According to historian Dorothy Ko, "we hardly know what footbinding is about because the archives fail to answer even the most rudimentary questions. Legends aside, when did it start? How did it spread through time, across geographical regions and across class lines? And, most important, how did women feel about it?" Ko cautions that "there is no neutral or objective knowledge about footbinding" because our sources and informants have a "modern nationalist bias," owing in part to the "intrusion [into China] of Euro-American missionaries" in the mid-nineteenth century.² Ko makes several compelling points, including that the custom of footbinding, which lasted over a thousand years and affected virtually every province in China, had so many variations in practice, stories of origin, and reasons for being that it is difficult to speak with any certainty about a master narrative.³ Furthermore, when first-world scholars move beyond a surface-level comprehension of this pervasive tradition, the absence of a complex understanding necessarily points to other elisions, including what Gayatri Spivak might call knowledge of the "consciousness of the woman as subaltern."⁴ But, neither of these points would be apparent when reading the literatures of Asian America.

Chinese American literature, in particular, serves as an interesting vehicle for studying the trope of footbinding in large part because this body of work uniquely straddles the Asian/American, first-world/developing [End Page 31] world cultural and nationalist divide, and depicts Asian socio-political customs in terms of domestic socio-racial politics (Frank Chin illustrates this dynamic most prominently in his attacks on Maxine Hong Kingston's "fake" use of Chinese myths⁵ ). If we can view Asian American literature as a body of work that both arises from political activism and always already contains the seeds of an activist agenda, it may not be surprising to see that in Chinese American literature footbinding is represented through synecdoche and largely puts forth a modernist, first-world feminist agenda. What might be unexpected is to see that this activist agenda ironically objectifies, homogenizes, and ahistoricizes the Chinese subaltern woman in the name of anti-racism and anti-sexism.

You'll remember that synecdoche, the literary device used most often to present footbinding, is a universal trope or figure of speech that typically represents a whole being by reference to only one isolated part of that being, thus the common definition of synecdoche as a representation of "a part for the whole." When a writer uses this device, she purposefully foregrounds, and therefore over-determines, one aspect of (say) a person while homogenizing and subverting other traits in order to allow the selected feature to become the defining characteristic that subsumes the being itself. Synecdoche offers a way for authors to make visceral and concrete a sensibility that, for artistic and/or symbolic purposes, consumes the being and her space and place in society.

Women, especially, have a long history of being represented by parts. Their bodies praised, doted upon, idealized, and fragmented, their breasts, or lips, or legs have often stood-in for their moral, or physical, or reproductive value—and not just in the West. Ko does not use the label "synecdoche," but she describes perfectly its function in Chinese literatures. Regarding the Chinese roots of the Cinderella tale, for instance, she says the Cinderella story is "part of a long literary tradition whereby poets and storytellers fixated on parts of a maiden's body as a stand-in for the beauty or worth of her entire person."⁶ Seeing footbinding through synecdoche, this universally- used vehicle for delivering a punctuated but rather myopic focus, helps to reveal the problematic feminist goals of select Chinese American texts. [End Page 32]

Footbinding and Nationalist Identity Politics

In Jade Snow Wong's autobiography, Fifth Chinese Daughter, her father in America, in the first decade of the twentieth century, writes to her mother still in China and tells her not to bind their two oldest daughters' feet:

Here in America is an entirely different set of standards, which does not require that women sway helplessly on little feet to qualify for good matches as well-born women who do not have to work. Here in Gold Mountains [America], the people, and even women, have individual dignity and rights of their own.⁷

Although footbinding was already beginning to be abolished in China during the time in which this scene is set (and was totally abolished by the time Wong wrote her autobiography), Wong's inclusion of this moment serves to strengthen the depiction of her father as a different kind of Chinese in the U.S., as one who is modern and progressive in his support of women's rights. Heretofore, the narrator sees her father as traditional, even "Confucian"—he is patriarchal, strict, and private; he forces her to remain quiet at the dinner table; and he makes all five children attend Chinese school. But, in displaying his instructions to his wife not to bind his daughters' feet, Wong reveals a side of this immigrant that is unexpectedly reform-minded, able to reject a significant aspect of traditional, feudal, "Confucian" China in favor of modern, feminist America.⁸ On the same page, Wong suggests that her father's "unshakable, profound faith in Christianity" (and one supposes his ordination as a minister) are influential in developing these modernist ideals.⁹ In fact, the Church is depicted as the "one source of organized friendly assistance" (emphasis added) available to Wong's father, in large part because he had made enemies in Chinatown when he was sent there from China to audit accounting books, where he apparently found frauds which "discredited the management . . . and created no popularity for him among his own people in Chinatown."¹⁰ Just as the arrival of missionaries into China helped significantly to push forward the anti-footbinding campaign, the co-location of the father's Christian devotion and his demand to maintain natural-footed daughters suggests that, in domestic America, Christian ideology has also had an impact on the negotiation of Old World and New World values. In this case, Wong's father embraces American modernist conventions, through [End Page 33] Christian devotion, that support female individualism at the expense of Chinese Confucian traditionalism.

