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Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China

Wang Ping (Goodreads Author)

3.56 · Rating details · 145 ratings · 19 reviews

When Wang Ping was nine years old, she secretly set about binding her feet with elastic bands. Footbinding had by then been outlawed in China, women’s feet “liberated,” but at that young age she desperately wanted the tiny feet her grandmother had–deformed and malodorous as they were. By first examining the root of her own girlhood desire, Wang unleashes a fascinating inqu ...more

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Paperback, 288 pages

Published March 12th 2002 by Anchor (first published 2000)

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Apr 19, 2013 Rebecca rated it did not like it

The description on the back of "Aching for Beauty" reads: "When Wang Ping was nine years old, she secretly set about binding her feet with elastic bands. Footbinding had by then been outlawed in China, women’s feet “liberated,” but at that young age she desperately wanted the tiny feet her grandmother had–deformed and malodorous as they were."

Unfortunately the cover description is about the most interesting part about this book. I was barely able to get through a couple of chapters before I gave ...more

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Feb 17, 2017 Asita rated it liked it · review of another edition

One can tell the author writes novels, which genre she transmits directly into her academic writing. The whole book is plagued--if I may use this rather strong expression--by overinterpretation, an unfortunate result of the author's overflowing subjectivity. I understand that literary scholars often have the impulse to dig up (and exaggerate) the subversiveness of writings by the oppressed, but it's just not the case that those figures, women from some centuries ago, for example, were so pent up One can tell the author writes novels, which genre she transmits directly into her academic writing. The whole book is plagued--if I may use this rather strong expression--by overinterpretation, an unfortunate result of the author's overflowing subjectivity. I understand that literary scholars often have the impulse to dig up (and exaggerate) the subversiveness of writings by the oppressed, but it's just not the case that those figures, women from some centuries ago, for example, were so pent up with gunpowder to subvert and inverse and reverse the status quo. You can't pass what you wish for for what was possible. It surprises me to see how she exaggerates matters given that she relies heavily on previous scholarship (that of Lydia Liu, for example) and quotes them everywhere.

It's not that she's bereft of originality. She does have interesting ideas; it's just that her arguments are often stretched so far that they stop being persuasive anymore. She has this annoying way of stitching miscellanies together, making the wildest associations and the most unlikely connections, which sometimes look ridiculous. She wanders off her topic often, and in the second half of the book footbinding more and more looks like an excuse, which she inserts now and then in her discussion about writing, body, transvestism, etc. One wonders why she has to call her book "footbinding in China" since her focuses are so diffused that the book can be subtitled "Footbinding and X", X being "Sexuality", "Women's Writing," and what not.

It makes me laugh when, in an apparently self-defensive and slightly apologetic manner, she justifies her digression by saying things to the effect that although the discussion she makes now has very little to do with footbinding, footbinding is nevertheless a pivotal element. Examples are: on page 64, after talking on and on about prostitutes, she adds, “And footbinding was a must for female charm and beauty.” Nice stitch. In discussing Shuangqing, she owns, “Although Shi Zhenlin never mentioned whether Shuangqing had found feet or not, her tortured body as well as her writing apparently served as a much more refined substitute for their erotic gaze and consumption” (129); again, “Although she never mentioned a word about footbinding except for one allusion in a lyric song to her girlfriend, the self-awareness of her body, be it fragmented, wounded, sick, alert, or heart-broken, permeated each of her songs” (155). Ok. And then in writing about the nüshu, she resorts to sophistry: “Bound feet are not the focal gaze in their writing but appear everywhere as something taken for granted” (162); “And since most women practiced footbinding, feet became a natural symbol for female identity and sexuality, the glue for female liaisons and bonding” (168). None of these arguments are well supported with evidence.

