Grandmother’s Footsteps
Penelope Fitzgerald, 9 April 1992
Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China
by Jung Chang.
HarperCollins, 524 pp., £17.50, March 1992,0 00 215357 2 Show More
by Jung Chang.
HarperCollins, 524 pp., £17.50, March 1992,
“... Jung Chang’s grandmother, Yu Fang, walked ‘like a tender young willow in a spring breeze’, meaning that she could only totter because her feet had been bound and the arches crushed with a stone. If this was not done, a girl would be exposed to the contempt of her husband’s family and she would blame her mother for weakness ... ”