A look at the marketing of this book also reveals nationalist identity politics. Wong's work was first published in 1950, shortly after Japanese in America had been released from internment camps. At that time, she was sent on a four-month-long book tour to Asian countries, such as Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, East India, Thailand, Burma, and Pakistan, not by a publisher or professional promoter but by the U.S. State Department. Curiously, the State Department also published and released translated copies of her seminal work. The U.S. nation-state's involvement in the publication of Wong's autobiography suggests its embrace of Wong's "good Chinese/Asian" image against the "bad Japanese/Asians" with whom America had just been at war. In Wong's words, "I was sent [to Asia] because those Asian audiences . . . did not believe a female born to poor Chinese immigrants could gain a toehold among prejudiced Americans."¹¹ Here, the U.S.'s "model minority" politics were played out on the world stage.¹² After all, it was in America's economic interest in the period of recovery following WWII to showcase not just any non-Japanese Asian immigrant, but one who was Asian enough for wide, sympathetic identification (the Wongs were poor, "Confucian," garment factory workers/owners), and yet Western, modern, and even Christian enough to help redeem the racism and savagery that America so publicly perpetrated against domestic Japanese. Wong and her book apparently met just this standard, with her narrator and father who, to use Homi Bhabha's clever rhyme, were "almost the same [as mainstream Americans], but not quite . . . .almost the same, but not white."¹³

If the father's perspective on footbinding gives us a noteworthy illustration of one aspect of first-world, feminist nationalist politics, it is important to know that he is not the first to convey footbinding in nationalist terms. The decision to bind or not to bind a daughter's feet has an established ethno-nationalist history in China, beginning with the Manchus and replicated with every major nationalist movement during the thousand-year tradition of footbinding, including those of the Taipings, the Nationalists, and the Communists.¹⁴ To describe just one such episode, in the mid-seventeenth century when the Manchus overtook the Ming emperor, who represented the last Han (and therefore ethnic Chinese) Dynasty, footbinding was appropriated [End Page 34] by governmental leaders on both sides as a national emblem of Han loyalty. The Manchu leader, Qing Taizong, issued an edict forbidding the Han people to bind their feet in an effort to promote Manchu customs in their place. Similarly, he threatened Manchus who followed distinctly Han customs, such as footbinding, with severe punishment if they continued to follow these "foreign" traditions.¹⁵ In essence, then, the ban on footbinding for both ethnic Chinese and Manchu invaders served as a type of ethnic cleansing imposed deliberately to erase old nationalist identifiers in favor of creating a space for new ones. Interestingly, the edict didn't work since Chinese continued binding girls' feet for over two hundred more years in a stark display of loyalty to their ethnic and nationalist Han heritage. Setting aside the greater complexities inherent in the use of footbinding to foster ethnic loyalty or ethnic cleansing, what is significant for our purposes is that the binding of women's feet clearly served as a unique marker of ethnic and nationalist pride during this volatile historical period. Critic Hock Soon Ng is even more to the point when he calls attention to the inherent synecdoche: "It is not women who mark nationhood, but their bound feet."¹⁶

So when Jade Snow Wong illustrates her father's modern, American sympathies through his prohibition against binding the feet of his daughters in China, he is also seen to be disavowing an important tradition from his ancestors that, at least at one important historical juncture, represented ethnic loyalty and Han fidelity. The decision not to bind can thus be seen as much as a move against traditional China (a "push") as it is a pro-U.S. nationalist argument (a "pull") that has the ultimate effect of contributing to the launch of Jade Snow Wong's book (and body) into the inter/national marketplace. The father's position on footbinding, this "wedge" issue of international politics, calls attention to the use of the older sisters (and their feet) as mere plot devices in service to the book's overarching strategy of showcasing a modernist, feminist, progressive agenda. An interesting moment in this showcasing is the scene where American nationalist politics is placed directly upon the feet of Chinese girls and they (and the narrator), like subalterns, are left wholly silent about its implications. Even from across the Pacific Ocean they are disenfranchised, given neither vote nor voice when their father dictates their fate. One wonders what these Chinese girls think, and whether they want to come to America at all. It is within [End Page 35] Wong's discursive power to render an opinion on this matter, but she (and her sisters) remain curiously quiet, leaving the unbound feet to represent, instead, their father.

Class, Gender, and Marriage

If Jade Snow Wong's novel shows that bound feet are inserted into Chinese American literature as pro-American ethnic and nationalist signifiers, Ruthanne Lum McCunn's Thousand Pieces of Gold and Lisa See's recent novel, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, give us more intimate looks at nineteenth-century Chinese expectations for bound feet, albeit from dramatically different class circumstances. Together, these novels illustrate a tautology in the sense that in all classes of society women's feet became markers of their prestige, talent, and gender in a culture in which women's economic security depended upon marriage, and a good marriage was determined, in part, by the quality of the bound feet. Juxtaposing these novels' approaches to footbinding draws into relief the stark contrasts in their theoretical and political positions.

McCunn's is a biographical novel about the life of Lalu Nathoy, a Chinese woman who had her feet bound and then unbound before being sold as a slave and shipped to the United States. In 1865, when the novel opens, Lalu is thirteen years old and she has already endured the two-year process to bind her feet into four-inch "golden lotuses." McCunn writes,

Every day for two years, her mother had wound long white bandages around each foot in ever tightening bands, twisting her toes under her feet and forcing them back until her feet had become two dainty arcs. They were not as small or as beautiful as those of a girl from a wealthy family who would not need to use them at all. But they were useless for heavy labor.¹⁷

If Lalu had come from a wealthy family, her life would have changed immediately. As we see when Lily, the narrator in Lisa See's novel, has her feet bound, she physically and psychologically begins the transformation from "little girl" to "girl-in-preparation-for-marriage." Lily joins the "women's world," signified by her fulltime entrance into the women's chamber, and her mother and other womenfolk daily re-wrap and cleanse her feet and [End Page 36] supervise her walking to help shape the feet (Meanwhile she must remain more and more distant from her father and other men, given her now acknowledged pre-sexual status.). In the women's chamber, Lily starts lessons in sewing, spinning, weaving, and embroidery, skills that will be carefully measured as part of the matchmaking rituals, and a matchmaker is contracted to begin looking for an appropriate marriage partner. While these changes have an immediate impact on Lily's life, Lalu experiences few of them. Like Lily, Lalu learns the domestic skills of sewing, spinning, and weaving while her feet are healing, but there is no women's chamber and no matchmaker for this farmer's daughter. Neither Lalu nor Lily can run in the yard and play anymore, but Lalu still has "light" work to do, which includes much of the cooking and housework. Lalu's feet are bound to four inches—not the perfect three inches which Lily's mother skillfully achieves for her—so even if Lalu is lucky enough to have a matchmaker, the husband chosen for her will be second-best (or worse), commensurate with four-inch lotuses rather than three. Lalu's footbinding experience serves to advance her characterization as an archetypal downtrodden woman whose courage and perseverance through hardship make her admirable. By contrast, Lily's footbinding experience, contextualized within her upwardly-mobile status, shows her to be a girl whose circumstances propel her further than her character and talents may have otherwise deserved. Through the use of synecdoche, both girls seem to be equally subject to the rules and rituals of their classes in Chinese nineteenth-century society, but this commonality will change. For now, the literature suggests through this comparison that smaller feet could presumably compensate for a myriad of deficits, in Lily's case including a lack of facial beauty, talent, or desirable figure. Through Lalu, we learn that binding the feet did not necessarily mean that she didn't have to work or that her household could do without her labor. We also learn that feet that are bound can (and were) unbound.

