The first incarnations of the Great Wall were not even erected in the same place where I stood in the winter sun. The wall constructed in the 3rd century B.C.E. under the Qin dynasty was farther to the north, and little of it now remains—an immense effort of men swallowed into the earth, as if it had never been. Thus, when people speak of the Great Wall being more than 2000 years old, the claim is in dire need of qualification—and nearly as much of a myth as the assertion that the wall can be seen from the moon. The Great Wall that draws crowds of visitors today was not built until the 15th century during the Ming dynasty. Yet even here, when we walk along the wall at places like Badaling and Mutianyu, we trod on a reconstruction built not to keep the northern invaders out but to draw the tourists in. We may not like to be reminded by the trinket hawkers that we are mere consumers of a packaged past, but that is the true state of things. Even if we don’t buy the t-shirts and postcards they’re selling, our ticket to the Great Wall purchases an illusion.

Be that as it may, the Great Wall is a glorious illusion. Of all the places I have traveled, only Machu Picchu in Peru surpasses the wall’s fusion of natural and man-made splendor. A large part of the wonder of the wall is that human beings could have managed to build anything at all given the rugged terrain, yet the Chinese had the audacity to construct a stone partition across the county’s vast northern border. The wall rises and falls innumerable times, conquering the topography in Taoist fashion by yielding to it. Yet the wall, like the Eiffel Tower in France, has become a beloved national icon only in retrospect. With regard to its original purpose, it was a dismal failure. The old wall didn’t prevent the Mongols from storming south and conquering China in the 13th century, nor did the Ming wall fare better in staving off the Manchus in the 17th century. Consequently, in historical terms, the wall is a monument to futility more than anything else. How then, did the wall become an enduring symbol of China?

Perhaps the answer lies in the tension between China’s view of itself and its attitude toward the rest of the world. The Chinese word for China, Zhongguo, literally translates as “middle country,” and China has a longstanding cultural tendency to see itself at the center of the universe. There is nothing unusual in this, for anthropologists have noted the presence of such ethnocentrism across cultures. What is unique to China is how long its cultural patterns endured and the extent to which its sense of superiority was well founded. The latter point is best illustrated by what transpired when the Mongols and Machus breeched the Great Wall and conquered China. Both northern invaders reached the same conclusion: there was no better way to govern China than the Chinese way, and the Confucian system of governance that had evolved for well over a millennium continued on despite the dynastic shift into foreign hands. The wall had proved ineffectual in keeping the “barbarians” out but much more successful in sealing in the culture of China. The invaders had triumphed militarily, but, culturally, the positions of victor and vanquished were inverted. To rule China, the Mongols and Manchus strove to become de facto Chinese.

Only in the 19th century did the Chinese confront foes whose sense of cultural superiority rivaled their own, and these invaders came from the east by sea, where the Great Wall offered no resistance. By this time, the medieval wall could not have presented much of an obstacle to the Western powers and their modern weaponry anyhow. The physical wall had become irrelevant, but the Great Wall’s psychological twin persisted much longer. Modern Chinese history is, to a large extent, the story of a great and ancient power coming to terms with modernity and reinventing itself to meet the demands of a changing world. One response to perceived threats from without is to retreat within, to seek refuge behind great walls of the mind. However, a modern nation can hide behind walls for only so long before it begins to suffocate itself.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, reformers such Zhang Zhidong sought to encourage both the adaptation of Western technological innovation and the preservation of Confucian values. His was a mission at cross-purposes. The revolution of 1911 that ended the long history of dynastic China and sent the country into decades of social turmoil also made it clear that a nation cannot move backwards and forwards simultaneously. This tumultuous period did not end until the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 brought Mao to power and reinforced the psychic wall that ran not just along the northern border but around all of China as well. Mao may have opened diplomatic channels with the US as part of a triangulation strategy against the Soviet Union, but, in doing so, he unwittingly began the process of dismantling the last incarnation of the Great Wall, a wall without stones that has proved to be the most durable wall of them all. Current practices in China such as Internet and other media censorship suggest that the dismantling is far from complete, but, like the old Qin wall, Mao’s psychic wall is nearly in ruins now.

As I walked along the Great Wall, I thought about this complex history and of how, in less than the course of my own lifetime, the very act of a foreigner taking such a stroll on the wall had gone from unthinkable to uncommon to commonplace. In the thirty-odd years since the death of Mao, China has changed from an impoverished and insular country whose isolation rivaled that of North Korea into a vibrant nation with cosmopolitan cities and seemingly limitless potential for economic growth. I don’t think that visiting the Great Wall really did much for my masculinity, but it surely filled me with a sense of awe. The awe stemmed both from a brush against China’s dynastic past as well as the awareness that the China I inhabit today has transformed in ways that almost no one could have imagined, much less have predicted. The Great Wall is now nothing but a tourist stop, and, as I stood on its reconstructed towers and stared out at the scenery, it was as if I could catch a glimpse across the 21st century. There were no real barriers in sight.