According to Chinese culture and tradition, women are seen as nothing. When Chinese girls are born, they are raised to obey their fathers and seen as no use because she will eventually become the property of a husband and his family with the sole purpose of bearing children. They are simply raised to believe that women are much less important than men. Pang-Mei Natasha Chang is the author of the book: Bound Feet & Western Dress, which is a memoir that reflects on the life and struggles of her great-aunt, Chang Yu-i, her family and friends, as well as the family of her first husband, Hsu Chih-mo during the crossroads of traditional Chinese culture and Western ideas. This book includes a chronology of events, prologue, and also an epilogue. Bound Feet & Western Dress was published in New York City, by Anchor Books in October of 1997. Furthermore, from information in this book, I will attempt to write an essay that will explain the changing ideas of the family in modern China, how and why these ideas change, and why Chang Yu-i’s experiences were exceptional.
Yu-i was born in the year 1900, a time when Chinese tradition and culture were taken very serious. As men moved forward, women stayed behind in the past with the sole purpose of becoming the property of a husband one day and giving birth to sons to carry on the family name. Before Yu-i told her story to her niece, there were a few things she wanted her to know so she would understand: “In China, a woman is nothing. When she is born, she must obey her father, when she is married, she must obey her husband. And when she is widowed, she must obey her son.” (6) Children in China are brought up to respect their family and elders and must always inform their parents of where they are going and what they are doing. (10) Yu-i was born into a changing time. In the year that Yu-i was born, a group of Chinese called the Boxers tried to lay siege to Western delegations in Beijing, the capital of China, in which they were successful for two days before being slaughtered by American, Japanese, and Russian forces. “The Boxers were mainly Chinese from the countryside who hated all Western people and ideas and wanted to eradicate any trace of foreign thinking from China.” The Qing government (which was in place at the time) hated Westerners too and lost a large part of China to them as well, however; they were too slow to modernize and act on their own so they secretly supported the Boxers. When her mother would say that women were nothing …she recalls that part of her would hear and part of her would not, and the fact that she was born into changing times gave her two faces, “One that heard talk of the old and the other that heard talk of the new, the part of me that stayed East and the other that looked West.” (15) Coincidental to being born into a time of change or not, the life Chan Yu-i lived was far from typical; in fact, her life was rather exceptional. Foot binding is a painful Chinese custom of tightly wrapping the feet in cloth to force the toes under the sole of the foot to prevent them from growing. Tiny feet were considered beautiful, exuded femininity, and referred to as new moon or lotus petals, after the Tang dynasty concubine who started the tradition. (20) On the fourth day of Yu-i’s foot binding process, her second brother could no longer bear her screams and told their mother to take the bandages off because it was too painful for her and that foot binding was a custom that was no longer beautiful. Mama felt that Yu-i would suffer in the end because no one would marry her with big feet, but second brother—raised to be true to his word—assured her that he would take care of Yu-i if no one would marry her.(22-23) She never had her feet bound again. A few years later, Empress Dowager, who controlled the Qing government, passed a series of reforms banning foot binding which led to Yu-i’s two younger sisters being allowed to grow their feet as well. Another significant change in Chinese thinking was education. Men had been recruited to fill government jobs and in the past, all anyone had to know were the Confucian classics for the state exams. This centuries-old exam system has become obsolete due to certain reforms, which would result in the best candidates for these jobs being the students sent to study abroad to learn the ways of the West. “Baba [Yu-i’s father] wanted very much for all of his sons to complete the classical education at home with tutors and then to attend the new-style schools that taught Western subjects, which would prepare them for further learning abroad.”(45) In arguing that Yu-i’s feet should not be bound, second brother called upon his Western training. (45) Even though the education of Chinese girls was looked upon as unimportant and not supported as much as the education for boys, Yu-i admired her second and fourth brothers intelligence very much and developed a passion for learning herself, “I think my desire for education was due to the fact that I knew that I had been born into changing times.” (56) Her passion for education and adoption of Western ways ultimately led her to become the vice-president of the Shanghai Women’s Savings Bank, which gave her power and a higher social status. Another exceptional family experience in Bound Feet & Western Dress, was the first modern divorce in China between Chang Yu-i and Hsu Chih-mo. The message to Yu-i growing up was that she should marry a Chinese. (64) But even at a very young age she had dreams of Western romance. Yu-i remembered a dream she had where a young white man with wavy brown hair walked into the room, she recalled a kiss she shared with him expressed a feeling of freedom. (63) Furthermore, at the age of twenty-one she even fell deeply in love with a non-Chinese but astonished herself when she broke off the relationship and pronounced the very words from a previous dream: “I would marry a Chinese just to please my father.” (64) Unfortunately, she was not free to choose her own husband. Chinese tradition holds that a girl’s husband must be chosen for her by parents as a sign of filial piety, “This was how it was at the time according to Chinese tradition: I would marry the man my parents chose for me.” (66) In 1915 Yu-i and Hsu Chih-mo were married and an unpleasant experience for Yu-i began to unravel. Chih-mo did not like Yu-i from the beginning, while living with the Chih-mo family, a servant told her what happened when Hsu saw her picture for the first time, “He turned down the corners of his mouth and said with distaste, “Country bumpkin.” So he did not care for me from the very beginning. But even he, who became modern later, did not dare defy tradition. He obeyed his father and married me.” (67) According to Yu-i, Chih-mo ignored her except for the most basic of marital duties, he never looked at her, only through her as if she did not exist, and would often disappear without saying a word. She felt as though she was a modern girl with big feet, but Chih-mo treated her as if she had bound feet—old fashioned and uneducated and did not care for her. (89&90) Eventually Chih-mo would ask for a divorce, a divorce that would be remembered as the first modern divorce in China. Divorce was not common during these times in China; in fact, when Yu-i was a child, the only divorces she had ever heard of occurred when the woman was unfaithful, or jealous, or did not serve the family well. Yu-i was not guilty of any of these and could not believe that Chih-mo would put her in this terrible situation, a situation so terrible that often times a woman would be so disgraced that her family would not take her back. Chih-mo once said that change was sweeping over China that meant freedom without the bonds of ancient customs. Moreover, “…he said that he would challenge these traditions that kept him from acting on his own true feelings: he would be the first man in China to get a divorce.” (100) Chang Yu-i was always concerned about what was right and what was wrong and felt that everything she had done was for her family and the Hsu family. Even though she was divorced, she remained close to the Hsu family as well as Chih-mo. When asked about how she could run a bank, a dress shop, and still be so obedient to Hsu-s and Chih-mo, she replied, “I thought that I had a duty to the Hsu’s because they were my son’s grandparents, and therefore my elders. I grew up with these traditional values; I could not discard them, no matter how Western I became.” She also mentioned that without her divorce from Chih-mo, she may never have been able to find herself. She simply was freed to become someone. (201)

Works Cited
Chang, Pang-Mei Natasha. Bound Feet & Western Dress. New York: Anchor Books, 1997. 6- 201. Print.
Chang, Pang-Mei Natasha. Bound Feet & Western Dress. New York: Anchor Books, 1997.