Lalu is probably lucky that her father decided to bind her feet in the first place, since many farm families could not afford to deny themselves a daughter's "heavy" labor. The village people make fun of her father for risking his family's welfare by mortgaging his house to plant a large crop of wheat, but they make even more fun of his first big wager: years earlier, [End Page 37] he had gambled with the family's future by binding his oldest daughter's feet. He had hoped that through an appropriate marriage she would ally them with a more powerful family/class in society and that their lives would therefore be more comfortable. When a winter storm destroys the family's risky wheat crop, her father owes more than he had risked in the first place, and Lalu's membership in the family is suddenly in jeopardy. She begs her parents to unbind her feet rather than sell her as a servant. One wonders if Lily would do the same if placed in Lalu's shoes.

In looking at Snow Flower, Lily's soulmate, we see that See's novel illustrates an alternative agenda. When Snow Flower's family meets with misfortune and declines, instead of going against tradition and unbinding Snow Flower's and her mother's feet so that the women could work and perhaps save the family, as happens with Lalu, the feet remain bound and mother and daughter stay in the family house, largely in hiding. The charade of wealth is shattered when Snow Flower is ultimately matched to a butcher, someone significantly below her presumed class level. Not surprisingly, she dies prematurely of a tragic illness. Similarly, her parents are exiled to the countryside, where they likely become beggars and die terrible deaths. In a turn away from sentimentalism and towards Realism, like Lalu, the promise of Snow Flower's feet could not save them.

In keeping with a first-world feminist agenda, in McCunn's novel Lalu who, as a footbound teenager, would seem to hold no power of her own, is able to summon a level of agency that confronts and overturns a thousand-year-old practice; in unbinding her feet, she is gladly willing to bear personally the price of indignity in an effort to keep her family together. By comparison, in See's novel indignity and anti-traditionalism are tantamount to death itself. In the face of economic downturn, See's rendition of footbinding serves to endorse the continuance of tradition, privileging class appearance and family separation rather than cultural confrontation. See's women are liberated only in so far as they are able to approximate pride and selfhood within the confines of patriarchal society; they are left to fate rather than agency, tradition instead of progress. Footbinding here has esoteric and Orientalist overtones, located in a world where the women embrace this "mysterious" practice as a signature of their pride in self. By comparing McCunn's and See's novels, we thus [End Page 38] see distinctly different politics in the face of economic hardship. Lalu's family illustrates a move towards feminism and anti-traditionalism in the unbinding of Lalu's feet. See's characters, however, value the opposite: they maintain a sense of stoic pride in their footbinding, even at the expense of their lives and livelihoods. This comparison begins to show how the practice of footbinding was neither homogenous nor monolithic.

When Lalu's feet are unbound, not only must she give up her prospects for (an appropriate) marriage, but her fundamental identity as a girl/woman is questioned as well, as though the practice of footbinding is so thoroughly embedded within Chinese society that gender is defined along an axis of foot size. Almost immediately, the villagers mock Lalu and laugh at the family who turned a "girl" into a "boy." Later, when Lalu immigrates to America, she accepts her fate as the "wife" of a Chinese man who "blamed Lalu for his lack of arousal. Her feet were so big and her hands so coarse he thought he was in bed with a man."¹⁸ Chinese society sees Lalu's value in terms of her adherence to the custom of footbinding, so when the bindings are removed she is symbolically stripped of the part of her that was coded as "female" and thus marriageable. As Andrea Dworkin says, "Footbinding did not emphasize the differences between men and women—it created them."¹⁹

If Lalu's status in the eyes of Chinese society is diminished as a result of her unbound feet, then her status within her family increases. After two years of working in the fields next to her father, her mother invites Lalu to sit at the dinner table and eat first alongside her father. In McCunn's words, "Like all other men," Lalu was "fed first, before his wife and children, and with the better food." About eating with her father, Lalu's mother goes on to explain, "Men are the pillars of the family. We depend on them for our lives, so they must be fed well."²⁰ Unlike the larger Chinese community, within Lalu's family her value is determined by her labor. As one who works in the fields to provide the family with its subsistence, Lalu is prized as a breadwinner, as an anchor who is needed for the continuance of the clan. These diametrically opposed views of Lalu—as degraded woman and admirable "man"—can co-exist since both are socially constructed, not essentialist; they are different interpretations of a woman's worth, based in part on the disposition of her feet. Ping writes, "one thing is certain: footbinding became the primary mark of class and gender identification. As the sayings reveal [End Page 39] . . . 'without footbinding, how can one tell the difference between men and women?'"²¹ In other words, for the era of footbinding, synecdoche is used to show that the locus of gender determination shifts from the genital and reproductive sites to the feet, making them markers of sociocultural values and class standing. The pervasiveness and power of footbinding culture meant that women were subsumed by their feet; when they did not have their feet bound or worse, like Lalu, had a fall from grace in having them unbound, they suffered the fate of being treated as unmarriageable and promiscuous, or were stripped of their gender completely.