As for when she contradicts herself about the aesthetic standard of footbinding, footbinding as something to separate the sexes, etc., I think they're just minor issues that you can often see in a graduate student's dissertation. I do that too and I'm grateful that I had people who kindly pointed them out for me. ...more

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Feb 21, 2012 Kay rated it liked it

Shelves: beauty-and-bodies, body-modification, 2013

Someone else said this reads like a dissertation and is thus too boring but, being an academic, I don't think that's the author's problem: instead, I think it's good old fashioned lack of editing. This book is packed with excellent information, well documented stuff on a phenomenon that is difficult to find info about beyond the stylized/theatrical versions of it. This is a combination of women's accounts of their experiences with footbinding, presented in combination with dramaturgical represen ...more

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Jan 27, 2016 Mary Havens rated it it was amazing

Great, graphic and well-researched.

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May 27, 2010 Jason Poulter rated it did not like it

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Book Review: Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China, by Wang Ping
In her provocative book, Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China, author Wang Ping attempts to tackle the deeper meanings behind footbinding in China. She begins with a preface in which she describes her personal experience with footbinding. As a nine-year old girl in 1966, Ping had tried to bind her feet to be like her grandmother’s. She then describes an experience twenty years later in 1986, while at a friend’s apartment in t Book Review: Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China, by Wang Ping
In her provocative book, Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China, author Wang Ping attempts to tackle the deeper meanings behind footbinding in China. She begins with a preface in which she describes her personal experience with footbinding. As a nine-year old girl in 1966, Ping had tried to bind her feet to be like her grandmother’s. She then describes an experience twenty years later in 1986, while at a friend’s apartment in the United States she saw a pair of lotus shoes that were only three inches long. She states that, “footbinding was rarely talked or written about because it became a symbol of national shame. But it is high time to lift the taboo…” Ping strives to lift the taboo that covers footbinding and analyze what she calls, “the heritage of my female ancestors, which is now mine.” She analyzes poetry, novels, plays, essays, drawings, and oral accounts that speak of footbinding from the Ming and Qing dynasties to the present.
The author organizes her book into two parts, part I entitled “Chinese Eroticism and Female Allure,” and part II titled “Footbinding in Women’s Literary Traditions.” The first part is broken up into five chapters and includes a brief history of footbinding. Ping analyzes erotic literature in order to better understand the stereotypical views that men held of women and the practice of footbinding. In the fourth chapter, entitled “Edible Beauty: Food and Foot Fetishes in China,” Ping explains the different Chinese fetishes in which food represents sexual organs or actions. In one story she analyzes, “the dishes that the maid brings to the garden – ducks’ feet, fish, lotus seeds, water chestnuts, and pond horned-nuts – are all euphemisms for bound feet.” The author concludes part I describing the practice of ling chi, in which a man is tied to a post and cut into 3600 pieces. Those pieces are then “sold as the most effective medicine for incurable diseases or the most powerful sacrificial food.” Included in the book is a photograph of a man being tortured through the practice of ling chi, it is quite disturbing. Ping connects the practice of footbinding and ling chi and concludes part by stating, “a connection was made between food and sex, eroticism and violence, death and ecstasy.”
Part II looks at footbinding from the perspective of women by analyzing oral histories and writings by women that give insight into the practice. Ping recognizes that footbinding was a part of women’s lives and was practiced solely by them. She searches through poetry and other literature to find signs of footbinding or reactions of women to footbinding and their place in China. The author states notes that bound feet did not just symbolize eroticism and fetishes “but they were also a symbol for self-identity, the emblem of female pride and culture, and most important, the basis for female bonding and support networks.” Women were being bound and binding not purely for the satisfaction of male sexual fantasies but for their own pride and standing in society. The book concludes, effectively, referring to the story told in the preface regarding Ping’s own experience with footbinding as a nine-year old girl. She states, “I was not only trying to create beauty, but also to write/inscribe my personal, political, and cultural signature upon my body.”
Ping’s book is provocative to say the least; her analysis of bound feet as erotic symbols of sex and pain is precise and detailed. At times I was disturbed by the images of pain that were described but these images greatly illustrated the authors arguments. The pictures included further demonstrate the practice. At times I feel the author may have read more into the practice than I would have but her conclusions are not outlandish. She argues her point very successfully and does so in a way that is personal by including her own life experiences. Aching for Beauty serves as a great resource on the practice of footbinding in China in which Ping articulately explains the subject.
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Nov 06, 2010 Darlene rated it liked it

