* Thanks to my Uncle Derek for the photos and his email: I saw one of these women in Taiwan in 1979. She was 96 years old. I wanted to take a picture of her feet. She was so superstitious that she thought the camera would steal here soul, so she refused.
Anybody else out there going stop looking at this site on their lunchbreak? ugh.
I just want to grab both sides of that foot and straighten it out. ahhhhhhhhh.
cute shoes though...
Posted by: matt PiE at May 14, 2007 12:33 PMI just finished reading a really great book that had a vivid account of footbinding - "Snowflower and the Secret Fan". (Sort of like "Memoirs of a Geisha") I knew what the end result looked like, but I had no idea what they had to endure to achieve it. It was heartwrenching. Terrific read, though.
Posted by: WonderGirl at May 14, 2007 3:51 PMmy god! seriously?? i had NO idea. i mean, i knew it happened but didn't know what it actually looked like. how could anyone ever find that attractive? what do we do to our bodies to look good?? it blows my mind.
Posted by: koleen at May 15, 2007 10:33 PMI think what is not generally made clear when looking at pictures of the bare, deformed feet is that the bare feet were not normally seen by anyone other than the woman herself (and the women involved in initially binding her feet). Men saw only the tiny cloth-bound feet in beautifully embroidered shoes, not the misshapen feet themselves. It's definitely an extreme and disturbing type of body modification, but I think it's a little more understandable how people could find the outward appearance attractive when they have never seen the deformity it hides (and when, as it was by the vast majority of Han Chinese in the latter half of the Qing dynasty, it is considered just a normal rite of passage for women).
Dorothy Ko is an interesting author who has written a lot about the subject of footbinding.