If gender during the era of footbinding was determined by the feet, then it is not hard to imagine that marriage matches were made largely on the basis of the quality of the bound feet. That is, when it came to marriage, bound feet also encapsulated a woman's being in the sense that her talent as a seamstress was reflected in the painstaking embroidery which ornamented her shoes; a woman's personal cleanliness was reflected in the smell which emanated from her foot-wrappings; and, a woman's ability to endure pain and remain obedient—traits which were particularly valuable to a future husband and mother-in-law—were reflected in the size of her feet. Historian Ko explains, "as footbinding migrated from the palace to respectable households, the blatant sensuality had to be draped in the mantle of domestic values. During this evolution housewives and mothers gave footbinding an entirely new set of meanings, as a celebration of women's work and motherhood."²² These domestic virtues were tied closely to footbinding rituals; for instance, both Lily and Lalu learn to sew while their feet are healing. We can only imagine that Lalu's sewing takes the form of mending and making family necessities, since the text remains largely silent on what she sews, but Lily takes great pride in her talent for embroidering slippers. For Lily, and presumably for other women of her class, embroidered slippers serve as the currency of intimacy with Lily ritually giving pairs of shoes to her soulmate, her husband, and her mother-in-law. Furthermore, when Lily sees that her mother-in-law is not wearing the shoes that Lily painstakingly embroidered as an engagement gift, Lily feels ashamed and as though her mother-in-law has snubbed her, signaling that she is undeserving of this high-class marriage. On her wedding day, Lily tells the reader, "when I looked down through the tassels [End Page 40] and saw [her mother-in-law's] golden lilies that seemed as small as my own, I felt a wave of panic. She hadn't worn the special pair of shoes I'd made for her. I could see why. The embroidery on these shoes was far better than anything I had done. I was disgraced."²³ Here, the bound foot is seen as a cultural and material symbol that "speaks" of class, talent, and endurance in an environment where women were often allowed no voice of their own. (Interestingly, Bossen links the abolition of footbinding to the development of textile machines, as if the handiwork encouraged by the time spent in the "women's chambers" was directly challenged by technological innovation. According to Bossen, women may have responded to technology developments by unbinding (or not binding) their feet in order to become more employable. The abolition of this crippling practice may have thus had as much to do with technological innovation as missionary invasion.²⁴ )

For our purposes, an analysis of marriage and material culture calls attention again to the class and political distinctions between McCunn's and See's narrators. Lalu, fallen from grace because her feet are unbound, is first sold to a bandit and then resold several more times until she is given as a prize in a poker match to a Chinese gambler in America. In the "Gold Mountain," she meets her true love, Charlie, with whom she eventually makes a home. Despite Lalu's poor beginnings, McCunn demonstrates in her novel that the woman in China who is stripped of her gender, marriageability, family, and home can still find happiness in America without bound feet. This anti-footbinding, feminist, pro-American thematic is largely in keeping with Jade Snow Wong's work. Both works use the trope of the bound-footed woman as a marker of the past, in support of a triumphalist narrative aimed at showing pro-American ideologies of growth and progress. Lisa See's novel, on the other hand, never brings her narrator to America. Her characters stay in China, firmly placed within exotic frameworks, including the opening scene when we are told that Lily writes this story as a retrospective "for those who reside in the afterworld."²⁵ This ancestral framework foregrounds the mysterious and highlights the novel's orientalist thematics, setting a perfect stage for a focus on the exotic custom of footbinding. Therefore, See's novel doesn't so much illustrate a modernist, Western, feminist politics as much as it challenges it through orientalist, patriarchal, sentimental discourse. Like other orientalist [End Page 41] texts, its goals are to put forward a mysterious and foreign Chinese land with strange traditions and dutiful people, rather than to question or overturn them. See's text is useful for comparison against Wong's and McCunn's, since it helps to reveal the different underlying assumptions and politics of these works, all written by twentieth-century Asian American women. If Wong's and McCunn's works embrace the abolition of footbinding in an effort to support a politics of female agency, See's novel affirms the need for their efforts in its display of a culture of patriarchy and women's oppression. All three works, though arising from opposing political viewpoints, leave the bound-footed woman a subaltern spectacle. Chandra Mohanty would say that "an ahistorical, universal unity" has been assumed about bound-footed women based "on a generalized notion of their subordination."²⁶ Wong and McCunn attempt to revitalize her through first-world feminist agency, while See's novel affirms her status as a sexualized and racialized object. However, the socio-political pressures for footbinding certainly varied across regions, classes, and historical moments for this thousand-year-old tradition; yet these Asian American writers would have us believe that the practice was seemingly monolithic and the subjects largely unquestioning. The more important issue arising for Asian American literature is not whether the bound-footed woman can speak, as Spivak might ask, but whether readers can truly understand her and the cultural forces that led some 50 million women, by one estimate, to cede themselves to—and even to embrace—the footbinding custom. In the absence of this understanding, she remains a raced and sexualized object who is inscribed with derision alternatively for her submission or participation.

The Eroticization of Women's Feet

An analysis of footbinding would not be complete without a discussion of the foot as fetish. But first a caution is in order, since the eroticization of the bound foot is probably over-determined in English-language analyses, in part due to the dominance of Howard Levy's groundbreaking text, Chinese Footbinding: The History of a Curious Erotic Custom.²⁷ Levy's text was the most influential, standard book-length study about footbinding available in English until historian Dorothy Ko and other scholars entered the conversation [End Page 42] in the last decade-and-a-half or so.²⁸ The erotic framework Levy uses, as well as the pornographic literature called upon to support much of his argument, buys into the problematic exotic and sexualized assumptions inscribed upon Chinese women in Western society. Even his subtitle underscores the stereotype of Chinese women as "curious" and "erotic." Staunch feminists such as Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin, among others, used Levy's work as their primary source of information on footbinding, which naturally led to their narrowly-focused invectives against the sexual and patriarchal elements of bound-foot society. Their narratives understandably also serve a first-world feminist agenda to eradicate such customs.²⁹ Even the foreword to Levy's book, written by famous Chinese translator Arthur Waley, sets a myopic and inflammatory stage, given its patriarchal and sexist assumptions. Waley writes that footbinding is "the most striking example of the strange things that women do or have done to them, in almost all cultures, in order to make themselves more attractive to men." In short, Levy's account tends to reduce footbinding to a "curious and erotic custom," without giving adequate attention to socio-political and cultural forces that include the erotic but may not have sex as their defining characteristic.³⁰

