Shaking Soul: Exploring China's Last Little Foot Tribe

Author: Yang Yang
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-07-01
Features: Who would have thought that there is such a village on the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, where it has completely preserved living historical materials of foot-binding. Most things that enter history are unspoken words and objects, but the cultural prose "Shaking Souls" by the Yunnan youth writer Yang Yang provides a history that is vivid, hands-on, and directly narrated by those who experienced it firsthand. How can the value of this text be overestimated? We don’t need to rush to judge whether the perspectives Yang Yang brought when collecting and organizing these materials can withstand rigorous scrutiny, nor do we need to pick at the extent to which the emotional impulses she couldn’t help but express in her writing diluted the simplicity of the facts. What Yang Yang presents is already enough to excite us. In this book, she not only examines the formation history of Liuyicun but also explores the environmental reasons behind women’s foot-binding. Moreover, she fully showcases the rituals, tools, and processes of foot-binding, with particular being the psychology of those who bound feet and those who appreciated it. It cannot be denied that these psychological aspects are private and even perverse. But if they are not revealed truthfully, then all past and present research on foot-binding will lose its weight. Women’s endurance of physical torment to identify with the practice of foot-binding is actually a distortion caused by a patriarchal society. In the section "Collecting Secret Verbs" in "Shaking Souls," Yang Yang describes in detail the perverse tendencies of men, the special role played by "little feet," and the various stimuli they brought to men—truly something that is hard to believe. Yet even more unbelievable is how this private, unhealthy hobby could transform into a socially widespread "aesthetic" activity. Such a transformation reminds us of the importance of social mental health and the arduous task of protecting it. The numerous pictures and stories in the book can be said to be shocking. These elderly women who bound feet were not living for posterity to provide academic materials; they simply lived through to the present day. Their dance is a dance of life, their movement is a tremor of the soul. Although they could not change the history of foot-binding from a physical perspective, they could still achieve spiritual freedom. Witnessing the passing of an unhealthy custom once obsessively pursued by a nation, and sifting through the cultural symbols intertwined with traces of daily life, readers will also, like the author of "Shaking Souls," reflect on the changes of the times and the expansion of human nature.