At that moment, I was determined to bind my feet much more tightly no matter how painful it was. To Yao and fellow aficionados of lotus feet, stories like Jin's were a kind of sacred pornography. Seen through Western eyes, foot binding, which was outlawed during the Cultural Revolution, might seem an archaic, barbarous ritual. To novelist and poet Wang Ping, however, whose new book Aching Beauty offers a fascinating survey of the custom's history and cultural significance, foot binding is the key to a deeper mystery, tied as much to her own past as to that of China. On a luminous fall afternoon, Wang is sitting outside her office in the leaf-blown quadrangle of Macalester College, where she has taught creative writing for the past two years.
Sunlight filters through tree branches overhead.
At age 43 she might still pass for one of the students walking across the campus, though she now has two children of her own with her partner Adam Lerner, of Minneapolis-based Lerner Publications. In her fiction, Wang deals with the psychic fallout of self-imposed exile. Looking back they regard the bondage of the past with a mixture of sorrow and regret. They are free in exile, but also adrift in the world. Aching for Beauty , a nonfictional treatise that originated as Wang's NYU Ph.D. thesis, might seem a sharp departure from her previous, highly autobiographical work.