In search of airplane reading material before a trip to China last spring, I grabbed Lisa See’s popular novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan from a bookstore shelf and was promptly riveted by her description of foot binding. Nothing in my glancing awareness of this practice prepared me for the details she provided: that it was inflicted on girls as young as three years old, that “the arch and toes of the foot must be broken and bent under to meet the heel,” and that the ideal result would fit into a shoe no more than three inches long. I knew that foot binding was female mutilation, falling somewhere on the continuum between clitoral cutting and ear piercing; what I didn’t know was that it had been practiced for nearly a thousand years, that the bound foot—no less than the bountiful breast in Western culture—represented an epitome of female beauty, and that the obsessively decorated coverings for these status-symbol stubs constituted their own complex and prized folk art genre.
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Visitors descending on Beijing for the Olympics this week will get a jaw-dropping look at an ancient country catapulting itself into the future. They’ll see alarmingly massive skyscrapers sprouting like so many ginkgo trees in a city where a thousand new cars hit the streets every day. They’ll tour the empty shell of the Forbidden City and the spiffed-up remains of a few old courtyard-and-alley neighborhoods—perhaps by rickshaw, after a tea ceremony. But they aren’t likely to learn much about the once-pervasive culture of foot binding, thought to have affected as many as a billion women, including nearly 100 percent of those from the upper classes. Eradicated 60 years ago when the Communists took over, swept away with so much else during the Cultural Revolution, it’s not something the government or government-sponsored museums want to highlight. It wasn’t until my last day in China that I chanced upon a pair of bound-feet shoe replicas for sale. Creamy embroidered silk, they nestled in the palm of my hand like baby birds. To see the real thing on a major scale I had to come home.
No one knows for sure how foot binding—which looks from a distance like national insanity—took hold in China, but there’s archaeological evidence that it had already been around for a while by the 13th century. Legend has it that it was inspired by a clubfooted empress, or tenth-century palace dancers cavorting on their toes. Incredibly cruel and painful, perversely erotic, it was clearly a means of repression and confinement. And yet—as Prentice’s favorite scholar, Barnard College historian Dorothy Ko, argues in Every Step a Lotus—for hundreds of years it was also the ultimate mark of class standing. In a culture that valued cloistered domesticity, where being wealthy meant not having to do anything that resembled physical labor (even walking) for oneself, a foot the shape and size of a lotus bud was the ticket to a more important kind of mobility.
Prentice has never shown his collection in public and is careful even when talking about it. His experience has been that “people think it’s some kind of fetish. They get indignant and judgmental about a culture without understanding it.” If the right venue came along, however, he says he’d consider an exhibition. In the meantime, we’re missing a dazzling trove of 500 pairs of shoes and a thousand or so related items like leggings, sashes, bindings, shoe-making tools, photographs, paintings, and books.
