Beauty and horror: the binding of women's souls

An excerpt from The Three-inch Golden Lotus: a novel on foot binding by Feng Jicai

(Blogger's note: foot binding was a practice which was almost universal in China for nearly a thousand years. It was only banned in the early 20th century, though it was carried on in secret for many decades. Little girls had their feet contorted and crushed into the “ideal” measurement of three or four inches long. A powerful fetish sprang up around this hideous practice, with men becoming “connaisseurs” of  foot deformity and the various ways in which the instep buckled and the toes were crushed into lifelessness.  Jicai’s novel is both brilliant and hair-raising in exposing a barbaric, horrifying practice which made little girls marriageable and desirable, providing their only chance to “marry up” and save their families from destitution. Many say Jicai's novel is satiric, not just uncovering a shame from the past but holding up present-day social atrocity for close, uncomfortable scrutiny.)

In this scene, Fragrant Lotus, a five-year-old girl who already has beautiful tiny feet, is initiated into womanhood by her beloved grandmother. To start the process, she forcibly breaks the little girl’s toes and folds them under the sole.

“Granny’s hands moved fast. She was afraid Fragrant Lotus would start to kick and scream, so she quickly completed the binding. She wrapped the bandage around the four toes, down to the arch, up over the instep, behind the heel, and then quickly forward, over the four toes once again. . . Fragrant Lotus’ mind was filled with waves of pain and pinching, folding and contortion. . . The four toes, now next to the arch, were locked firmly in place, as if by metal bands. They were unable to move, even a minute fraction of an inch.

“. . . She set about collecting shards of broken bowls, spread them on the ground, and smashed them into small, sharp bits. The next time she rebound Fragrant Lotus’ feet, she put the bits of porcelain inside the bandages, along the soles of her feet. When Fragrant Lotus walked, the pottery bits cut into her skin. . . The cut feet suffocated by the bandages became swollen, inflamed, and pus formed in the wounds. Whenever the bindings were changed, the old bandage had to be ripped off, tearing off pus and chunks of rotten flesh. This was an old method in the north China foot-binding tradition. Only when the bones were shattered and the flesh was putrid could the feet be properly molded into the most desirable shape.”

ENOUGH! We won’t get into the way Granny pulls out Fragrant Lotus’ toenails and pounds her feet with a rolling pin to make them more malleable. Though I am sure Jicai did his research with the utmost care (it matches everything I’ve ever found on the subject), at a certain point it becomes too headspinningly horrendous to even take in. How many millions of little girls had their childhood stolen from them in this way, forced to live the rest of their lives with a literally crippling deformity?

But even this isn’t the worst. Jicai also delves into the creepy fetishes men developed around bound feet, which were sometimes unwrapped and “played with” in the marriage bed. Foot competitions, in which feet were judged on size and shape (the smaller and pointier the better) were a common diversion, with women hiding behind screens so that only their deformed feet showed in their three-or-four inch, gorgeously-embroidered, teeteringly high-heeled shoes.

Because of her exquisitely-bound feet, Fragrant Lotus has “married up” into a wealthy family with a typical foot obsession. An impromptu foot contest springs up when a number of perverted old men show up to indulge their fetish. Mr. Lu, a self-appointed expert on the subject, begins to expound:

“Small feet are beautiful or ugly based on their overall appearance, which can be further divided into two elements: shape and form. Let us discuss shape first. There are six terms to describe shape: short, narrow, thin, smooth, upright, and pointed. Short refers to the foot’s length from back to front, and it should be short, not long. Narrow refers to the breadth of the foot from side to side, and it should be narrow, not wide. . . "

"Pointed refers to the toes, which should not be blunt but should come to a sharp point. If they have a slight upward turn, they are even more seductive. However, the degree of upturn should be just right. Too much will cause the point to stand upright, like a scorpion’s tail;  too little and it will droop downward, like a rat’s tail. Neither of these will do. And that, gentlemen, completes the discussion of the shape of the lotus.”

