Footbinding: Search for the Three Inch Golden Lotus New Programs / Vision TV Posted by RAD on Nov 09, 2004 - 04:24 PM North American women today voluntarily wedge their feet into crushingly painful pumps and high heels. But the discomfort of standing too long in a pair of spiky Manolo Blahniks doesn't begin to compare to the torments of foot binding. This cruel custom, which prevailed in China for close to a thousand years, is the subject of a deeply personal documentary by Vancouver filmmaker Yue-Qing Yang. Footbinding: Search for the Three Inch Golden Lotus makes its world television premiere on VisionTV Wednesday, Dec. 15 at 10 p.m. ET, as part of the network's weekly series of documentaries on social justice issues. Yue-Qing's mother and aunt both bound their feet, as did their mother before them. Raised by her aunt from the age of six, Yue-Qing would watch her hobble home from work in great pain each night. She was haunted by these memories, and by the realization that her own feet would have been similarly bound had she been born a few decades earlier. This film is Yue-Qing's attempt to find out why so many Chinese women - a billion or more over the centuries - endured this kind of suffering to realize a strange ideal of feminine beauty. She returns home to speak to her mother and aunt, and to seek out others who went through the ordeal. The practice of foot binding is said to have begun in the tenth century, with an emperor who became enamoured of his concubine's tiny feet. The fashion soon spread from the royal court into all classes of society. Though 18th-century Western missionaries tut-tutted at the custom, it remained widespread until 1911, when the imperial dynasty was overthrown and the new republic decreed a ban. Still, foot binding lingered until the 1930s. Because men considered women with small feet to be highly desirable, foot binding came to be seen as the key to winning a good husband. The ultimate goal - attainable only by a few - was a foot so exquisitely tiny as to resemble that of a doll: the three-inch "Golden Lotus." And so, at the age of five (or even younger) a girl's feet would be bound with strips of silk cloth until the toes were crushed under the sole and the arch was broken. Delicate, embroidered silk shoes would be worn over the deformed extremities. For those with bound feet, standing and walking became painful activities, and running was a virtual impossibility. In the documentary Yue-Qing travels to increasingly remote parts of China, searching out elderly women who will talk about why they bound their feet and what it felt like. To her surprise, she finds that most consider the very subject taboo. "Foot binding is China's hidden shame," a friend tells her. "Don't expose our dirty laundry." Western feminists blame men for perpetuating this custom through the ages. But some scholars claim the story is more complex, noting that women also helped to pass the tradition from one generation to the next. The Chinese society of the past, after all, had no place for an unattached woman, and foot binding was a way to be considered marriageable. Says Professor Dorothy Ko of Columbia University, who curated an exhibition on foot binding at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto: "Women had to work with their bodies ... It was a way for mothers to teach their daughters how to be a woman, to go through the pain and to use your body to get ahead in life." Yue-Qing, however, is impatient with such arguments. To her, foot binding is a custom "in which beauty, eroticism and marriage have all become instruments of male domination." Footbinding: Search for the Three Inch Golden Lotus was produced, written and directed by Yue-Qing Yang for East-West Film Enterprise Ltd. with the participation of VisionTV and the National Film Board of Canada. Footbinding: Search for the Three Inch Golden Lotus The Filmmaker Yue-Qing Yang - Producer/Director/Writer Yue-Qing Yang is a pioneering Chinese Canadian filmmaker dedicated to uncovering and telling the stories of Chinese women. Her 1999 film Nu Shu: A Hidden Language of Women in China, gives a compelling account of a little known and now nearly extinct system of writing invented and used exclusively by women. A graduate of the University of Alberta, where she earned a Masters Degree in Science, Yue-Qing worked as a university instructor in China. It was there that she made her first documentary, The Chinese Forest Frog, which was broadcast on China's Central TV Station and won the Shennong Honour Award in 1989. Since 1993 she has concentrated on making independent documentary feature films from her home base in Vancouver, B.C. This article is from CHANNEL CANADA   http://www.channelcanada.com/ The URL for this story is:   http://www.channelcanada.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=638