Wild Swans (12 cents)

Everyone tells me I should read "Wild Swans" and learn about hardship in China. It's a book that everyone raves about.

But it is so long.

And, instead, I found "Bound Feet and Western Dress", by Pang-Mei Natasha Chang, daughter of a Chinese born Yale professor, and herself a recent Harvard Chinese Studies graduate, who has struggled with her Chinese and American identies throughout her life.

She tells of her upbringing in Connecticut, her family on the west and east coasts, and their "strange" ways, which reflect on their Chinese background and earlier years. But she has no first-hand appreciation of life in China.

That is, until she meets her fathers remarkable aunt, Yu-i, who moves from San Francisco to New York and becomes a regular visitor, and a very formal one, to her parents' house.

Over the years, she gets closer and closer to Yu-i, who was born in 1900 and left China for Hong Kong in 1949, after the Communist takeover, settling in Hong Kong and coming to this country almost thirty years later. Yu-i dies in 1989.

Yu-i's story is a remarkable one. Her family (and Pang-Mei's father's family), the Changs, were very wealthy and very prosperous in the China that existed before the Sun Yat-sen revolution in 1915, although a family scandal (her grandfather was accused of a theft by a relative) shamed them into relocation and poverty. But they persevered, most members were very intelligent and were sent to the best schools, in China and more importantly abroad, learned Chinese and Western culture, and promised to be members of the elite of the new China.

But the old ways died hard, and Yu-i was married by her parents at age 15 to a young man who was destined to become one of China's leading poets and intellectuals. It is the rocky story of this marriage, and of Yu-i's children, that forms the basis of the book. Husband and wife were separated for years, then lived together in Germany and England, and then they separated again, this time for good. In fact, they were the first "modern divorce" granted by Chinese authorities, and became celebrities. Yet, although Yu-i was divorced by her husband (all his idea, and he was to marry twice more before dying in a plane crash in the late 1930s), she remained devoted to him intellectually, and devoted to his parents as if she was still married to their son and part of the family.

A divorcee in China, with modern and traditional principles, Yu-i was unique. She was also very intelligent, extremely practical (got a problem, call Yu-i), and she became a women's dress store manager, and an officer and eventually president of a women's bank, which operated until the Communists came, throughout the Japanese occupation of World War II.

Yu-i was not the only Chinese of an earlier generation to find a place in Chang's book. The other was a woman who was a combination maid and nanny, Xu Ma, in some ways perhaps similar to Yu-i (in intelligence and general competency), but from a very different social and economic class, who had worked her father's family since the 1930s in Shanghai. Her story is another story of survival, of a very different type. She was also married off as a child bride, to a man who became an addict and was abusive, and she obtained a position with the Chang family only by chance.

Chinese women of a certain class used to have bound feet. The process is described in detail when it was time for Yu-i's feet to be wrapped to start the process. It was her rebellion and the surprising support from one of her brothers that enabled her to avoid having her toes broken which would have sentenced her to a lifetime of servility and helplessness. At the time, when her mother agreed that her feet did not have to be bound, it was viewed as a calamity: who would marry a girl with big feet?

Hence the title of the book.