Shaking Soul — Exploring China's Last Small Foot 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, tangible, and directly narrated by those directly involved—how can the value of this text be overestimated? We don’t need to rush to judge whether the views Yang Yang brought while 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 the author has presented is already enough to excite us. In this book, the author not only examines the formation history of Liuyi Village but also explores the environmental reasons behind women’s foot-binding, fully demonstrating 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 actually a distortion caused by a patriarchal society. In the chapter "Collecting Secret Verbs" in Shaking Souls, the male is described in detail, the special role played by "little feet" bringing various stimuli to men—truly, it is hard to believe. Yet even more unbelievable is how this private, unhealthy hobby could transform into a social and universal "aesthetic" activity. Such a transformation reminds people 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 foot-binders are not living for posterity to provide academic materials; they are ordinary people who have made it to this day. Their dance is the dance of life, their movement is the tremor of the soul. Although they cannot change the history of foot-binding from a physical perspective, they can still achieve spiritual freedom. Witnessing the passing of an unhealthy custom that a nation once crazily pursued, and sifting through the cultural symbols intertwined with traces of life, readers will also, like the author of Shaking Souls, reflect on the changes of the times and the extension of human nature.