It goes on and on from there, for pages and pages, as various points of confirmation are discussed in detail as if the men are talking about flower varieties or dog breeds. The longer you think about this, the worse it gets: these crushed feet are being celebrated, the women’s lifelong crippling lifted up as rare beauty. The most unbelievable aspect of all this is the true meaning of the term “fragrant”: what it comes down to, as far as I can tell, is the horrid whiff of dead flesh coming from the rotting toes.

From a foot binding site come these startling revelations:

“Men who were turned on by bound feet were referred to as “lotus lovers”. They were aroused by the mysterious feet and were thrilled when the cotton covers were taken off. They inhaled the fragrant aroma and took delight in smelling the bared flesh. The husbands would fondle the foot in the palms of his hand before gradually caressing it with his mouth. He would place watermelon seeds or almonds between the toes before eating them from the woman’s foot. Beside these strange fetishes some men would drink the water that had previously been used to bathe the feet. The bound feet would be treasured like gold.”

When Fragrant Lotus loses the foot competition, not by inferior feet but a cheap pair of shoes, she decides to commit suicide: “In the Tong family if your feet were bad, you were finished. This family was like a chessboard, and bound feet were the individual chessmen. One false move and the game changed completely.”

Her only solution is to consult with a foot binding expert who says her feet are not "bowed" enough to be truly beautiful and must be rebound. ("Bowed" refers to the buckling upward of the crushed instep, forcing the front of the ankle to bulge outward.) Thus she experiences the torture of her girlhood all over again in order to gain favor in her own family.

The Three-Inch Golden Lotus isn’t history so much as social satire. Jicai seems to be whispering to us beneath the fascinatingly awful story: “Have things really changed so much?”  Instruments of torture, all the various means of squeezing, deforming, removing, wrenching out of shape and cutting away: they are all part of woman’s presence on earth.

Corsets, high heels, female circumcision, clitoridectomy, where does it stop? Now women are having surgery on their feet to “correct” problems that might keep them from wearing the five-inch skyscraper heels that are currently in fashion. In fact, the newest invention is the "ballet" heel in which the wearer literally walks on the ends of her toes with seven-inch stilts under her heels.

All in the name of fashion, but why? Do women do this for each other? Why are men so afraid of women? Why won’t they let us walk, breathe, have an orgasm? Why was being deformed and crippled such a sexual turn-on in an advanced civilization for a thousand years? Do you really think all this pain is part of the past, has come to an end? Why do women collude with men in taking on so much pain in order to be “beautiful”? What’s beautiful? And why?

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

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Down in Mexico

"And I'm thinking of you, down in Mexico
Feeling free as the air
Here I am, stuck in the city
Still goin' nowhere."

Oh, yeah! But I'm glad Caitlin and Ryan are having such a good time. Oh, those braids! Oh, that towel-turkey (or turkey-towel)!


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GIve your harp a hug! Alisa Sadikova

Here's one that simply blew me away. There are plenty of YouTube videos of child prodigies performing, but this one tops them all. Harp is one of the most difficult instruments to play, not just for the multitude of strings but for expression: it doesn't produce vibrato or rubato or glissando or any of those other "o"s that make music vibrant and alive.

I suspect that all instruments are attempts to mimic the human voice, and this one seems static by comparison. So the artist has to rely on what's called "decay": the little fade-off at the end of each note or phrase which kind of blurs the individual tones together. (Musicologists, I know you're wincing at this! It's just the way I see it, or hear it.) It gives harp-notes that golden sound and richness, no doubt only attained through long practice. But how can you attain anything through long practice when you're only seven years old?!

Stories of musical prodigies always seem to end sadly. There are rare examples, such as Yehudi Menuhin, in which the child goes on to a long and brilliant career, but more often that promise is never fulfilled. The brilliance dims, the playing settles into something still better than average, but no longer at genius level.

It's hard to peak at seven, or ten, or twelve. A documentary was made years ago about such an artist, who eventually came to ruin. Trouble is, I can't remember his name, or the name of the film! Never mind, the internet will provide, but only if I keep hunting.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

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Noel. . . Noel!

