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Aching for Beauty Footbinding in China Wang Ping View photo of Chinese woman's slipper REVIEWS: |
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A fascinating and haunting exploration of the bound foot in Chinese culture. Why did so many Chinese women over a thousand-year period bind their feet, enduring rotting flesh, throbbing pain, and hampered mobility throughout their lives? What compelled mothers to bind the feet of their young daughters, forcing the girls to walk about on their doubled-over limbs to achieve the breakage of bones requisite for three-inch feet? Why did Chinese men find women's "golden lotuses"—stench and all—so arousing, inspiring beauty contests for feet, thousands of poems, and erotica in which bound, silk-slippered feet were fetishized and lusted after? As a child growing up during the Cultural Revolution, Wang Ping fantasized about binding her own feet and tried to restrict their growth by wrapping them in elastic bandages. Even though footbinding was not practiced by every woman in late Imperial China, the aesthetic, financial, and erotic advantages of footbinding permeated all aspects of language, ranging from erotic poetry, novels, and performances to food writing, myths, folk songs and ditties, and secret women's writing, some of it hidden in embroidery. In Aching for Beauty, Wang interprets the mystery of footbinding as part of a womanly heritage-"a roaring ocean current of female language and culture." She also shows that footbinding should not be viewed merely as a function of men's oppression of women, but rather as a phenomenon of male and female desire deeply rooted in traditional Chinese culture. Written in an elegant and powerful style, and filled with personal, intriguing, and sometimes paradoxical insights, Aching for Beauty builds bridges from the past to the present, East to West, history to literature, imagination to reality. "Aching for Beauty demonstrates the complexity and the manifestations of a civilization's obsession with the body-its beauty, its fulfillment, its destruction, and its transformation. Wang Ping writes with passion and an understanding strengthened by the female experience. This is a rich, necessary, and invaluable book." —Ha Jin, author of Waiting, winner of the 1999 National Book Award for Fiction “Aching for Beauty masks a festering feast of sex and death—the coming apart, and together, of a civilization—in impeccable, tightly wound, attractive trappings. Wang Ping, our cool, often sly, and scholarly narrator, presents herself as a woman of cultivation and taste through this house of Chinese wonders and horrors, while the physical book itself is prettily packaged in a bandage of a slipcover and sepia-printed hard covers that open boldly, violently into red leaves—red of course being a lucky color. Both beauty and talent count here. Wang herself is one of our most mutable authors—poet, novelist, short story writer, editor, translator, academic—and, while being an impressive researcher, she's artist enough here to guide us smoothly through this tangle of fascinating, esoteric, and not infrequently gleefully appalling material.” —San Francisco Bay Guardian “Wang Ping’s relationship with her subject is a fascinatingly tortured mix of personal and academic, feminist and explicator/defender of Chinese culture.” —Washington City Paper “Examining the imagery and fetishes associated with footbinding, Wang views it not just as something that victimized women and enforced patriarchy but as a vehicle for blurring gender boundaries. Wang offers readers a deeper understanding of a complex and horrific cultural practice.” —Women’s Review of Books "Because the author is also a poet and a novelist, her literary gifts are everywhere evident, particularly in her deft analysis of the language and literature of the golden lotuses. But Wang Ping’s most striking revelations evolve from her study of the relationships among women of the golden lotuses. She muses on the tight bond (to employ a nearly unavoidable pun) between mothers and daughters, observing that because a woman’s future depended on the perfection of her golden lotuses, there was no greater act of love than a mother’s binding of her daughter’s feet. Wang Ping has done more than perform great feats of scholarship and interpretation. By beginning with a disturbing strip tease that exposes the vulnerability and, to our eyes, grotesqueness, of lotus feet, and then carefully, even reverently, binding them up again with layer after layer of meticulously crafted and keenly sensitive extrapolations of their profound social, aesthetic, moral, and spiritual significance, she carries her readers beyond the pornographic into the cathartic. Wang Ping awakens empathy and wonder, and helps us see that we are all kindred in spite of our extraordinary and precious differences.” —Ruminator Review “Wang’s complex analysis does not just portray footbinding as a brutal patriarchal method to keep women dependent; she explores how different aspects of Chinese culture intersected around footbinding, reinforcing its importance.” —Pacific Reader "Aching for Beauty is an exhilarating and exhaustive study of the Chinese custom of footbinding, as well as all the literature surrounding it, much of it previously unavailable to Western readers." —Rain Taxi Wang Ping, born in Shanghai, came to the United States in 1985. Her books include short stories, American Visa (1994); a novel, Foreign Devil (1996); and poetry, Of Flesh and Spirit (1998). She also edited and cotranslated New Generation: Poems from China Today (1999). She has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University and teaches creative writing at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Winner of the Eugene M. Kayden Press Book Award (2001) 320 pages | 17 black-and-white photos, 1 line drawing | 5-7/8 x 9 | 2000 |
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$30.00 Cloth/jacket