With Levy as the primary English-language source on footbinding, the West has almost exclusively focused upon the sexual dimension of footbinding, in part because this preoccupation conveniently confirms long-held stereotypical assumptions about Asian women, and also because it creates a space for enacting a first-world civil rights agenda.³¹ For our purposes here, however, it is enough to establish that erotic desire for bound feet is extant in the literature before and after the nineteenth century and that the sexual dimension of footbinding is real if, perhaps, over-determined for various reasons in English-language analyses.³²

Lisa See's novel, not surprisingly, works hard to capture the erotic intimacies of foot-bound culture, as illustrated in Lily's description of her wedding night:

That night, he [her husband] followed all the correct traditions, even removing my bridal shoes and putting on my red sleeping slippers. I was so accustomed to Snow Flower's gentle touch that I can't really describe how I felt having his hands on my feet, except that this act seemed far more intimate to me than what came next [sex].³³ (emphasis added) [End Page 43]

Julia Kristeva explains that the bound foot "became the most erotic part of the female body." Sociologist Fan Hong goes on to say that "women suffered willingly in order to please men."³⁴ Placed next to one another, See's and Hong's descriptions of the sexual cache invested in bound feet suggest that for both women and men, respectively, bound feet were the most intimate and erotic parts of a woman's body, even more so than the sexual organs (and this in a Confucian society that prized reproduction!).

In contrast, in Amy Tan's The Bonesetter's Daughter, when the narrator asks her mother whether "bound feet look like the white lilies that the romantic books describe," her mother responds in their secret language that bound feet are "usually crimped like flower-twist bread. But if they're dirty and knotty with calluses, they look like rotten ginger roots and smell like pig snouts three days old."³⁵ Of note, this burst of realism upon the stage of romantic and erotic narrative convention is expressed through a secret language of hand signals, as though the reality of the bound foot—its decrepit and putrefied nature—was a taboo that needed to remain hidden. If the bound foot was, in actuality, smelly and crimped, it seems unlikely at first that it could inhabit a space of supreme eroticism and pleasure, as suggested by See, Kristeva, and Hong. How can we reconcile this seeming contradiction? Critics have turned productively to psychoanalysis to interrogate the logic of this otherwise paradoxical and perhaps incomprehensible desire, arguing that despite the Western origins of (say) Freudian psychology, "it can nevertheless generate important insights into the difficult terrains of unconscious manifestations of sexuality and desire" in Chinese footbinding.³⁶

Freud saw the bound-footed woman as one who appeased male castration anxieties through foot fetishism. In his view, foot fetishism was a sexual perversion that always entailed a substitution where the feet were taken as representative of the genitals:

. . . the fetich [sic] depends on a coprophilic smell-desire which has been lost by repression. . . . Accordingly, only the filthy and ill-smelling foot is the sexual object in the perversion which corresponds to foot fetichism [sic].³⁷

For Freud, only the decrepit and rotting bound foot could be the object for sexual gratification because it signaled a denial of the real while simultaneously [End Page 44] affirming an entrance into the symbolic, into the unconscious imaginary. As the logic goes, men in Chinese society, always aware of their own potential for castration, saw the bound-footed woman as doubly castrated—first by her birth as female and second as (sexually) disabled since the bound feet were considered a substitute for the genitals. The footbound woman, then, was a symbol of man's own castration fears: her hobbling walk and limited scope of activity, ever present in villages where footbinding was nearly universal, reminded men of their own vulnerability, just one step away from some similar castration. Men were soothed, however, by an awareness of the cultural constructs that prescribed footbinding in the first place—marriage. When men realized that women "voluntarily" underwent this form of castration early in their lives in preparation for marriage, the practice of footbinding took on a more personal dimension. From the point of view of men's self interest, footbinding was seen to be a severe sacrifice endured by women for the sake of men. Freud writes, "[in] mutilating the female foot and then revering it like a fetish after it has been mutilated [,] It seems as though the Chinese male wants to thank the woman for having submitted to being castrated."³⁸

Returning to the quote above from See's novel, upon Lily's wedding night when her husband changes the shoes on her bound feet in preparation for sex, both Lily and her husband are to realize the rewards for which they have endured nearly life-long suffering: for her, the sacrifice and social conformity represented by her bound feet result in a marital bond that provides economic security for which she is grateful. For her husband, the realization of the degree of Lily's long-suffering brings with it an increased level of appreciation for her merit and self-worth. The subsequent consumption of the rotting feet with his hands, his eyes, and perhaps even his mouth assuages the castration anxiety long magnified by seeing women hobbling around him in the streets. The husband, through marriage and sex, finally possesses his own pair of bound feet, phallic symbols that reaffirm his masculinity and social legitimacy. His castration fears are alleviated, if only momentarily, in the knowledge that Lily has spent a lifetime suffering and preparing for him and that, according to the laws of society, he deserves it. The onus then falls upon him to fulfill his role in the bargain—which in this case he does—by providing [End Page 45] well for Lily and their family. The paradoxical nature of bound feet thus contributes to a cultural narrative that rewards both men and women for participating in the fantasy of the golden lotus, but interestingly it is the voice of Lily's husband that remains notably silent throughout this symbolic exchange. Because we see the bound feet in See's novel almost entirely through the eyes of Lily and other women, their long-suffering, sacrifice, and economic need become foregrounded, emphasizing their own castrations in the midst of men who appear to be more whole.

