When I was 12 years old, my family lived in Okinawa. We did not live on a military base. I walked by a house every day with a fence made of concrete and bricks. I often saw an elderly woman walking slowly around the garden. She always held onto the wall as she slowly walked around the outer edges of the garden. She had the tiniest feet I had ever seen. Over time we would smile at each other and wave to one another as I walked past her house. One day a younger woman called out to me. She spoke English and asked if I had a moment to stop so she could speak to me. I stopped and said, yes. She told me her family moved to Okinawa from China. She told me the elderly woman was her mother. She didn't understand why her mother was drawn to me, only that she was. She said her mother asked if I would stop by the next day and have some tea with her mother. I said I would. Her mother spoke no English and I did not speak any Chinese. That first afternoon of having tea with her mother became a regular visit several times a week. Her daughter always left us alone after bringing some tea and little cakes and cookies to her mother's room. The elderly woman sewed little people surrounding a circle, a pin cushion she made for me. She made one also for my mother. One day she made me a tiny lion. His head could move back and forth and when it did his tail moved too. It was a treasured gift I had for many, many years. She gave it to me on a day our visit became a turning point in my life. She and I talked and shared conversation with each other though neither of us could understand what the other said. After many months of our conversations and time together, she reached out, put her hand over my heart and spoke to me in Chinese. I don't know what she said, but her eyes spoke to me with love. I found myself speaking with tears running down my face. I told her about the things my father was doing to me every night and how many years he had been doing that. She may not have understood my words, but she understood pain. That is the day she gave me the tiny lion. She also looked deeply into my eyes and took off her very tiny shoes. She unwrapped her feet and showed me what had been done to her by people who were supposed to love her. I looked at her feet and gently touched her foot. She nodded at me as she watched my eyes fill with tears as I touched her foot. She rewrapped her feet and put her tiny shoes on again. Neither one of us had realized her daughter had come into the room. She heard some of what I spoke about. She later said what made her freeze and not make a sound was seeing her mother show me her feet. She had never done that. Her daughter finally moved and made a sound so we knew she was there. The daughter sat with us and she translated her mother's words to me. Her mother said what drew her to me was she recognized I too walked with pain. Both of our pains were in different parts of our bodies, but both pains lived in our hearts. Both the mother and daughter told me I could come to them any time. Their home was a safe haven for me until it was time for my family to return to the states. As you can tell if you read all of this, the kindness of this  precious, elderly woman stayed with me forever. I am now 74 and I can remember all the love and kindness I received from a woman who lived with such great pain every second.

When I was in college, I did a research paper on foot binding. They didn't just wrap the feet at the beginning. They FOLDED (broke) the toes by breaking the arch of the foot and compressing the foot together. Barbaric.

Foot binding was absolutely perverse.

I am an x-ray technologist and worked in the San Francisco area. When I was young I did foot x-rays on an old lady who had bound feet. Her granddaughter said the woman had suffered all her life.

One in ten women died from infections in the feet.  Women are the most abused group of people in the world over the centuries.

Oh my gosh, how women have suffered, how babies have suffered from the fetishes of men, men they may never even meet. Thank you for covering this. Power to women all over the world!

The brother wanted her married “to be rid of a burden and make a useful connection.” Utterly disgusting how women have been abused.

My paternal grandmother who passed away in 1976 had disfigured feet. I later understood her feet were bound.

My grandmother wanted to bound the feet of my aunt, but grandfather rejected and not allowed. He said it was modern China . That was just after Republic China was set up.  My aunt told me she might have died if her feet were bound during the Sino Japanese war. A lot of feet bounding women die because they couldn’t walk fast and nobody could carry them when bombs drop over their head.

Men always blamed women for the gender of their child when its the sperm that determine it🙄

I am Hakka and we  have never practiced feet binding.  I am immensely thankful that my female forebears did not have to go through this cruel custom.

Footbinding sounds so painful. Those poor girls who endured it. Pure torture. To hear an actual account hurts my heart.

1000 years of torturing women , sometimes to death, just for a ridiculous beauty standard.

I am an antiques dealer and have had 2 pairs of antique Lotus shoes--they are incredibly tiny, hard to believe that a grown woman's feet could fit into them.

I grew up middle class but poor in America with siblings who got preferential treatment. My shoes never fit. They were always inches too small, except for flipflops. Naturally I prefered those or went barefoot.

My mom literally couldnt be bothered to help me pick shoes and always shamed me if I picked my actual size. My actual size is a womens 13. My feet are exactly 12.5 inches. Instead, she would only buy the shoes if they were 9.5-10. Which would be 2-3 inches too small. And then verbally abuse me for having big feet and acuse me of lying. Even when I had someone measure my feet, she'd scoff at them and tell me men wont find me attractive if I have big feet, as if it were something I chose to have.

Im 40. I havent been able to walk without foot pain since I was 9 or so. My toes are deformed. I have hammer toe, bunions and claw toes. My foot bones get damaged easily and Ive got bone spurs, and had tendon issues since I was a teenager.

It was a gradual experience for me, and I did at least have long periods of barefooted relief. These girls didnt get that.

This story breaks my heart. Im not Asian, Im Scottish and Native American, big bones and large in general. And it truly hurts. Im crying by night time. I will avoid drinking fluids after 7pm just so I dont have to scream walk to the bathroom and wake everyone up.

To do this to a child makes me so angry. I love Chinese history and culture but this is such an abusive practice it's hard to imagine how women lived like this, and that's from someone who only had mildly similar experiences.

My grandmother had the exact same problem. Her feet looked like literal sea lion flippers. We both are hyper flexible so it greatly affected balance and mobility by adulthood and these are mild cases. These poor girls.... and it's not like it made the feet pretty! 😒 It made them hideously deformed! That's not pretty.

It’s interesting to see that every era has had ridiculous beauty standards for women! Whether it was tiny feet, tiny waists, large chest, etc., we all have lived to see the cruelty of the beauty standards of the day. Women have suffered for centuries for what is fleetingly considered beautiful. 😞 :_baobunCry::_baobunCry:

Foot binding was started when  Yao Lang, a court dancer, was asked to bind her feet in the shape of a crescent moon by the emperor Li  Yu. So while a woman did start the practicing foot binding, it was a MALE emporer who encouraged her to do it bc he had a foot fetish.  
Women who do things bc men who encourage us to do them does NOT mean it was the womans idea. It was ultimately to please a man. THAT is patriarchy in a nutshell.

I have fairly large feet (size 10.5) and last year i broke one of them, and lemme tell you, foot pain is no joke and being able to walk normally is something I'm grateful for every day.

When I think of how unsteady my grandmas were in the final decades of their lives, how one even had to have hip replacement surgery twice due to bad falls that broke her fragile bones, and then I try to mentally add to that that the constant pain of having tortured, deformed feet...I really cannot comprehend how women like Zhou Joumei lived so long. I don't think I'd have been strong enough.

It hits even harder when seen through the eyes of a real person.  Really enjoyed this one.