Footbinding

A Jungian Engagement with Chinese Culture and Psychology

Shirley See Yan Ma

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135190064
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this book Shirley See Yan Ma provides a Jungian perspective on the Chinese tradition of footbinding and considers how it can be used as a metaphor for the suffering of women and the repression of the feminine, as well as a symbol for hope, creativity and spiritual transformation.

Drawing on personal history, popular myths, literature, and work with clients, Footbinding discusses how modern women still symbolically find their feet bound through this ancient practice. Detailed case studies from Western and Asian women demonstrate how Jungian analysis can loosen these psychological bindings allowing the client to reconnect with the feminine archetype, discover their own identity and take control of their own destiny.

This original book will be of great interest to Jungian analysts looking for a new perspective. It will also be of interest to anyone studying Chinese culture and psychology.

Chapter 1
First glimpse of the Golden Lotus

When I began my training at the C.G.Jung Institute in Zurich to become a Jungian analyst, I had no idea that living in central Europe and immersing myself in the teachings of this fascinating Swiss psychiatrist (Carl G.Jung, 1975–1961) would take me on an adventure that would lead back to my Chinese heritage. I thought I’d left all that behind.

Soon after I turned 18 I left my home in Hong Kong, moved to North America and, in a concerted effort to fit in with other university students and be successful, proceeded to become as Western as I possibly could. I studied science, obtained a Master’s degree, and eventually obtained the success I’d longed for with a career in the medical science field. The interest I’d had as a teenager in Chinese history, culture, and literature was long laid to rest.

However, several years later, not long after I moved to Zurich, I began experiencing dreams and having encounters that led to an increasingly deep interest in Chinese symbols, imagery, mythology, and tradition. Many of these encounters had an element of synchronicity. In Jungian terms, synchronicity is sometimes defined as “meaningful coincidence” or “meaningful chance,” but a more exact explanation would be to say that a synchronous event is one that occurs in the outer world but coincides in a deeply meaningful way with some psychological aspect of our psyche. One of the most wonderful things about these events is that they often reflect some deep psychological truth that we are, at that moment in time, still completely unconscious of. This was certainly true for me, because a number of these events related in some way to the Chinese practice of footbinding, and I had no idea at the time that I would eventually embark on an extensive exploration of this phenomenon or that I would come to see it as an extraordinarily potent symbol—one that can work as a powerful metaphor to help us to heal our wounds, reclaim our power, and regain our sense of self and worth as women.

My first synchronous encounter with footbinding occurred not long after I’d moved to Zurich. One day when I was returning from my daily walk in the woods, I looked up and saw an elderly Chinese lady, probably in her late seventies, walking along the other side of the lane with a little boy. Overjoyed to see someone from my own culture, I walked up to her without any hesitation and proceeded to greet her and introduce myself. The old lady appeared surprised at my openness, but warmed to me after a few moments. She explained that she was in Zurich visiting her daughter and son-in-law and that the little boy was her grandson. As her story unfolded I discovered she was originally from Shanghai but had moved to Taiwan after the Chinese Revolution in 1949. It immediately became clear that she was inordinately proud of both her daughter and her son-in-law. They were professors at a well-known American university and were currently in Zurich as visiting scientists. She began to talk on and on about their scholarship and achievements in their respective fields, never once showing any interest in me or curiosity about what I might be doing in Switzerland.

As she continued talking, I began to feel uneasy and even intimidated. Fortunately, the little boy became impatient, and his eagerness to move on ended her monologue. The moment we began to part, I felt an inexplicable sense of relief. As I watched her moving away, I noticed she was walking with a cane in one hand and leaning on her grandson with the other. Glancing down at her feet, I was surprised to see that she had extremely small feet and wore special leather shoes. Later, when I reflected on the encounter, I was stunned to realize that the woman had actually had bound feet.

