Bound Feet and Western Dress is a memoir written by Pang-Mei Natasha Chang, a Chinese American, about herself and her great aunt Chang Yu-i, a woman who lived in 1900s Shanghai, China. It chronicles Yu-i's life spent straddling the traditions of Old China with the innovative life of new China. While tracing the steps of Yu-i's transition to the new China, the memoir chronicles China's cultural conversion to Communism. Richard Bernstein said of the memoir, “Ms. Chang, in striving to subdue her own adolescent embarrassment at being different, trying to understand her past, has helped us all to recover a rare, precious, painful moment in the great panoply of human predicaments.”
The memoir is a frame tale, or a story within a story. Natasha narrates some parts and Yu-i narrates the majority. In the Prologue, Natasha explains how she came to tell the story of her great aunt, by stumbling across an article in her college textbook about her family and realized that they were her close relations. The story told within is their story, and more so it is Yu-i's story of struggle during the “tremendous upheaval of traditional Confucian culture as Western ideals pushed to the fore” (5). It is the story of Yu-i that pushes to the forefront in this memoir, and makes it truly memorable.
Yu-i was the daughter of one of the wealthiest families in Shanghai before their fortunes were lost and she submitted herself to a pre-arranged marriage with Hsu Chih-mo. Married young and divorced young, Yu-i was torn apart by the different expectations that society placed on her, both traditional and modern. It is the discrepancy between Yu-i's figurative “bound feet” and Hsu Chih-Mo's figurative “western dress” (the difference between old and new values and practices) that eventually destroys the couple and pushes them to have the first divorce in China (122). It is also Hsu Chih-mo's embrace of new ideals that pushes his family away from him, through his many fickle flings with women to his abandonment of his family, and draws his parents to Yu-i . But in this tale of change, Yu-i redeems herself, albeit suffering the death of her youngest child meanwhile, and becomes vice president of a branch of the Bank of China and leads an independent life (179).
Bound Feet and Western Dress discusses some of the events that took place while China's empire was transforming into a Communist government. It briefly mentions the events at Tiananmen Square on May 4, 1919 when “some three thousand students staged a mass demonstration, demanding that the government refuse the terms of the treaty” (99). However the memoir's most influential accounts of the conflict in China and around the world are in the social and cultural tensions that arise from these events.
Throughout Yu-i's life, she is taught to blindly obey many rules such as “your life and body are gifts to you from your parents. This means that it is unfilial to try to commit suicide” (9) and “you must always inform your parents where you are going and what you are doing” (10). Although these are only two out of the hundreds of rules that Chinese women are taught to view as sacred and unbreakable, they are good representatives of the strictness that Yu-i grew accustomed to. When she marries Hsu Chih-mo, she expects to remain faithful to these rules, but it is only after her husband tells her he wants a divorce that she understands why: “Hsu Chih-mo thought me so old-fashioned, he worried I would hurl myself over the porch railing!” (122). She finally realizes why her marriage failed later:
“Hsu-Chih-mo had compared the two of us to bound feet and Western dress, which initially confused me, because I did not have bound feet. But during the months in the French countryside I realized, in many ways, I had acted as if I did. In Xiashi, I never dared deviate from the in-laws' expectations of me. I never questioned old Chinese customs and traditions” (136).
What is even more heart-breaking about the situation is that Yu-i is pregnant with Hsu Chih-mo's child when he leaves her, and she must truly leave her Chinese traditions behind and strike out on her own. Which in Europe, is more viable, but still extremely difficult. She must also contend with the stigma of being a divorced woman of a famous family; she often heard people make comments like “Chang Yu-i must be very ugly and old-fashioned . . . .Why else would Hsu Chih-mo leave her?” (150).
But Yu-i succeeds on her own, which is not surprising because as a young girl, she would not tolerate having her feet bound in the traditional Chinese manner and in her elder years, she advances her desire for modernization. Yu-i becomes treasurer of the National Socialist Party (182), educates herself by hiring a private tutor (180), buys and exchanges stocks (202), and remarries a doctor. She also passes on her modernity to her son who becomes an American engineer (206).
The idea of modernization is also brought out by Natasha Chang's part of the memoir. She faces discrimination from her peers at an early age:”I was surprised the first time the kids at school made fun of my favorite pair of pants, telling me that the legs were too short and the crotch hung too low . . . It hurt me to see China from my classmates' vantage point; it meant falling into the crack away from my Xu Ma” (29). The ridicule pushes Natasha away from her Chinese culture and caused her to be ashamed rather than proud.
The memoir ends with an account of Yu-i's peaceful death and Natasha's reminiscing over Yu-i's old clothing n the mahogany trunk bringing the story full-circle. The trunk of clothes represents the family experience that is transferred from generation to generation and built upon to achieve new successes within a new country and the new culture that blends the “bound feet” of China and the “Western dress” of America.