Genny Lim gives us a different perspective from a male character, where the appeasement of castration anxiety is still present but may be harder to visualize, since the focus is ostensibly on women's sexual satisfaction rather than on men's. In a dialogue between men in her play Bitter Cane, Kam brags about his knowledge concerning female sexuality: "Hey, take it from me!" he tells Wing:

I know what I'm talking about. Every woman wants you to suck her dainty earlobes. She wants you to caress her creamy thighs and pinch her nipples till she cries with pain. And when you bite those tiny dewdrop feet with your teeth, she'll arch with such pleasure, she'll think she was just born! She'll arch her back up in a half-moon and that's when you'll know, the gate of heaven is open.³⁹

Kam draws attention to a dynamic where neither marriage nor man's sexual gratification from manipulating the foot is at center, as in the earlier discussion. What is central here is the means by which to render women vulnerable. Kam's ability to seduce a woman, to "open the gate," confirms his own desirability and validates his manhood. Her susceptibility leads to his arousal; her defenselessness affirms his masculinity. In this passage, bound feet are constructed as a female "Achilles heel," which can be grasped in order to make her helpless. As Kam tells a bound-footed woman in another scene when he attempts to rape her, "Crippled woman, where can you go? You have no feet—only petals for toes. You can only submit! Like a fish out of water, you see?"⁴⁰ In Lim's play, the language of seduction masks a reality of female vulnerability, but it is a woman's submission that ultimately alleviates Kam's castration anxieties. These scenes suggest that Kam is lacking, relying upon women—even crippled ones—for power and gratification. [End Page 46]

Though footbinding can still be seen as a fetish that assuages castration anxieties, its manifestation in this play through female rather than male desire opens a door for female sexual agency in the face of male patriarchal perversion. In contrast to the husband in See's novel, who remains silent about his wife's tiny feet, Kam says too much, revealing his own needs for power and triumph at women's expense. His excessive need for the phallic mother to affirm his manhood allows the reader to see what he cannot—that footbinding should be eliminated so that people like him cannot take advantage of women. In keeping with the politics of McCunn's and Wong's first-world texts, Lim's play puts forward a thinly-veiled feminist critique of footbinding through a male character who seeks to dominate women.

Before leaving the foot fetish, let's push Freud's analysis further. Freud allows that, "In very subtle instances both the disavowal and the affirmation of the castration have found their way into the construction of the fetish itself,"⁴¹ and two critics have sought to illustrate such unusual and "subtle" instances. Rather than seeing the bound foot as a substitute for the genitals, Ng contends that the elaborately embroidered shoe is a substitute for the smelly foot, and "in concealing the mutilated feet, actually reassert[s] that [castration] anxiety."⁴² Similarly, Blake argues that the bound foot is a substitute for the womb and that "by controlling that which the culture invested in her feet, a woman controlled that which the culture invested in her womb and defined as the key to her femininity—her ability to bear children."⁴³ For Blake, the bound feet possess "androgenic properties," and the woman who has them gains phallic agency through her ability to reproduce sons. Women with bound feet, according to both Ng and Blake, are thus threatening and fascinating precisely because they both affirm and assuage castration anxiety.

See's novel illustrates this dynamic, too. Early in See's novel, the narrator tells us that "a pair of perfectly bound feet" has "seven distinct attributes: They should be small, narrow, straight, pointed, and arched, yet still fragrant and soft in texture. Of these requirements, length is the most important" (my emphasis).⁴⁴ Similarly, the matchmaker describes the perfect foot to the family in sexually graphic terms: "The cleft [of the foot] is as deep as this girl's inner folds. She will make her husband a happy man. . . .The way her heel curves down like a sac with her forefoot pointed out just [End Page 47] so will remind her husband of his own member. All day long that lucky man will be thinking of bed business."⁴⁵ While there are reasons to believe that Levy served as an important source for See's work, suffice it here to say that the sexualization of the bound foot takes an inherently phallic appearance—with its most important quality its length, and the curve of the arch ending in a "sac," which suggests not just the image of a penis but of a full-fledged phallus. So far, this imagery seems perfectly in line with Freud's reading and my earlier discussions of the bound foot as a substitute for the phallus and a vehicle to allay castration anxiety through marriage and its consummation. This perspective also seems largely congruent with the larger themes of patriarchalism, orientalism, and melodrama exhibited in See's novel.

But, a closer reading of this scene reveals that the image of female genitalia is always already present in the bound foot ("The cleft is as deep as this girl's inner folds"). In viewing good photos of bound feet, where both the overall shape of the foot as well as the bottom of the foot are evident, it is clear that where the toes are bent under the foot, they create a fissure that can vary in depth and texture to mimic female genitalia.⁴⁶ Chang's Bound Feet and Western Dress affirms this interpretation when the narrator tells us that with the "perfectly formed" bound foot, "you can slide three fingers into the niche between the toes and the heels" and later that in tea houses "lily-footed ladies danced on tables and lured men with glimpses of their insteps." ⁴⁷ Not surprisingly, then, in pornographic texts men both fondle and are fondled by the bound feet in a sexual sequence that allows for a double or even triple penetration (both feet plus vagina). Taken as a whole, the phallic topside and vagina-like underside of the bound foot renders women symbolically androgynous, as Blake has argued for different reasons. Their androgynous construction helps to account both for the "correct" marriages in this text, for Lily to an upper class man and for Snow Flower to a butcher, but it also allows a space for their continued intimate relationship as "laotongs," or soulmates. Said differently, the phallic character of bound feet may be their most evident trait, so we see in See's text what Freud predicts: marriage for mutual gratification, in terms of women's economic interests and the soothing of men's castration fears. But, See's novel also points to a decidedly feminine undercurrent within [End Page 48] the phallic order itself. In fact, it is the structural mechanisms that help to define the bound foot as phallic—the high arch of the foot and the wrapping under of the toes—that also define the foot's feminine properties. If the feet are emancipated, as happened in the early twentieth century, then the arch flattens out and the toes unravel, disintegrating the foot phallus as it has heretofore been defined. The phallic mother is thus always already in jeopardy. Her own ambiguous and unstable state means that the men in the text cannot rely upon her for continued castration appeasement. Thus Snow Flower's husband, for example, must find alternative ways to affirm his masculinity, such as beating his wife nearly to death.

