When a baby girl was born to a Chinese family, her own clan did not especially welcome the news. In a world that treasured lineage continuity above all else, only healthy male heirs added to the family wealth, and built the power and prestige of the clan. Their full names, alternate names, father’s name, and birthdates were carefully noted in the clan jiapu. Infant girls were more or less irrelevant.
Daughters were listed simply as Miss Chock, or Miss Tang, and they were lucky to get more than the month and year of their birth.
From the moment they were born, little girls were seen as belonging to the clan of their future husband, born to create the wealth of sons for someone else.
Of course their parents loved them, but they never prized them like the boys. They were good for household duties and as potential pawns in political or economic marriage alliances. But for most families, the tangible value of a girl child was the bride price a family would someday pay for her.
This is the primary reason that everyone forced their 5-year olds through the torturous ordeal of foot-binding for almost a thousand years. (It began in the 10th century, and the last factory making shoes for bound feet in Harbin, China stopped production in 1998.)
Simply put: no Chinese man — no matter how poor — would accept a bride with a big (unbound) foot. And without a husband, a big-foot girl had no place in the world except as a field laborer or maidservant. (Even prostitutes had to have tiny bound feet or customers were repulsed.)
On her wedding day, having paid the agreed price, the groom’s family sent a red sedan chair to her father’s house to collect her and her 3-inch “lotus” feet and carry her away to her place as a wife in her husband’s home. Her status was transformed in the course of that short ride; she stepped out as a new creature — her husband’s Fu Ren — with the opportunity for honor and glory.
Job One became the bearing of healthy sons and worthy heirs. Nothing else would ever matter as much as that. Her success at that job — even if it killed her — would enrich her husband, his family, his clan, and her status in that clan forever.
Excerpt from Chock Chin’s abridged jiapu, translated in 1974.
Every little girl submitted for a future as a mother. Every mother knew the terrible price her five-year old must pay.
The unbound feet of this lady’s maid may reveal her family’s lowly social status. They likely did not expect her to attract a husband, so they did not bind her feet.
This was exactly the case for Chock Chin’s 3rd Chinese wife, Chun Shi. She was a big-footed maidservant purchased from a poor family in a fishing village in northern China. He found her serving on his mother’s household staff when he returned to China after my grandmother Hee Shi died.
Her parents had literally sold her down the river to the Chock family of Guan Tang. They had somehow seen a notice that they were hiring servants for their family compound. Her brothers sailed her in a little boat down the riverways to Guangdong province — half a continent from her home — to raise the money to throw a proper funeral for the father when the time came. Even in the poorest families, their daughter’s value was whatever a family would pay for her. But a servant price, not a bride price.
To his mother’s horror, the grieving widower selected this young, quick-witted, hard-working maidservant as his new wife. Because he now knew — with tragic certainty — that bound feet were an impossible handicap for a woman in the islands raising a family without a full staff of Chinese servants. He needed a wife capable of supervising a household, restaurant, and general store across the muddy roads and uneven landscapes of Hanalei.
So it seems little Chun Shi’s story had a fairytale ending nobody could have seen coming. Outlasting all the terrible odds. Weeping through childhood years of luck that were unfailingly bad. Taken south sorrowing, in a little boat steered by cheerful brothers glad for an adventure, to a life forever less-than, in a great house among strangers.
Then the strange twist of fate. She earns herself not just any husband, but the firstborn son and heir of the household she came to scrub. Now a prosperous landowner who knows what kind of wife he wants in his tropical paradise. And this clever, kind-hearted family man twice her age chooses her out of all the rest, precisely because everyone agreed she was never going to be enough to marry, so they left her little feet alone. Sounds like a miracle, to me.
