Bound Feet & Western Dress

Pang-Mei Natasha Chang

Doubleday

1996

215 páginas

7h 10m

ISBN-10: 0385479638

"In China, a woman is nothing". Thus begins the saga of a Chang Yuyi, a woman born into a well-to-do, highly respected Chinese family. Growing up in the perilous years between the fall of the last emperor and the Communist Revolution, Chang Yuyi's life is marked by a series of rebellions that will make her one of the most famous women in Chinese history: her refusal as a child to let her mother bind her feet, her scandalous divorce as a young woman from the famous poet Hsu Chimo, and finally, her rise to Vice President of China's first women's bank in her later years.In the alternating voices of two generations, this dual memoir brings together the textured portrait of Yuyi's life in China and the story of her brilliant and assimilated greatniece Pang-Mei Natasha Chang, struggling with her own search for identity and belonging.

Written in vivid detail and pitch-perfect prose, Bound Feet and Western Dress shows us independent women struggling to emerge from centuries of customs and duty, and reveals the power of storytelling itself, as great-aunt Yuyi confides her innermost dreams and demons to the author in this critically acclaimed literary debut.