Jane Yang’s novel The Lotus Shoes (2025) follows two young girls with intertwined lives as they grow up in the late Qing Dynasty period (the late 1800s and into the early 1900s). Their individual lives are sharply defined by social changes happening at the macro level.
The progressives in the country are moving away from the practices of foot binding for girls and away from the male-dominant Confucian ideals. Young modernists are starting to look West (and even to Christianity) for new values and practices. The conservatives are holding on to old ways, requiring female obedience and servitude.
Little Flower is 6. It is the sixth year of Emperor Guangxu’s rule (1880). She has had bound feet—”golden lilies”—for two years, with her tender bones bent to the binding because of an emperor’s erotic whim and its impact on society. [It is said that Emperor Li Yu of the Southern Tang dynasty popularized this practice based on his obsession with a concubine, Yao Niang, known for dancing with bound feet. This practice started in the 10th century and went on for generations through to the early 20th century.] Little Flower’s parents had hoped that she can make a future marital match that could mean less of a life of rural poverty.
Little Flower and her mother hitch a ride with a local farmer on his cart to Canton City in S.E. China. The little girl does not realize it yet, but the premature death of her father from an unexpected illness means that she is being sold. She will become a muizai or indentured maid (slave) to an imperious young woman her same age. Her illiterate mother extracts a promise from her to maintain the foot binding in her new household, or she would never see her mother again. Her focus will shift to her surviving son, into whom she will invest the little she has for carpentry studies.
Her mother advises her:
You will be a slave girl but you’ll have food to eat and a roof over your head. You’ll live better than we do…Be good, grateful and patient. Follow orders and always remember your place. A muizai is her mistress’s shadow. You are there to do her bidding. Don’t ever forget that. You must never argue or disobey orders. Life is easier for those who can swallow bitterness and accept their lot.
The young mistress is Linjing, a privileged young woman who is the apple of her father’s eye. He has fought hard to ensure that her feet grow naturally because he is a modern(ish) man, with ambitions for his beloved daughter’s life. He enters into an arranged marriage agreement with a powerful man, Lord Li, Viceroy of Tianjin, to marry his daughter off to his first son. He has hopes that she will be bilingual. Meanwhile Linjing’s Aa De (father) has an official job in store for this tradeoff. The paternal decision-making shows something of the sense of responsibility for the young and the planning many years ahead for their lives.
Little Flower, the slave, and Linjing, her owner, take on a relationship of sibling rivalry. Little Flower wants her freedom, in order to marry and bear children. Linjing wants her to be her slave forever and advocates against her release. Into this relationship comes Abigail Hart, a Christian missionary and activist, who believes in full female emancipation and choice about the life any woman can have.
What follows are occasional challenges to the power of traditions and the male patriarchy. Those who challenge family power are subject to the matriarch’s cruelty and strict following of the Fong family’s Gaa Faat (the Ancestral Book of Domestic Rules). One muizai escapes only to be punished severely for running away. Another tries to escape and loses some of her fingers as punishment. The maiming is a form of killing the chicken to scare the monkey. The punishments are public among the larger clan in order to enforce the power, with matriarchs in charge of the women’s side of the family enforcing the subservience.
For young women, their main way out is through marriage. Through their husbands, they may acquire some social status and access to resources, even if they are one of a number of wives. Matchmakers in this world are of particular value because they may make the life-changing connections.
Little Flower has a skill for embroidery. She has astute observations of human nature. She can work through a problem towards a possible solution. Linjing is presumptuous about her position in society. She is impatient and impulsive. She is cunning in working the social relationships around her to get her way. She is jealous of Little Flower’s aesthetic talents with sewing and embroidery and takes every effort to sabotage her.
The world of The Lotus Shoes is a brutal one, with a majority of the population dispossessed. It is a world in which geomancers have power in foretelling fortunes and fates. Ceremonies may be conducted to determine blood relations. Girls and women who aspire to marriage pray to the deity Jyut Lou to find a mate.
The novel follows the two in their unpredictable lives. Jyutping is used for the Cantonese representations using the English alphabet. This is pinyin albeit for the Cantonese dialect of Chinese.
Yang, the author, was born in Saigon, in Vietnam, and raised in Australia. She is a clinical researcher. She writes with an assured author hand. The Lotus Shoes brings readers into an imaginative and dramatic world based on historical practice. It leaves readers considering how sensitive people are to the socially constructed worlds around them, and just how unjust humanity can be if unchecked.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
