
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...

A fascinating and haunting exploration of the bound foot in Chinese culture. Why did so many Chinese women over a thousand-year period bind their feet, enduring rotting flesh, throbbing pain, and hampered mobility throughout their lives? What compelled...