I have a history with this piece. My father had a large and eclectic collection of recordings - we'd call them vinyl LPs now - representing various facets of classical music. He liked compilations, and one of the best was called Pastorales: small woodwind pieces by a diverse group of composers such as Haydn, Stravinsky, Grainger - and Jolivet.

That name doesn't ring many bells, does it - and it didn't then, either. I kept this one with me, however, in some bubble at the back of my brain. Sometimes it would replay there, or parts of it, hauntingly, and it made me want to cry. Couldn't remember the title of it, the composer, anything, and decades went by before I was able to track it down. All I knew was that it had the word "Noel" in it, and was meant to represent four small scenes, musical miniatures from the Nativity.

On the internet, the merest wisp of thread can lead you all the way back to the treasure. Eventually I found a recording of Jolivet's Pastorales de Noel on CD, but it was a disappointment: by then, the original had become deeply recorded and I was stuck on it. The playing was good, but a glaring flaw made me unable to stand it: the flautist took a gasping breath right in the middle of the dramatic sustained trill at the end of the first movement, ruining it.

I found another CD version, but the bassoon sounded thin and the flute less than convincing. By then I was tired of trying to find anything like a match.

I am sure I hunted for a performance of this on YouTube for several years and didn't find it, so it was a nice surprise to discover this. Overall I like this version, though I am driven nearly mad by the way the harpist fusses and fidgets with her music, her stand, her chair. At one point the flautist seems to mimic or even send her up a bit with a little "wait, wait, guys" fidget of her own. Really, this sort of thing should be unnecessary. The harpist's music appears to be approximately three feet wide, the pages impossible to manage. If pianists can use page-turners, why can't harpists?

May I suggest an alternate solution? Opera singers manage to memorize five to six hours of music for Tannhauser and other Wagnerian tortures, so it's obviously doable. Would fourteen minutes really be such a strain?

That said, she does look great up there, her dress matching her instrument, and she sounds even better, the notes golden and sparkling. The weak link is the bassoon, which lacks depth of tone and expression. But he still provides a solid backdrop which allows the flute to really shine.

One glitch - and I'm sorry, but this is the ear I was given genetically - she misses a delectable bit of flutter-tonguing right near the end of the piece, a decoration that turns a plain flute line into a blur of ascending wings. Either she chose not to do it, or it's optional (but I've heard it in every other version), or, at the last minute, like the figure-skater deciding not to risk the quadruple-jump, she shied away.

Never mind, it's a live performance, not to mention a piece of music I was sure I would never hear again.


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Bird sex orgy

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Birds do the nasty

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Bird sex: not all it's cracked up to be

It all started with wanting a bird. Wanting a bird sort of came out of the blue, except that it didn’t. Our cat had just died at age 17, leaving a bit of a hole in the family.

“No more cats,” my husband said, and I had to agree with him. From a 22-pound, majestic miniature lynx, Murphy had dwindled to a sad near-skeleton, clinging to us as his major organs slowly shut down. He left puddles of pee everywhere, barely able to make it to the litterbox (which I was tired of: litterboxes STINK, no matter what you do to deodorize them).

I didn’t even think about a bird, or consider having one, until I visited my sister-in-law in Ontario and discovered she had acquired a parrotlet. A cute little pocket parrot, only about four inches long. She held it in her hand and scratched its neck and it laid its tiny avian head down and blinked its filmy little eyes in bliss. OH GOD, it was cute!  It didn’t do much else, and didn’t even make much noise, but I thought it was adorable.

I HAD to have one. “No impulse buys,” Bill begged. “One bird. ONE bird,” he pleaded, probably afraid I’d come home with an Amazon parrot or a whole aviary of shrieking cockatoos. I went away and did nine months of research before deciding what I wanted.

