A few days ago, I had a WeChat call with my 90-year-old eldest sister and talked about the year of the flood in my hometown, when she was only 15 years old, and she and her mother drove all night. At that time, I was still a child, and I only remember waking up in the morning, when the rain was pouring outside the thatched hut, and the water in the thatched hut was flooded to the bed pedals, my young lady and I sat on the edge of the bed, watching the shoes on the muddy floor float up and sink into the water. My mother and eldest sister went to the river in the middle of the night with gasoline lamps to drive for water, and we waited for a long time, but the shoes gradually peeked out of the water and the water on the pedals gradually receded.
With a bang, the door opened, and the mother and eldest sister rushed into the house wet, and the rain flowed all over the ground.
The eldest sister also thought about it and said, in fact, it was she who was in the water, not her mother, and her mother had wrapped her little feet, and the water was easy to slide down. At that time, the crops in the field were flooded, the mother was anxious, and the father was in the army all the year round, so the mother had no choice but to let the eldest sister go to the car. The eldest sister has not grown yet, and it is only a little higher than the waterwheel crossbar, so the mother does not leave her side to prevent the eldest sister from falling into the water when she is sleepy and tired.
I was amazed to hear it. I know that my mother binds her feet and puts her feet down, and she has a pair of "liberated feet". I washed my mother's feet and cut her toenails, and I looked closely at her half-crippled feet, whose four toes were curled up and her big toes stubbornly straight. I held my mother's poor feet and lamented the pain they had suffered, and I asked and asked about the details of the footbinding, and my mother answered all the questions, but I ignored my mother after putting her feet, and she was still in pain, and she couldn't even get water.
Mother was born in 1915, is the youngest daughter of her grandmother, according to her should not bind her feet, in 1912, Sun Yat-sen issued the "Great ** Order of the Ministry of the Interior to persuade the provinces to prohibit foot binding", and earlier, after the Qing army entered the customs, it was also ordered to abolish the cruelty of women's foot binding, but the bad habits formed for thousands of years, the aesthetic consciousness of the deformed patriarchal society, can not be changed overnight.
My grandmother is a capable and well-behaved woman, she herself has a pair of small feet wrapped like zongzi, I went to my grandmother's house when I was a child, I saw her feet, four toes embedded in the soles of the feet, bent into a deep groove, when she walked, her small feet were broken, her waist skirt swayed, she just couldn't walk fast. Grandma supports these little feet of flesh and bones, and she is still busy working in the house every day.
My mother started binding her feet when she was five or six years old, and my grandmother said that the younger you are, the more tender your bones become. Before binding her feet, she scalded her mother's feet with hot water, bent the four toes except the hallux toes to the soles of her feet, applied alum, and wrapped her mother's feet tightly with the cloth she had woven. The mother bared her teeth in pain, but she didn't dare to cry. It's really a "pair of small feet, a jar of tears"!
My grandfather worked in town and didn't come home often. When I came home one day, I heard my mother hiding in the quilt and sobbing, my grandfather lifted the quilt, knew that his daughter was bound to her feet, and said angrily: What age is it, and her feet are still bound! As he spoke, he removed his daughter's footcloth and threw it on the ground, and the mother who removed the footcloth felt comfortable.
The next day, my grandfather went to work in the town, and my grandmother turned around and re-wrapped my mother's feet, which were stronger than before, and she not only dragged my mother to walk wildly in the presence of the house, but also told her to go to collect firewood, light fires, and cut sheep grass, my mother limped in pain, and breathed in the slightest, and my grandmother pretended not to see. My mother just wanted my grandfather to come home soon.
When my grandfather came back, he was angry when he entered the door: tell you not to wrap up, don't wrap up, and wrap up! These feet are born, and the eyes, nose, and ears on the face are the same as those given by God, why don't you cut off your nose and ears, and you can't get along with these feet? My grandfather removed my mother's footwrap and threw it outside the house. Grandma was dissatisfied, she put away the footcloth with a calm face, and complained in her mouth: You are harming her, you don't care if you can't get married? Grandpa said: Don't worry about me, there is a big ** tube, it was Sun Yat-sen who persuaded women not to bind their feet! Grandma only knows that there is an emperor, but she doesn't know that there is **. She didn't even know that the bad habit of binding women's feet was not stipulated by the emperor, nor was it an act of the state, but a social creation of male superiority and inferiority of women. Those rich and powerful men, driven by a deformed aesthetic sense, gradually formed a trend and intensified. When people generally think that women with bound feet are good-looking, and blind dates are an important condition, women can only follow the customs.
Grandma actually felt sorry for her daughter, and later heard that people in the town did not bind their feet, and there were little girls in the village who were noisy and refused to wrap, so her tone was much softer. My grandparents fought like this for a few rounds, and my grandmother was defeated, and my mother, who was supposed to endure three or four years of torture, quickly let go. By this time her toes had been deformed and bent, and her feet had grown slowly, stopping at 34 yards. In this life, it has always been difficult for us to buy shoes for our mother, but fortunately, my mother is as capable as my grandmother, tying the soles, cutting the shoes, and putting on the uppers, she can do everything. With her free feet, she walked all over the fields, carrying burdens and cutting wheat, inside and outside the house, and could do anything. But after all, her feet are deformed, and she will hurt when she walks more, and my grandmother's house is 40 miles away from our house, and when she was first liberated, there was no transportation. Every once in a while, my mother misses my grandmother and wants to go and see it, giving her a chicken or bacon and rice cakes and rice wine made by herself. She was silent, going out in the dark, going home in the dark. Because I didn't worry about our children, I didn't dare to stay at my mother's house for one night. We never asked my mother how she endured the pain in her feet and walked 80 miles back and forth a day just to see her grandmother. As soon as my mother came home, we were so happy that we forgot everything.
On that day, my eldest sister told me that the custom of binding small feet in our hometown lasted until the 40s of the last century, when it was basically extinct.
Mother was lucky, at the end of the foot binding, she was finally liberated and had a pair of free feet.
For these feet, my mother has experienced such pain and ups and downs, and she can walk her own way like ordinary people, and she has walked a lot in her life until the end of her life at the age of 94. (Wang Zhousheng).