Wandering in Northern China

by Unknown

Crippled feet would be bad enough in comfort and warmth and with plenty of servants to save steps, as probably most Westerners fancy Chinese women have who are thus “beautified.” But if there is any decrease in foot-binding at all, it is among the well-to-do, the wealthy in large cities who might sit perpetually in cushions and spare their little feet. Your peasant and countryman is most insistent that the old custom be kept up; he would sneer with scorn at the thought of taking a wife with natural feet; he sternly insists that his daughters’ feet be bound. Stumping about their filthy huts, shivering with mountain cold, probably never washing all over once in a lifetime, it is astonishing that these country women do not all die of gangrene or something of the sort. How they keep such feet warm, when they cannot move rapidly, when they ride sometimes all day in a cold so bitter that even we were forced to get off and walk at frequent intervals, is a question I have never yet heard answered. Perhaps the foot becomes a kind of hoof, devoid of feeling and incapable of freezing.

At first thought one might fancy that at least a few mothers who had suffered all their lives would spare their daughters similar misery. For, they have told missionary women, their bound feet hurt whenever they walk, and generally they have pains also in the legs and the back as long as they live. Knowing how serious a mere broken arch may be, it is not hard for us to imagine what it must mean to have the arch doubled back upon itself by turning the toes under and squeezing the heel up to meet them, and then insisting that the victim walk. But even if the mothers were devoid of that wide-spread human cussedness which makes misery love company, even if the father did not absolutely insist, there is the economic question. Girls must have husbands—“or they will starve,” as even experienced Peking amas put it. There is no provision in the Chinese scheme of family for old maids. But granting that all these insuperable difficulties have been overcome, there is the girl herself with whom to reckon. If she has reached the age—six to seven—when the binding should begin, and it has not begun, she is likely to commence by insisting, and to advance to weeping and tearing her hair unless the oversight is corrected. In other words, girls cry if their feet are not bound; and they certainly cry if they are, so that there is apparently no escape from tears. You would hardly expect a modest American school-girl willingly to consent to mingle with her companions if she were obliged to wear trousers, or to cut her hair boy fashion; and in China “face,” the fear of ridicule and public opinion, is much stronger than in the United States, and customs and precedents are far more solidly intrenched. Naturally the Chinese girl would rather face a little suffering—for at her age she probably has only a hazy idea of the length of the ordeal and the severity of the pain involved—than to be made fun of all her life for her “boy’s feet,” and, worse still, to lose all chance of getting a husband, which she has been taught to think is the most dreadful, in fact the most unsurvivable, fate that can befall her. Once in a while some poor orphan girl is so “neglected” that no one takes the trouble to bind her feet; and she becomes the village slattern and a horrible example to all “decent” girls. For of course she cannot get a husband; she will be unusually fortunate if some one gives her a job as a barn-yard drudge.

Our hostess at one of the mission stations knew a girl whose feet had not been bound but who turned out to be very pretty. One day an important official happened to see her as he was passing through the district. “What a pity,” he said, “that her feet are not bound, for if they were I would take her as a concubine.”

“Oh, do not let that stand in the way of your desire, your Excellency,” cried the enchanted mother; “give me a year and I will have her ready for you.”

“But you cannot bind her feet in a year,” replied the official.

“Only leave it to me, your Excellency, and I shall not fail you,” persisted the mother.

A year later the girl took the proud position that had been offered her, as concubine to what, to the simple country people, was a very great man; but to this day, though she still keeps her precarious place, she cannot walk a step. For instead of starting gradually, by bending the toes under and wrapping them in wet cloths that shrink, then tying them down more tightly and beginning to draw up the heel the following year, and so on, this mother was working against time. So she literally cut much of the flesh off the girl’s feet, broke nearly every bone in them, and by the time the year was up she had made her as helpless a cripple as any mandarin could have wanted for a plaything.

The best style of bound feet, it seems, have the bones broken. Exacting men ask if this has been done, and show worth-while approval at an affirmative answer. Feet seem to vary in size and style by localities. In some places on our western trip they were so small that no real foot remained; the leg tapered down without a break to the end, almost as if it had been cut off at the ankle. In fact we often wondered if it would not have been much simpler and far less painful to amputate the feet entirely. In other places the big toe was left, and with it something of the shape of a foot. But under this the tiny shoe was generally fitted with a miniature heel, often red in better-to-do cases, which made walking next to impossible. With no give and take of the leg-muscles, these of course soon dry up, so that the leg resembles a tapering wooden stump and the gait bears out the likeness. Foot-binding is certainly a wonderful scheme to keep the women from gadding about; and in a land where they are seldom expected to leave the compound in which they are delivered to the husband—or mother-in-law—this no doubt is considered a great asset. Earlier writers have told of districts in which the feet are no longer bound because of the sad experiences of fleeing women who could not keep up with their men-folks at the time of the great Mohammedan rebellion. But we never saw any such districts. Probably the experiences have been forgotten, and custom has reasserted itself. The Mohammedans, by the way, are just as bad as the mere Chinese in this matter of foot-binding; if I remember rightly, the Koran has nothing to say against it.

As far as we noticed, the missionaries in the northwest did not seem to be making any great effort to reduce this most atrocious of Chinese customs. Some of them appeared to be more eager to save souls than soles, though in general they were men and women of sound common sense, with their own feet on the ground rather than with their heads lost in the clouds. Suffering and misery, immorality and wicked superstitions are so general in China that the mere crippling of the feet soon becomes but one of many possible points of attack. Christian converts are not allowed to bind their feet; if they are already bound, they are expected, in theory at least, to unbind them, though this in the case of older women is not always possible. Girls with bound feet are refused admission to most, if not all, Christian schools; and a few of the best government institutions are commencing to follow suit. The best argument of all against the practice is the plain economic one. If you bind your daughter’s feet she cannot marry within the church, the missionaries tell a convert, for Christian boys will not have her. As available husbands of that point of view increase, the girls are of course more and more willing to run the risk of not having themselves adorned with lily feet. But, to be frank, Christianity is not rapidly increasing, and bound feet seem to be as prevalent, at least in northern China, as ever, except in Peking and a few coast cities, where it is against the law, in Manchuria, where it is contrary to custom, in the rather small and scattered Christian communities, and among a few of the more progressive families in the larger cities.

Custom is not only a curiously tenacious weed but often a quick-growing one. I was impressed with the latter thought one morning when, in riding into a town of some size, I caught sight of a woman with natural feet, such as I had not seen perhaps for a week; and the first flash to cross my mind might have been expressed in some such exclamation as, “My, but isn’t she ugly!” The abnormal type is always ugly, and if, in a mere week, a foreigner can become so accustomed to the normal Chinese woman, who tapers down like a sharpened stake, that an uncrippled one strikes him, even momentarily, as a kind of monstrosity, it is easy to understand why the Chinese have come in many centuries to consider this alteration of the human form both an improvement and a necessity. Nor is the custom so universally injurious to the health as the rest of the world naturally supposes. Women with cheeks bright red without the aid of rouge, yet with the tiniest of feet, were no more unusual in Kansu than the filthy, old, and totally unattractive ones who scuttled away into their holes as if they were in imminent danger when two harmless foreigners rode by on travel-weary pack-mules.