After reading Lisa See's novel, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, I became fascinated with the chinese practice of foot binding. Aching for Beauty was a difficult book to read.. partly because it read like a doctoral dissertation and partly because the ideas presented were very disturbing to me. I tried very hard to maintain an open mind about the practice of foot binding. I really wanted to understand the cultural and social reasons for it. Ping used literary sources such as novels, poems and pla ...more

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Mar 18, 2014 Aditi rated it it was ok

Shelves: abandoned

The factual information is interesting, when you can find it. I also liked the passages by other women describing their experiences.

However, I hated the parts when the author tried to interpret the bound foot - such as when she says it looks like both male and female genitalia - really? Also, the part when she talked about half-animal-half female forms in other mythologies such as the Sphinx or the mermaid and compared them with "hooved women" of China, was plain irritating. She seems to not re ...more

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Jul 18, 2011 K. rated it liked it

Shelves: abc-challenge, non-fiction, reference, location-china, gore, asian-history, erotica

This would have been a good deal drier if the author hadn't added in many references to older literature and anecdotes by a variety of women, which I heartily enjoyed. However toward the middle I felt as if the author was meandering when it came to the main thesis, as it were. There's a chapter entitled "Edible Beauty" - it basically outlined the hedonistic lifestyle of the emperor and the upper class in Hangzhou. If you read only that section out of the whole book, you would not have known Achi ...more

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Jan 22, 2009 Karenj454 rated it liked it

This book was rather high-level philosophy, some parts becoming too much of a disertation comparing it's content to other chinese writers. But it had a lot of historical information and insights into the custom of footbinding. It spared no reality and some mental pictures will stay with me, wanted or not. ...more

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Jun 13, 2010 Catherine Siemann rated it liked it

Ping's study is smart and interesting. After a few introductory chapters dealing with the culture of footbinding, she focuses primarily on its representations in classical Chinese literature. Some of the connections she makes, for example, the bound foot to the Lacanian phallus, speak to the work's origin as her dissertation, but overall her insights are well worth the time spent reading. ...more

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Jan 30, 2013 Mei Hua rated it it was amazing

A book that was left by my mother in my book shelves. This is really a heart-touching story of footbinding ever happened in China, where beauty in women was measured by the size of their feet. It is a real good book, and I recommend women with Chinese ancestors to read it.

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Dec 23, 2010 Alicia rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction

I only got through the first chapter before bringing it back to the library. Even still, I think the author summed up the book in that first chapter. I found "Snow Flower and The Secret Fan" more interesting. ...more

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Apr 07, 2010 Brittany rated it it was ok

I couldn't quite bring myself to finish this book because it felt too much like a thesis, which in actuality, I believe it was. However, the topic was amazing and incredibly tense. It's piqued my interesting into learning more about footbinding, even though it's painful to read. ...more

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Jun 01, 2008 Lori Stoltz rated it it was amazing

If you want to be haunted with words for a long time, this is the book that will stay with you concerning the lengths humans go for acceptance. Ping's words are powerful. ...more

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Jun 04, 2008 Nicole rated it it was amazing

After becoming obsessed with Geisha, I figured I would learn more about other Asian cultures and their traditions, such as the Chinese tradition of foot-binding. Very interesting.

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Apr 08, 2008 Kathy rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Recommends it for: students of Chinese culture

Shelves: nonfiction

This turned out to be a doctoral dissertation. I got through about half of it. She raises some interesting points, but this was too ponderous to be a good introduction to the topic.

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Jan 25, 2012 Kate rated it liked it

I didn't know much about the practice of foot-binding; this is a well-researched history of foot-binding. I learned a lot, appreciated the pictures. ...more

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