Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
I feel like I’m hosting a book blog at the moment, continuously blogging about books I just finished reading. Well, it’s just in the holidays and during this holiday I decided to get back into reading English novels because it gives me more thought into different issues rather than the “lovey-dovey” Chinese online romance novels I was obsessed with over the past five years or so.
Anyhow, I finished reading Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See last night at 2 am. It was a great book. I cried at certain points and throughout the entire final chapter. Call me a water-tap if you wish but it was that touching. However, the details of foot-binding made me cringe as I placed myself as the character in the story.
This past tradition of foot-binding disgusts me. According to the novel and what I heard before, girls of families of reasonable social status bound their feet when they were around six or seven. The aim was to have a set size of no longer than the length of a thumb (7 cm) and this was how feminine beauty was judged by in the past China. Toes were bound to the heel and they balanced and walked on just their two big toes. All the bones were meant to be broken eventually and through this process one in ten girls died. Since the flesh was bound together for the rest of their lives, it stank. To overcome that, they used artificial scents, of course.
Now to me, that’s something seriously wrong with the men. They got turned on by terribly mutated 7 cm feet because well… Women swayed “beautifully” on their “lily feet” and with such feet it was impossible for them to run fast or run away from their husbands’ homes.
In terms of gender inequalities, I know it exists throughout the world and to a greater extent in the past times. But to look at it from a more modern point of view, this masculine superiority idea that most Chinese men (being a “zodiacist”, I say Sagittarius in particular) still holds is crazy. Foot-binding is an example, but that’s outdated. There’s this thing about how the guys may or may not have sex before marriage but, they would expect their future wife to be a virgin. 
Along with that, how pale white skin normally connotates physical weakness and obviously, that’s one part to the definition of Asian feminine beauty. I don’t think I’m ugly, but I get annoyed when the Asian guys back in high school used to refer to me (mockingly) as “black girl” just because I’m darker than most other Chinese girls. (It didn’t kill my self-esteem so much though because they weren’t the best looking males either. 
) But seriously, they need to grow up. Move along with the global trend towards gender equality and with that… Tanned girls are not ugly! >.<