I found a pet store that believed in carefully socializing a bird before bringing it home. I made a down payment on a newly-hatched lovebird that was barely fledged (a disgusting naked pile of skin), and then when he was being weaned, I came into the store for an hour a day, put a towel on my lap and let him crawl around and explore.

By the time I took Jasper home several weeks later, he was “socialized”, meaning he could scream at me for seeds, come out of the cage and chew on me for seeds, or peep at me adorably (for seeds).

At the same time, he began to do something really weird. He’d open his mouth and sort of pump his head  up and down and emit this sickening sound, a sort of gasping noise like birdie asthma. Sometimes he’d actually throw up on me, this awful viscous seed gunk.

I read on a bird site that I was supposed to be flattered. It meant he was trying to mate with me. Birds regurgitate in each other’s mouths as a courtship ritual, with the males being more vigorous than the females.

I didn’t know how to take it, but I was generally satisfied with the cute little devil. Then a few months ago, for no reason that I could figure out, he began to shriek and scream almost non-stop. I mean, he could keep it up for six hours at a clip. This noise was so shrill that it speared through two closed doors and a set of industrial-strength earplugs.

 I tried everything: turning out the lights; covering the cage; varying his diet; changing the cage around (which he hated; birds are creatures of habit), putting a life-sized plastic budgie that chirped electronically in his cage (I couldn’t find a plastic lovebird). Instead the shrieking only escalated.

Then the other day, I put some of his favourite toys on the floor of the cage. I didn’t want to do this before, because the cage floor is nasty at best, even with daily cleaning and changing the paper. I knew those toys would get pooped upon.

What I didn’t know is that they would get raped.

I mean, raped! Straddled and humped, almost every hour of the day that he wasn’t sleeping. He’d shove a toy up against the corner (the half-eggshell that used to belong to a plastic egg-carton toy seemed to be his favourite, as he can brace the other toys up against it for stability) and go at it. And at it. And AT it.

At the same time, a funny, unexpected and very welcome thing happened: he stopped shrieking. My eardrums, assaulted for months, suddenly and gratefully popped out again. But every time I go in his room now (yes, he has his own room, just like a fractious infant), I don’t see him up on his swings or perches.

No, he’s down on the bottom of the cage doing the dirty deed.

All day. Every day.

This bird is maybe six years old now, and they live to fifteen at the most. He’s fifty years old, for Christ’s sake, acting like some horny middle-aged businessman with an expense account. Birds often drop dead for no apparent reason, and maybe he’s just trying to die with a smile on his beak.

He now has a harem of about six toys, mostly cat toys because they’re small and easy to manipulate (and they jingle). He has a smaller plastic budgie that lies miserably on its side, covered in shit. In fact, all the toys are covered in shit, even though I take them out of the cage and scrub them down each day. He is obviously using that half-eggshell as a toilet.

Funnily enough, it’s kind of hard to find any good pictures of birds mating, except maybe roosters ravishing hens. There are a few out-of-focus budgie pictures, a sort of avian Kama Sutra, but we all know what we think about budgies. A dime a dozen, and they squawk and screech all day. Jasper has two of them, for God’s sake, concubines who are slaves to his birdie will. Obviously, he doesn’t care if his girl friends are real or inanimate. But then, isn’t that true of some humans (see my Pardon me, Miss post of Dec. 1/11)?

He acts very strangely when he mounts his girlfriends, aside from the macho wing-displays and scaly little trampling feet : his beak begins to rattle alarmingly, sounding like bird castanets. I can’t find anything about this on the internet. It’s purely instinctive, some sort of reflex.

And to a human, creepy.

I’m glad I didn’t buy a pair of lovebirds, which some people say is necessary to keep them happy (except that they will bond exclusively with each other and won’t want much to do with you ,except for SEEDS). They would have produced several dozen clutches by now, and I wouldn’t know where to put them all. Or else the female just would have expired from exhaustion.

My bird’s a rapist! Good thing those toys are waterproof.

But at least the house is quieter now, save for the castanet-like rattling of a tiny, horny beak.

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Come on, eat that fruitcake!

