She escaped bound feet, was the first Chinese divorcee, Hong Kong people were constantly thanking her – why?
- A writer and filmmaker recounts her great-grandmother’s remarkable journey, from a Shanghai toddler rejecting foot binding to matriarch of a far-flung family
When my great-grandmother Zhang Youyi turned three years old, she experienced a small miracle.
Born in 1900 to a wealthy family in Jiading, a town on the outskirts of Shanghai, Youyi as a toddler somehow managed to make a radical break with the life of her high-born grandmother, mother, aunts and even her own three sisters.
One night around that time, my great-grandmother’s amah had appeared at her bedside. She placed a glutinous rice dumpling in front of the girl and instructed her to eat the entire thing, a rare treat.
The next morning, they soaked her toes and heels in warm water, flexed her tender feet in half, folded her toes into her soles, and bound them with heavy strips of white cotton.
Youyi howled with pain, thrashing about as her mother held her down in a chair. Her screaming might have been fuelled by the horror of realising she would no longer be able to roam freely.