MyWeek - The Trouble with Feet

My partner has been ill recently and we’ve been trekking to and from the GP and hospital appointments and medical tests. She has had a strange swelling of the feet that is part of reactive arthritis. The condition is not life-threatening but it is very distressing to see someone you love in a lot of pain. She is forced to move around like an old woman and cannot stand or walk for long. She has to use crutches and we have borrowed a wheelchair just in case.

The trouble with feet is that we take them for granted and a lot of our lives depend on being mobile on them. Take simple matters like crossing the road or entering a house - a step can be a huge exhausting hurdle if you cannot get the wheelchair over it. And even just pottering about at home can be a marathon of endurance and pain.

I think about my great-grandmother who had bound feet and the generations of Chinese women stretching back a thousand years whose feet were broken and deformed by this practice. I had always recognised how barbaric and cruel the tradition was but never fully realised the actual daily implications of living your whole life with crippled feet. For my partner Angie, we know that in a while, her feet will slowly get back to normal and in the meantime, there are friends and family who are supportive and mechanisms to help her get around and minimise the pain. For the women who lived in a society where it was the norm to be crippled by bound feet and there was no support structure of any kind, their lives must have been daily hell.

It was not just high-born women with minions to carry them around in sedan chairs and servants to do the chores who had bound feet. The fashion trickled down through the whole of society and many mothers bound their daughters’ feet from the age of three or four to improve their prospects of a good marriage. So women in rural areas had to work in the fields and do the household work, carry wood for the fire, lift pots of boiling water all on bound feet. Many worked on their knees. Seeing Angie painfully hobble along the street the other day, wincing at every step, taking half an hour for a distance that used to take her five minutes, the horror of those women’s lives became real to me for the first time.

The tradition of bound feet has died out with the last old women of pre-revolution China in recent decades. I hope it is never ever revived.