It's that time again, and I'm wondering WHY it is that no one seems to like fruitcake.

Fruitcake is festive. Fruitcake is friendly.

Fruitcake has such fine and wholesome ingredients.

Nice ingredients like. . . whatever this is.

To make this whole exercise a lot more palatable, so we don't have to bury the annual 25-pound brick under the tree in the back yard, I'm going to introduce you to some of the star players on the fruitcake team.

Let's say hello to. . . Peter Pineapple! Peter once used to be fruit, but it was so long ago he can hardly remember it (nor can we). Some transformative process turned him into a crystalline substance resembling igneous rock.

Peter even comes in festive colours! Now, wouldn't you just love to hang these little suckers on the tree?

Now, let me introduce you to Cornelius Currant. No one eats Cornelius except at this time of year, but in spite of his bullet-like, wrinkled black appearance, he is considered every bit as festive as all that embalmed pineapple. 

The miraculous thing about Cornelius is that only five pounds of currants can produce up to six pounds of grit. This lodges itself permanently between your teeth and sands away all the plaque. Neat, eh?

I don't know who'd ever eat the peels off fruit - it'd be kind of bitter, wouldn't it - but in December, a Christmas miracle transforms all this acidy stuff into a translucent, sticky-sweet and violently-coloured confection, just waiting to be sucked down into the batter.

It's kind of hard to justify Marty Molasses, but hey, he's just one of the gang, and a necessary ingredient to the whole mess, a glue to keep all that former fruit from exploding into the stratosphere. 

And you gotta have this stuff,  lots of it. Start your fruitcake experiment in September, hide it in the basement, then every two weeks or so take it out and saturate it with as much of this stuff as it will take.

I swear to you, the results will be eater-friendly! People will just love it - they won't jam it down into the corner of the freezer in the garage and cover it with Eggo Waffles and frozen hot dogs.

All it takes is a little understanding of the process.

With friendly ingredients like this, drowning under the soupy sludge of bitter molasses and gut-rotting rum, how could you go wrong?

(Like this, maybe?)

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Ride 'em reindeer

Can't find good Christmas gifs no-how: I have a whole file of Mad Men, another of Anthony Perkins (the good kind like a small video), and I think another of Harold Lloyd and silent film and - But no Christmas, except this one. Not too bad however.

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The Muppets: nothing new

Nobody believes me, but this is where the Muppets got started: in commercials. They did two-or-three-second ads
for some kind of coffee, very violent, and these. This is either a prototype for Big Bird or Mr. Snufalopagus. The voice sounds familiar. I remember those La Choy noodles! You could blend them with melted chocolate and miniature marshmallows to make a sort of no-bake drop cookie. I did look for them years later and they weren't there.

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Blue Christmas: necrophilia for the season

This started off as a search for snow globe gifs. They all looked cheesy, and for some reason Elvis kept coming up. So the search was on for Elvis snow globe gifs. That didn't yield a whole lot either, but some of the non-gif/non-snow-globe ones were interesting. Kind of reflects what the season is all about.

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Wake up, it's Christmas!

I do try to get into the season. Not always easy, for there's something in me that resists. It's not just the Charlie Brown feeling that Christmas has become too "commercial" (and this was a sentiment first expressed in 1964!). I feel swept up in something I don't want to be swept up in, at least not all the time.

But I do try. I made shortbread yesterday, and if I must say it myself, it was melt-in-the-mouth heavenly. But full of butter, and not much good for my resolve to lose weight (for I need to lose a lot of weight, again).

I don't know why exactly this ad grabs me, but it does, and I was glad to see it on YouTube. I remember that rambunctious "wake up, it's Christmas" feeling when I was a kid. And yes, a lot of it was about "things".

All these gifts are supposed to be, what? A remnant of the Magi and their gold, frankincense (sp.??) and myrrh? We're getting farther and farther away from such symbolism, unless we happen to be churchgoers (talk about remnants!). Or is it Santa, his insistence on flying over us and landing on each rooftop to give just the right gift to the right child, but ONLY IF THEY'VE BEEN GOOD ALL YEAR??