The fetish is ultimately seen to be a substitution that is inherently flawed. It evokes both desire and fright because of its ability to appease and accentuate castration anxiety across both genders. This always present androgyny helps to explain the emotional dissatisfaction both women seem to experience in their marriages, since the husbands, perpetually disappointed, eventually see their wives as threats to their masculinity, rather than conveyers of it. The men respond with fear and threat, in addition to desire, keeping the women always at an emotional distance. However, the laotong relationship between the women is put forward as the most satisfying relationship in the text, with each woman fetishizing the other's phallic properties. Because the fetish is arguably never fully consummated between Lily and Snow Flower, however, disappointment doesn't prevail and the fright and threat associated with castration drops away to reveal a relationship that perpetually provokes desire, making the women's relationship the most compelling of the novel. In Lisa See's latest work, the imaginary substitution of bound feet for genitals—both male and female—helps to explain some of the unconscious gender politics in the text, while also illustrating the underlying dynamics of the perversion that encouraged the mutilation of women's feet. Rather than displaying a Western feminist political agenda, as other works discussed herein, this largely orientalist novel does the reverse—it capitalizes on the erotic and exotic dimensions of the bound foot, using them to further the goals of mystification, melodrama, and sexual perversity. It therefore affirms the need for anti-sexist, anti-racist works and calls attention to the hollowness of Orientalist works in their display of the exotic Other. [End Page 49]

Moving to a materialist analysis of the eroticism of bound feet, we see that the feet were cloaked within an elaborate tradition that was designed, in large part, to keep the putrescence of the flesh a secret while calling attention to the enticingly small size of the feet. Women customarily kept their feet in bindings and in embroidered shoes even while sleeping, so everything associated with the feet—bindings, shoes, alum powder, perfume—became signifiers of intimacy and sexual arousal. Freud concurs as he tells us, regarding the fetish, that the foot is overvalued as a sexual object which "inevitably extends to everything that is associated with it."⁴⁸ The bindings, for instance, served as "lingerie," which added an air of secrecy, mystery, and therefore enticement. Maxine Hong Kingston illustrates this dynamic in the first chapter of China Men, which parodies Li Ju-chen's (1763–1830) famous Chinese satire, Flowers in the Mirror. The original is widely considered the first anti-footbinding literature, a travel narrative where the protagonist, like Jonathan Swift's Gulliver, wanders to different countries in order to experience (and to evaluate) different peoples. As satire, the travel narrative is entertaining but is also a thinly veiled critique of the home country (China), which astute readers would appreciate and from which they would presumably learn. One of the most famous chapters of Li's work is the arrival of the protagonist in the "Country of Women," where he experiences gender-role reversal. More specifically, the male protagonist is chosen as the female King's concubine, and he must have his feet bound and his ears pierced in preparation for matrimony. His whining and complaining through the process of footbinding builds sympathy for Chinese women by showing Chinese readers anew, through the eyes of a man, how much suffering women were expected stoically to endure to perpetuate this custom.⁴⁹

In Hong Kingston's version the protagonist, Tang Ao, has his ears pierced and his feet bound (he doesn't beg to be killed in order to have his pain alleviated, as in the original), but he is

forced to wash his used bandages, which were embroidered with flowers and smelled of rot and cheese. He hung the bandages up to dry, streamers that drooped and draped wall to wall. He felt embarrassed; the wrappings were like underwear, and they were his.⁵⁰ [End Page 50]

The bindings of the feet functioned to hide a mystery too horrible to reveal, as though the sight of the bandages that covered the rotten feet might implicate the viewer in the perpetration of a debilitating crime.⁵¹ Their role to conceal as well as emphasize gave them the intimacy of "underwear" with the appeal of lingerie. Likewise, the perfumes and embroidered shoes also functioned to entice the gaze in the same moment that they erected a veil of deception by which to hide the truth of a rotting foot. The material associations of bound feet, the bindings, perfumes, and shoes, encouraged a disavowal. They hid the deteriorating flesh and fooled the gaze into believing that small feet were normative and even natural. On the one hand, the layers of cloth and perfume acted as a veil of deception which protected the viewer, the gazer, from the guilt of complicity. On the other hand, they increased the eroticization of the bound foot by making it seem even more mysterious. Is it any wonder that See spends so much time focused on the embroidered footbound slippers? Hong Kingston, however, parodies an anti-footbinding satire. In her rendition, Tang Ao's pain and embarrassment at his "underwear" and the graphic depiction of his smelly and rotting feet are meant, like the original satire, to convince the reader of the ridiculousness of this long-held custom. Like Wong's, McCunn's, and Lim's books, Hong Kingston's China Men displays a feminist and anti-footbinding agenda that leaves Tang Ao silent (with the exception of his cries for mercy). These texts do not help to further an understanding of the forces that rendered this practice hegemonic; instead, they put forward a titillating image, framed in terms of a first-world political agenda decades after the practice of footbinding had already been abolished.

Women as Children and Animals

Western feminists such as Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin argue that women in Chinese society during the era of footbinding were unrelentingly oppressed, their bodies ruined in service to patriarchy in a way that should be categorically and unquestioningly reformed. For them, all women experience patriarchal denigration, but Chinese footbound women experienced some of the worst, as Dworkin explains: [End Page 51]

[Footbinding] demonstrates that man's love for woman, his sexual adoration of her, his human definition of her, his delight and pleasure in her, require her negation: physical crippling and psychological lobotomy. That is the very nature of romantic love. . . . he will have her as sex, even if he must destroy the bones in her feet to do it. Brutality, sadism, and oppression emerge as the substantive core of the romantic ethos.⁵²

It is true that the footbound woman was a spectacle: when she bound her feet, her disability drew (erotic) attention; if her feet were not bound, the large and undesirable appendages drew disparaging remarks. It is also true that her inferior status, added to this long-held custom, allows her to be constructed in Chinese American literature as an other's other—a being so marginal that she is no longer adult, dignified, or even human.

