Binding Chair: Or, A Visit from the Foot Emancipation Society Book

Oh, goodness, another seemingly Chinese novel with supposedly historic details written by a white woman...
Here's my breakdown of why this book should not be read or bought:

First off, I can understand if a Chinese woman wrote about the life of a certain class of girls set in Shanghai in the 1920's - 1950's. Whenever Westerners write about foot binding, they seem to perpetually assume that it was for all girls in the time period. That simply isn't true at all. Also, not all men were even into that. Any man with any sort of education or was raised in the city did not prefer bound feet at all. I have no idea how accurate the sexual predilections this author wrote about are. Really, it was only very traditional, insular men back in that time period who thought deformed feet were hot. I need to clarify this fact because all the readers who are giving this book a 5-star review think they are learning some historical relevance about China, but really are only glimpsing a small fraction of people who are brought into this practice. I have grandmothers and great grandmothers who were in no danger of ever getting forced into this bound foot business because they lived in the city and were educated. It wasn't common at all in most of the country even in the early 1900's.

This novel's main downfall is that it was written in extremely bad taste. Kathryn Harrison heaps insults upon insults not only about Shanghai, but extends it to the Chinese culture and the Chinese people as a whole. She thinks she is getting away with it because her main protagonist is a Chinese native. However, this character is a grand figment of the author's imagination and has no root in reality or historical context. Instead, May's character serves as the author's own petty, racist, imperialistic (after all she is British) voice. I kid you not, she calls Chinese people less human than white people and instills this irrational hatred into the main character to despise all Chinese men as well since they are animals...
Building upon the main downfall is one that really irked me throughout the entire book. She completely butchers all Chinese words in her novel! It further convinces me that she did no research on what pinyin is and how to romanize Chinese words. She freaking called the Huangpu River the Whangpoo. There's not a single case of any word getting spelled correctly! She's not using the Cantonese spelling or any recognizable spelling. The author most certainly has never heard of Mandarin Chinese. Oy vey. She couldn't even get her main character's name right--Mei, not effing May. And it would have been Meiling or Meili. No one is just named Mei--that's just her vanilla white self assuming things again.

As for the story itself, she should have just focused on the main thread of the bound foot girl, but no, the author extends herself by creating all these unnecessary subplots and characters who nobody cared about.
This book gets one star for writing a mildly interesting section about the rubber trade and then a synthetic replacement. The Dick character is definitely the most likable despite that name ;).

Had Kathryn Harrison read anything remotely historically Chinese, she would have learned that the real foot emancipationist was Mao Ze Dong. It was communism that abolished foot binding, multiple wives practice and many degrading female practices that stemmed from Confucianism. Jesus, just talk to a real Chinese person!

This ain't The Good Earth, that's for sure, but I really expected something more intelligent. Pearl S. Buck was a legit white lady who wrote about Chinese culture.