However, since I was deeply involved in analysis at the time, I was much more concerned with understanding the feelings this old lady had triggered in me than in reflecting on her bound feet. The woman’s boastfulness about her family’s achievements had made me feel inferior, not-good-enough, and useless. After a great deal of reflection, I realized one reason she had made such an impact on me was related to my upbringing in Hong Kong, a British colony where the sciences were considered not just more useful than any subject in the arts or the humanities, but held to be superior fields of study in every way. When I was in school there had also been considerable pressure on female students to prove themselves in what had previously been male-dominated fields. And there I was, in Zurich, having just walked away from a career in the health sciences where I’d been on a fast track to promotion, immersing myself not just in the humanities but in one of its more esoteric branches—a decision my family and many of my Chinese friends found incomprehensible and believed would be ruinous to both my career and my future security.

It was only years later that I realized the synchronicity in this event—the link between the woman’s bound feet, as a powerful psychological symbol, and the feelings of doubtful self-worth I was experiencing—and made the discovery that my own feet, like those of so many of the women I would eventually work with, had been psychologically bound. I did, however, at the time at least recognize the fact that these negative feelings needed to be dealt with.

Indeed, there was no way I could have ignored them because they were so intensified by the completely uprooted state I was living in. The moment I had moved to Zurich for my Jungian analytic training, I had thrown myself intensely into what Jung called individuation, a process that is sometimes described as our journey to wholeness and likened to the way a seed, already containing within itself all it needs to become a flower, eventually blossoms. It involves casting aside the false cloak of the persona—the “I” we present to the world that generally reflects only our most idealized aspects—and coming to know your true self.

Looking back I realize my approach to this was rather extreme and not one I would really recommend. After moving to Zurich, I found a place to live in one of the many wooded areas that dot the city. It was a 300-year-old farm house—but not much more than a cottage. Although there was electricity and a limited amount of hot water, the only heat was provided by stoves that I had to chop wood for. There was no direct access to the main roads or sidewalks from the cottage so I had to hike up and down a steep hill, my backpack filled with books, groceries, or anything else I needed to carry. When I wasn’t in class at the Institute, studying, or undergoing the many hours of required analysis, I recorded my dreams, practiced T’ai Chi, walked in the woods, and generally lived an isolated existence.

Driven by my need for self-realization and my thirst for spiritual enlightenment, I realize now that I had embarked on my quest with the fervor of a pioneer. And I had not for one moment stopped to realize how difficult this approach might be, especially in the beginning. Not only was I isolated, my life was turned upside down. Suddenly in a country where I didn’t speak the language or understand the culture, the basics of everyday life were totally disrupted—finding my way around, making myself understood, buying food and then trying to prepare it without any of the conveniences I’d always depended upon. Disoriented, I felt isolated and completely vulnerable.

On top of my living situation, and probably to some extent because of it, I was flooded with powerful dreams, some of them returning ones about my personal past and others with deep mythological motifs that I had to struggle to understand. This placed a heavy psychic burden on what was already a difficult adaptation to my new environment. Because I hadn’t considered how difficult all this might be, I was taken by surprise and totally overwhelmed. Not surprisingly, I became depressed.

In spite of all these difficulties, I knew it was the right path for me. I lived in my isolated cottage for the five years that I was training at the Jung Institute, and it gave me the time I needed, as the Buddhists say, to “contemplate my original face and eyes”; or in other words, to discover my true identity, the true self I was born with. I had been living as my persona, a false self that had been artificially identified with my job, and I had needed to abandon the job and lifestyle that went with it and live in the woods, in nature, in order to retrieve and heal myself.

There is another Buddhist expression that is similar to the idea of contemplating your original face and eyes; it is an entreaty that goes “Show me my face before I was born.” It was in this context of both being consumed by a deep desire to come to know the face I’d had before I was born and being disoriented by my living situation that I met the footbound Chinese lady on the path that day. It is little wonder she had such an impact on me. And it wasn’t long before the haunting image of her bound feet began to trigger childhood memories. One was the distinct recollection of walking through the busy outdoor market place in Hong Kong one day when I was about eight years old and coming across a crowd of people. The spectacle they were staring at was a young, attractive woman with an infant, sitting on a filthy red quilt laid on the ground, begging for alms. I was struck by her beautiful, classic features, which contrasted so vividly with the expression of helplessness and shame on her face. There was terror in her eyes as she gazed into empty space. Naively, I wondered to myself why on earth she didn’t look for a job. Then I looked down and noticed that this woman had extremely small feet, about three to four inches in size, that were encased in a pair of filthy, red silk, embroidered shoes that once must have been exquisitely beautiful.