In Paper Angels, Genny Lim's play about the Angel Island detention center, Gregory, an Anglo-American missionary, remarks upon Chinese women whom he recently took out for a walk. He noticed one in particular, who "hobbled down the side of the path, clutching onto tree branches to steady herself." Gregory goes on to describe the ways in which he offers treats to the women, as if they are animals or children: "Sometimes I give them a piece of candy, an orange or something sweet to cheer them. The least bit of kindness you show them makes them so happy."⁵³ Likewise, in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, the narrator imagines herself as a modern Fa Mu Lan who conquers bad guys and frees their victims. When invading the imperial palace, she "comes upon a locked room" and "broke down the door." Inside, she found

cowering, whimpering women. . . . They blinked weakly at me like pheasants that have been raised in the dark for soft meat. The servants who walked the ladies had abandoned them, and they could not escape on their little bound feet. Some crawled away from me, using their elbows to pull themselves along.⁵⁴

With no one willing to claim these women, the narrator-turned-Fa Mu Lan gives them each a bag of rice, and "They wandered away like ghosts."⁵⁵ These images of women as trapped, not only by doors and gates but by the infliction of culture upon their bodies, creates doubly-trapped beings who are relegated to a sub-strata of existence. They lack dignity, autonomy, and agency and are left to the good graces of (white) men or male imposters to deliver them. Both Lim's and Hong Kingston's works take the depiction [End Page 52] of footbinding to its ultimate extreme by stripping women of their adultness, of their very humanness, and casting them as children—and worse, as animals.

Hong Kingston carries the feminist argument to the limit of myth. By depicting this class of women as lower than the low, she then opens a space for agency and empowerment when her narrator contemplates, "Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound."⁵⁶ And upon the rescue of the "cowering, whimpering women," her Fa Mu Lan figure speculates that these boundfooted women would become the powerful witch amazons of legend:

Later, it would be said, they turned into the band of swordswomen who were a mercenary army. They did not wear men's clothes like me, but rode as women in black and red dresses. They bought up girl babies so that many poor families welcomed their visitations. When slave girls and daughters-in-law ran away, people would say they joined these witch amazons. They killed men and boys.⁵⁷

In Hong Kingston's path-breaking work, women are portrayed in terms of a dramatic fall coupled with a phoenix-like rise that results in a cycle of heroic evolution: they are so "dangerous" that they must have their feet bound, which reduces them to crawling and whimpering animals, who are then heroicized, like her Fa Mu Lan character, to become "witch amazons." When the most-read Chinese American text displays such staunchly feminist rhetoric in an effort to portray women as empowered, even stretching to resurrect the bound-footed woman as hero rather than debilitated victim, it shows that we have come to the literary extreme of this argument.

We see that the politics of footbinding in Chinese American literature overwhelmingly serves a modern, feminist, and anti-bound-foot agenda and has, to use Mohanty's terms, "inadequate self-consciousness about the effect of western scholarship on the 'third world' in a world system dominated by the west."⁵⁸ While this preoccupation may be understandable and even expected, it is not entirely honest nor completely satisfying. There is still something important that seems to be missing from these narratives, from the tome of writings from Asian America—namely stories that go beyond the surface and that meet footbinding in its full cultural and historical space in order to illustrate in a satisfying way how this practice was perpetuated [End Page 53] for so long and so widely, given its severity. We do not yet understand the "consciousness of the subaltern," to repeat Spivak's terms, and we should. Notably missing from these narratives are the stories of understanding from mothers and brothers, the stories of frustrated anger, the stories without judgment (Can these exist in twenty-first-century America regarding a practice that mutilated and even killed women?). Where are the sympathetic narratives from men who treat footbound wives and daughters in terms of Confucian respect? Where are the narratives of mother-daughter bonding over the pain and suffering of their women's travails? Where are the narratives that make clear the historical, regional, and class-based differences in this thousand-year-old custom? Where are the narratives of adamant rebellion? Perhaps the modern, Western roots of Asian American literature preclude the possibility of writing about a custom so entrenched in China and so harmful to women in any way but either as a first-world critique or as orientalist intrigue. Even if Ko is right and the historical facts about footbinding will forever evade us, the job of an activist literature after the stage of intervention is to help us understand and imagine the truth that once existed. Why did reasonable women capitulate to such maiming? What complex relations of dignity and power were embedded within the practice? What was the impact on a social class/village/region/nation-state when half the work force was voluntarily mutilated and disabled? If literature cannot—or worse, will not—tell these stories, then who will? If they are not written, then our ancestors—50 million women, by one count—look suspect for enduring such a practice for so long, even given the economic and social benefits that we superficially understand that they gained.

I am certainly not suggesting that we endorse or condone the cruel and inhumane practice of footbinding, but I ask whether it can be met on its own terms, without judgment and bias in an effort to understand—truly understand—the consciousness of women and of a society that must have gained from and thus perpetuated this practice for a thousand years? Some will say that these stories have already been told, but I argue herein that they have not been told in America, where we continue to champion anti-footbinding with blind conviction. Ko provides us with a good beginning when she asserts that footbinding made perfect sense for women. In her words, "footbinding was an entirely reasonable course of action for a woman who lived in a Confucian culture that placed the highest moral value on [End Page 54] domesticity, motherhood, and handwork."⁵⁹ When narratives with this tone and perspective arrive in the literatures, then we will know that Chinese and Asian American literatures have grown to the next level.