Talk about a tool for parental manipulation.

So if it isn't about the Christ Child, isn't even about Santa and his explosions of toys in particular, then what IS it about?'

I'm tired of it, kind of. No, not kind of, definitely. We're scaling down gifts now, in fact attempting to do away with gifts for the adults altogether. It's hard, because there's this entrenched custom for them to give to us, and if you don't reciprocate you somehow feel chintzy.

You know the feeling.

I'm trying to start a new tradition, and I've done it twice so far, of making charitable donations in the person's or family's name. Myself, I'd love receiving this, the feeling that the money that might have gone into yet another blender or Body Shop gift set will actually do some good. The Body Shop stuff doesn't even get used, and the blender is likely to be shoved in the very back of the cupboard along with the waffle iron that you used maybe twice.

The kids, well, we're still giving them stuff, but the emphasis is changing, we hope. We're giving them tickets to activities they might enjoy, science lab kits (for Caitlin), things they can DO rather than "play with" (i.e. ignore). I've knitted things, made things for them. I'm giving a ream of paper to Erica so she can build more stately mansions with it (and I wish we had photographed the Parthenon she built with rolled-up paper and tape). They don't need more Barbies or Matchbox cars or train tracks. They've got all that stuff, too much of it.

For all that, I don't feel well today, and it occurs to me I have the same acid stomach I always have in December. I just have to get through it. Not that January will be a sweet time, necessarily, but at least all this pressure will be over.

Pressure? Yes. To go along with it, so you won't look Scrooge-y or Grinch-y. Spend, spend, spend: and not just money, but time, decorating, baking, doing all those things that I guess we should be enjoying more than we actually do.

So I don't know exactly why I like this ad so much. I think it's the bouncy energy of it, the song and the swift half-second montage of shots. Some ad people are genuises at putting it all together. I loathe almost all TV ads, but once in a while one comes along (like the Glade one with the animated cookie reindeer) that delights me.

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ANGRY BIRDS: when turkeys attack!

  Kung Fu Fighting, chicken style

When good turkeys turn bad. . .

Stereophonic suit poop.

At last. . . a happy bird.

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Tiny angels, Christmas angels

Oh my, oh my. Went to my granddaughter Erica's Christmas concert this afternoon - she appeared, grave and serious, in a gorgeous black-and-tartan dress worn several times by the girls in our family (a sort of heirloom now), singing Santa Claus is Coming to Town with graceful gestures that seemed almost Polynesian. She looked shockingly beautiful up there, and grown up.

So afterwards I went for coffee with my son's Mum-in-law, which I haven't for a while and enjoyed immensely. She insisted on giving us a beautiful potted poinsettia-and-white-flowers mix that will probably bloom lavishly in a day or two. Then came home to make chili, which I had planned to do yesterday and just ran out of time.

I don't enjoy cooking, even if I love the result, so I wondered what would make it go down better (besides that fizzy grapefruit drink I am so addicted to now, Dole Sparklers they're called). I thought, hmmm, let's put some Christmas music on! I haven't intentionally listened to a Christmas album yet this year. My hand just gravitated to Roger Whittaker, though my rational self was saying, "Margaret, NOT that sentimental old thing again."


Oh yes.

This was, in fact, a sort of test. I've tried to write about the spiritual meltdown I've experienced over the past several years, the fact that my entire belief system seems to have been blown to bits. Do I still believe in, well - God, or something like God?

Might it be a bit of a test to listen to this song, this song that always made me cry when my children were small?

This song that still made me cry last year? Was I so dried up, so hard-hearted, had I turned my face away from Love and Grace and all those things that used to hold my life together so much that my tears had turned as hard and crystalline as Lot's wife?

Friends, I cried. Did I cry! I bawled. It was wonderful, soul-rocking. I don't know what it is, perhaps just the way he sings it, and the deep truth of this: the only gifts that I could want are you. My darlings.

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