Foot Binding - in Literature, Film, and Television

In Literature, Film, and Television

The bound foot has played a prominent part in many works of literature, both Chinese and non-Chinese, modern and traditional. These depictions are sometimes based on observation or research and sometimes on rumors or supposition. This is only to be expected when a practice is so emotionally charged. Sometimes, as in the case of Pearl Buck's The Good Earth, the accounts are relatively neutral, implying a respect for Chinese culture and assuming that it is not the role of outsiders to promote reform. Sometimes the accounts seem intended to rouse like-minded Chinese and foreign opinion to abolish the custom, and sometimes the accounts imply condescension or contempt for China.

• Ju-Chen Li, Flowers in the Mirror Lin Tai-yi tr. (University of California Press, 1965 ISBN 978-0-520-00747-5) Includes chapters set in the "Country of Women," where men bear children and have bound feet.
• Feng Jicai (b. 1942) (translated from the Chinese by David Wakefield), The Three-Inch Golden Lotus (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994) presents a satirical picture of the movement to abolish the practice, which is seen as part of Chinese culture.
• In the 1958 film The Inn of the Sixth Happiness Ingrid Bergman portrays British missionary to China Gladys Aylward, who is assigned as a foreigner the task by a local Mandarin to unbind the feet of young women, an unpopular order that the civil government had failed to fulfill.
• Ruthanne Lum McCunn wrote a biographical novel A Thousand Pieces of Gold (later adapted into film), about Polly Bemis, a Chinese American pioneer woman. It describes her feet being bound, and later unbound when she needed to help her family with farm labour.
• Emily Prager's short story A Visit from the Footbinder, from her collection of short stories of the same name (1982) describes the last few hours of a young Chinese girl's childhood before the professional footbinder arrives to initiate her into the adult woman's life of beauty and pain.
• Lisa Loomer's play The Waiting Room deals with themes of body modification. One of the three main characters is an 18th-century Chinese woman who arrives in a modern hospital waiting room seeking medical help for complications resulting from her bound feet.
• Lensey Namioka's novel Ties that Bind, Ties that Break follows a girl named Ailin in China who refuses to have her feet bound, which comes to affect her future.
• Lisa See's 2005 novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is about two Chinese girls who are destined to be friends. This movie is based upon the sacrifices women make to be married, it also includes the two girls being forced into getting their feet bound. The book was adapted into a 2011 film directed by Wayne Wang.
• Feng Shui (film) is a 2004 Filipino horror movie about a curse old bagua mirror haunted by a malevolent soul of a foot-bound Chinese woman. The mirror showers luck and prosperity to its owner but as an exchange, the foot-bound woman brings death to those who are near her.