One thing that comes from Chinese culture is guo xiao jiao, or the old practice of foot-binding for women. This may be unique to China. In the old days, they started to bind a girl’s feet when she was four years old, and they started in the fall and winter so her feet would not feel it so much because of the cold. This practice, of course, broke the bones in the girl’s feet, since they were trying to make her feet stay very small – maybe four inches long. Foot-binding was banned officially after the 1911 revolution of Sun Zhongshan (his name is usually written Sun Yat-sen by the English), but it had to be banned again after the 1949 revolution of Mao Zedong as well. Today there might still be a few very old women who are living who had it when they were younger. Eason’s great-grandmother had it; he saw it when he was very young.
If you look at Beijing Opera, you can see the characters called Dan. These are the girl roles. At York University, a performer named William Lau knows how to play those roles. His group, which is called the Little Pear Garden Collective, gives performances and demonstration of Beijing Opera on the York campus and in lots of other places. In his demonstrations, he shows the audience the special shoes a dan performer wears to make the girl’s feet appear to be very small. They make the performer walk with very small steps.
Foot-binding may seem quite strange to people from other countries, but it is not true that this is the only beauty practice in the world that is not good for the women’s health. In the west, in the past, women often wore corsets that were very tight. A corset is a garment that makes a woman’s waist smaller. Sometimes women were supposed to have very small waists – maybe 48-50 centimetres (or 18-19 inches). These corsets could rearrange their internal organs in bad ways. Here is a link to a fashion magazine’s advice column from 1903 about how to get a girl to start wearing corsets.
After we heard about foot-binding, we talked some more about definitions of beauty. Why did people in China think that very, very small feet were beautiful? What is beautiful in any culture? Some scientists say that beauty is usually about looking young. Maybe that explains foot-binding a little. There is a science writer in English named Steven Jay Gould. He wrote an essay called “A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse,” in a 1980 book called The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History. Here is the York library call number for this book: QH 366.2 G666 1982. This essay explains the concept of “neoteny,” which says partly that people find youth attractive.
by Zhang Weifeng
If you look at Beijing Opera, you can see the characters called Dan. These are the girl roles. At York University, a performer named William Lau knows how to play those roles. His group, which is called the Little Pear Garden Collective, gives performances and demonstration of Beijing Opera on the York campus and in lots of other places. In his demonstrations, he shows the audience the special shoes a dan performer wears to make the girl’s feet appear to be very small. They make the performer walk with very small steps.
Foot-binding may seem quite strange to people from other countries, but it is not true that this is the only beauty practice in the world that is not good for the women’s health. In the west, in the past, women often wore corsets that were very tight. A corset is a garment that makes a woman’s waist smaller. Sometimes women were supposed to have very small waists – maybe 48-50 centimetres (or 18-19 inches). These corsets could rearrange their internal organs in bad ways. Here is a link to a fashion magazine’s advice column from 1903 about how to get a girl to start wearing corsets.
After we heard about foot-binding, we talked some more about definitions of beauty. Why did people in China think that very, very small feet were beautiful? What is beautiful in any culture? Some scientists say that beauty is usually about looking young. Maybe that explains foot-binding a little. There is a science writer in English named Steven Jay Gould. He wrote an essay called “A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse,” in a 1980 book called The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History. Here is the York library call number for this book: QH 366.2 G666 1982. This essay explains the concept of “neoteny,” which says partly that people find youth attractive.
by Zhang Weifeng
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