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Da Ma let out another burp, and Mama smiled, looking as placid as ever. What else could she do except for smiling, pretending that the subject matter didn’t interest her? I knew that Father had never taken her anywhere, let alone the theatre. In fact, Mama hardly stepped out of the house. She mostly stayed within the sphere of the family’s inner quarter; only in rare occasions would she pass the high threshold of the red second door and set foot in the outer quarter which contained the reception hall, rooms for servants, and the garage for rickshaws. When asked to take me to town, she always refused, giving me all kinds of excuses, among which the most favorite was her bound feet.
“Mama, I saw many women with bound feet walking on the street,” I said. “Come on, let’s go. I want to show you the cutest leather shoes I saw on the way home yesterday.” I was dragging and pushing her with all the strength I had, but she wouldn’t budge.
“Why’s wrong with those new shoes you’re wearing?” Mama asked looking at my ugly black cloth shoes. “Didn’t Wang Sao just make them for you?”
“But Mama, some girls in my class are wearing shoes made in cow hide now, and Ling has a pair, too.”
“I can’t walk for too long, my feet hurt if I do.” Mama brushed away my hand, staring at the pointy shoe tips that sticking out of her floral embroidered skirt, frowning.
“You don’t need to walk at all,” I raised another hand to tug her sleeve, begging. “We’ll take the rickshaw to the storefront. I know where it is; I passed by that shop when I was riding in the rickshaw every day.” In fact, the shop next to the shoe store had a lot of nice things also: velvet brats, silk ribbons, embroidered handkerchiefs, hand mirrors, colorful woolen yarns…Things that some of my classmates were wearing on their braids or carrying in their book bags.
“But no woman from a family like ours shows her face to strangers.” Mama yanked my hand off her sleeve, shaking her head, the jade beads hanging on the hairpin dangling helplessly.
“San Ma does,” I said nodding my head, raising my voice. “She went out all the time, and I saw her.”
“She went out only because your father wanted her to accompany him,” Mama smoothed the creases on her sleeve and sighed. “He prefers her because she walks faster; her feet have been unbound when she was younger.”
More than once Mama had griped to me about her misfortune. Her feet were bound when she was six, and by the time the Republic denounced the custom of feet binding and implemented the law to prohibit its practice in 1912, it was too late for her. At twenty-one, the bones of her feet suffered from such contortion that they were beyond repair; she was permanently crippled. San Ma was luckier. She was only fourteen when ordered to unbind her feet, which still had a chance to heal, though not completely.
Although I doubted that was the only reason that Father choose to introduce San Ma
to his social circle, I remained quiet. I was used to Mama finding excuses for herself and others.
Apart from her feet, Mama seemed to accept all the rubbish Fate thrust into her arms. Not a word of complaint. She just stood there, her head bowing, eyes casting on the floor, hands folding in front, and feet peeking out from the hem of the skirt like the beaks of some wounded birds.
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