Shaking Soul -- Exploring China's Last Footbinding Tribe: Exploring China's Last Footbinding Tribe

Author: Yang Yang
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-07-01
Features: Who would have thought that there was such a village on the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, which has completely preserved living historical materials of foot-binding. Most things that enter history are unspeakable words and physical objects, but the history provided by the cultural prose Shaking Souls by the Yunnan youth writer Yang Yang 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 while collecting and organizing these materials stand up to rigorous scrutiny, nor do we need to pick at the extent to which her irrepressible emotional impulses in the writing dilute the simplicity of the facts. What Yang Yang has presented is already enough to excite us. In this book, she not only examines the formation history of Liuyi Village but also explores the environmental reasons behind women’s foot-binding. Moreover, she fully showcases the rituals, tools, and processes of foot-binding, what is particularly precious is the psychology of the foot-binders and those who appreciated foot-binding. 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 foot-binding is, in fact, a distortion caused by a patriarchal society. In the chapter "Collecting Secret Verbs" in Shaking Souls, Yang Yang describes in detail the perverse tendencies of men, the special role played by "little feet" in providing them with various stimuli—truly, it is hard to believe. What is even more incredible is how this private and unhealthy obsession could transform into a socially and universally accepted "aesthetic" activity. Such a transformation reminds people of the importance of social mental health and the difficulty of protecting it. The numerous pictures and stories in the book can be described as shocking. These elderly women who underwent foot-binding were not living for future generations 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 examining 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.