Bound Feet and Western Dress: A Memoir Book

An interesting life's story in a rapidly changing China, unevenly executed
Watch people when they win, and you will learn something. But watch them when they lose, and you will learn even more.

General and setting
The impressive story of an elite Chinese family and how the 20th century influenced them. We follow Chang Yuyi, who looks back on her long life. From an influential family (priding itself on the gift of two palanquins from the emperor) in the vicinity of Shanghai, the Changs have a front row seat on history transforming China from a feudal to a communist country. They know Zhou Enlai, the later prime minister, and family members are factory owners, directors to the Bank of China, founders of the Kwomingtang and famous philosphers.

Already in the first chapter Yuyi emphasizes that women are nothing and she herself is engaged at age 13 and only narrowly escapes the feet binding. Her household maid is sold to her husbands family at eight, has a few casual gruesome abortions with sharpened twigs and ends up drowning her daughters to avoid starvation.

Respect to elders and magical belief system are also core to the first few years of our narrator growing up. A rice bowl falling at new year foretells misfortune and soothsayers predict if our main character fits with her husband or not. When the answer is not as positive as required, a birth year is pragmatically rearranged to make the marriage between Yuyi and Hsu Chimo possible.

Marriage and becoming independent
Hsu Chimo is poet to whom Yuyi initially looks up to, with him studying at Columbia and Cambridge. However he turns out to be unsympathetic and self centered.
This does lead Yuyi to end up in Cambridge, Paris, Berlin and Hamburg. Here her Chinese beliefs and sense of duty as instilled by her upbringing clash with the western views of her husband.

The experiences of our main character after her return to China were less interesting in my view. There are some burial rites that are described in fascinating detail. But how the story focusses on her development of a strong relationship with the family in law and the love interests of Hsu Chimo, while China is embroiled in war, feels strange. As reader you note very little of the historic context, people make frequent train trips to the countryside and regularly fly from Shanghai to Beijing like nothing is wrong in the outside world. Even the fall of Shanghai to the Japanese is described in no more than three paragraphs.

The reason might be that Yuyi is insulated by her family status and wealth; she even becomes a bank's director because her brother is an important figure at the Bank of China. Not to say that what she achieves is not remarkable, also running a (family financed) clothing store in the evenings after her bank job, but it feels rather nepotistic. In this context her clever investing in certain dies for uniforms during the war, that increase in value hundredfold when supplies run out, feels uncomfortable as well.

The last chapter, with a surprisingly touching confession that Yuyi never said "I love you" to anyone, made her feel a bit more human and casts a light on her character. I got a faint feeling that more might have happened during the war, and that this might explain the emotional detachment of the narration. However this might be a generous interpretation.

Style and conclusion
Yuyi her story is tragic at times, but it is told in a unemotional and matter of fact way. The book really feels like a woman looking back at her life in a non-fiction/biography kind of way. Some of the deaths and events would not fit a novel well, overall the book is quite uneven in pacing and payoff. I feel that if the main character had not been married to a somewhat famous poet this book might not have been published.

Sometimes it was also unclear to me who was the narrator, the author or her great aunt, but then I realised they are in conversation at the start of chapters as the author starts the interview of her great aunt. After this epiphany the reading experience became more logical. However I did not feel that the weaving of the author her own story into the book makes Bound Feet & Western Dress more powerful as a whole.

Overall I liked the first parts of the book due to the insights offered into the traditional Chinese culture, but I found the pacing uneven and the execution plain and sometimes even downright confusing. 2.5 stars rounded down.