A True Religion

It is an incontrovertible fact that the most vulnerable people have always been the poor. And among them, it is children and widows that are most wretched.

Thus it is said that a religion that is faultless must look after widows and orphans in their distress.

This is the heart and message of Deepa Mehta's moving 2005 film, Water, about a young Brahmin widow trapped in a condition of poverty and perversion.

Chuyia is only 7 years old when her betrothed husband, some twenty years her major, dies. Her family sends her away to a far off ashram to live as a widow forever, as is the proscribed religious practice in India. Her head is shaved and she wears only white cloth to show her new "untouchable" status.

The movie peels away the layers of cultural and religious formalities to show us the true reason for sending widows away to live in isolated communities: money. One less mouth to feed, four saris less to buy, and one cot less to be taken up. In a society of subsistence-level living, one woman is too much of a burden on the family-unit without a man to work for her. Thus children are betrothed at a young age and widows are shipped off to beg for a living.

But the movie does not stop there. It goes into the age-old dark underbelly of poverty: sexual exploitation. Under the delusion of sanctity, old Brahmin men pay to have sex with the youngest widows, justifying it as an honor and a blessing for the women.

It's been almost 10 years since I've cried watching a movie, but Water made me bawl like a baby during the last scene (ha! aptly named). I could've enjoyed it more without the unrealistic Bollywood elements, but eh, whatcha gonna' do.

Water is generally moving and artistic, with strong moral elements. But it manages to manueuver between over-simplicity and meaningless ambiguity with surprising and refreshing agility.

It is a simple cry for human compassion--the ultimate barometer of truth.

Golden Lilies

They should be small,
narrow,
straight,
pointed, and
arched, yet still
fragrant and soft in texture.

7 centimeters,
about the length of a thumb
is the ideal.

A perfect foot should be shaped like the bud of a lotus.
It should be full and round at the heel,
come to a point at the front,
with all weight borne on the big toe alone.

This means that the toes and arch of the foot must be broken and bent under to meet the heel. Finally the cleft formed by the forefoot and heel should be deep enough to hide a large cash piece perpendicularly within its folds.

If I could attain all that, happiness would be my reward.

Footbinding would make me more marriageable and therefore bring me closer to the greatest love and greatest joy in a woman's life--a son.

--from Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

This book I've been reading has all the subtlety and literary pleasure of an 8th grader's diary, but I've endured the prose to satiate my morbid curiosity about my own misogynistic culture.

The hatred of women is everywhere in ancient Chinese culture and like a bad trainwreck, I just cannot look away.

From girl-hood women are called "worthless daughters" in ritualistic poems--branches that must be pruned off. It is better to have your infant daughter be born dead than alive.

"Raising a daughter is like building an expensive road for others to use."

The ideal Confucian woman had two tenets:

(1) Obedience. "When a girl, obey your father; when a wife, obey your husband; when a widow, obey your son."

(2) The Four Virtues:
"Be chaste and yielding, calm and upright in attitude;
be quiet and agreeable in words;
be restrained and exquisite in movement;
be perfect in handiwork and embroidery."

In one common moral tale, a woman fulfills all the Confucian ideals and lives an exemplary life and gets a reward--to be reincarnated as the highest being on earth: a son.

But nowhere is that misogny more evident than in the ritual of foot-binding. This disgusting practice that began when a girl was 6, was seen as the defining symbol of status and worth. The perfect feet are called "golden lilies" because of their resemblance to the lily plant. They are formed by tucking the toes beneath a girl and having her walk on them until each toe breaks and then until the whole upper-foot bone breaks!

This "procedure" of course was unbearably painful and caused the woman pain for the rest of her life. 1 in 10 girls died during footbinding due to infections.

Footbinding was to insure that women would never venture out into the world of men. Their place was within the home, in the upper-woman's-chamber. There they would embroider and sew until they died. Clown-footed servants (whose feet were not bound) did the cooking and cleaning.

Although other cultures have relegated women to a place far below men and worshipped aesthetics far from natural, I can't imagine one more systematically linked between submission and status.

Is it any wonder then that, to this day, Chinese girls are stereotypically thought of as too submissive and obedient? Conventional. Unoriginal. Mice? Were we not bred for centuries to embody these very "virtues" in body and soul?

The irony is that I never knew any of this growing up in California. My mother didn't have a whiff of submission to men on her and certainly passed nothing of Confucian submission on to me. (Well, that's not true, she liked the part about being filial.)

But some exceptions do not prove the rule. An entire civilization built on a foundation of misogyny will leave its mark. China's daughters must be redeemed from this (somewhat literally) broken cultural past.