I then realized why she was sitting on the ground. Her feet had been bound. I was overwhelmed with pity for her immobility and her desolate future. Even at my young age I had the horrible realization that, if she weren’t begging, suicide might be her only option.

In retrospect, I realized that she must have been one of the newly arrived refugees from mainland China, where the failure of the “Great Leap Forward” movement had led to widespread food shortages and a resulting mass exodus to Hong Kong. I also realized that it was her bound feet that had made her such a spectacle for the crowd.

Years later in Zurich as I pondered her fate, more memories associated with bound feet came alive to me. With shame, I remembered that my siblings and I made fun of the semi-deformed feet of our cook, whose feet had only been partially bound. Images of other old women in our neighborhood, both rich and poor, who’d had bound feet began to come unbidden into my mind. Memories also came back of a trip I took in 1982 to Hangzhou, in mainland China, and how I had seen many more old women with bound feet there than we were accustomed to seeing in Hong Kong.

As these recollections came flowing back to me, they eventually became more personal. I began to remember my parents’ reminiscences and the stories they had told me. For instance, I recalled my mother sometimes complaining about how terrible her own mother’s feet had smelled. And although I’d been aware that my grandmother’s feet had been bound, I had never made the connection between the horrible smell my mother described and the fact that she’d had bound feet—even though it is widely known in China that bound feet often reeked from the thick bindings, the frequent sores, and the difficulty of cleaning the compressed, decayed flesh. A bit stunned, I began to fully apprehend for the first time the fact that my own maternal grandmother’s feet had been bound! She must have suffered terribly because of it and I had given it little thought. In fact, I came to realize that I had taken the whole subject of bound feet, and even the role they had played in my life, completely for granted.

Realizing this, I began to think about the fact that my great grandmother, my father’s grandmother, had also had bound feet. As a child my father and his mother and four siblings had been forced to move in with this grandmother when his father died suddenly. According to the stories I began to recall, my father and his siblings had frequently played tricks on her, often taking advantage of her lack of mobility. One of these misdeeds had extraordinarily far-reaching results and affected my father’s entire life. It occurred one day when my father sneaked up behind her and tugged on the string that held up her pants. Being loose-fitting Chinese britches, they fell immediately to the ground. Because Chinese women in those days did not wear underwear, she was suddenly half-naked in front of her grandsons. Shamed and completely humiliated, she struggled to run after them and catch them but couldn’t because of her bound feet. Later that day she took her anger out, not just on the boys, but on their mother, berating her and upbraiding her for her sons’ behavior until she could no longer bear it. The next day, the boys’ mother—who would eventually become my grandmother—packed up her meager belongings and her five children, left the security of her mother-in-law’s home and set out on foot for Hong Kong. They walked for 11 days, the children without shoes.

Many years later I realized this story held one of the keys to the deeply synchronous link between my feelings of low self-worth and the imagery associated with footbinding. One reason for this was that this incident—so inextricably linked to the fact of my great grandmother’s ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology of mythical and historical dynasties in China
• Note on romanization of Chinese words
• Chapter 1 First glimpse of the Golden Lotus
• Chapter 2 The Shang empress-fox and her feet
• Chapter 3 The Confucian Way
• Chapter 4 A Pearl of great price
• Chapter 5 Xi Wang Mu: the Queen Mother of the West
• Chapter 6 Yexian: the Chinese Cinderella
• Chapter 7 Chiu Chin: the beheaded martyr
• Chapter 8 Julia Ching: a journey from East to West and back again
• Chapter 9 Ruby and her new vision
• Chapter 10 Jade: unbinding and restoring her feet
• Chapter 11 Reflections on footbinding and the Golden Lotus
• Bibliography
• Index