The Binding Chair Read Online Free PDF

she walked slowly backward on her own tiny feet. The table legs whined and wept against the wood floor, but May made no noise as she cried. Yu-ying’s binding technique was so skillful that with each tread the bandages tightened, crushing May’s toes.
    “It hurts you now, Chao-tsing, and it will hurt you tomorrow and the day after that. This month and the following. All this year you will have pain, but the next year will be better, and by the time your feet fit the butterfly shoes, they will feel nothing.” Yu-ying continued to walk backward as she spoke, and on the other side of the table May followed, not daring to drop her gaze from her grandmother’s eyes.
    “When you are grown,” Yu-ying said, “you will be very beautiful. Your feet will be the smallest and the most perfectly formed lotuses. Your walk will be the walk of beauty, and we will tell your suitors that you never cried out when your feet were bound.” They reached the door, and Yu-ying pulled the table over the sill and into the courtyard that divided her wing from that of her daughter-in-law.
    “Tell me how you never cried out,” Yu-ying said. “Say the words, I never cried out.”
    “I never cried out,” May whispered, her face wet.
    “Again.”
    “I never cried out.”
    “Louder!”
    “ I never cried out. ”
    “Do you hear that?” Yu-ying said to Chu’en, who was standing at the threshold of her room, watching the slow progress of the old woman and the child across the slab-paved courtyard, each holding tight to the sides of the little black table. “Here is your daughter, Chao-tsing, who is telling you that she has had her feet bound and she did not cry out.”
    Chu’en, arms folded, stared. She stood on her own bound feet and willed herself not to cry lest she distract May and cause her to falter or to moan.
    At last they reached the doorway. Yu-ying took May’s hands from the table’s edge—she had to pull them off—and transferred them to Chu’en’s hips. She called for a servant to take the table back to her room, and as he retreated with it she looked at her daughter-in-law and granddaughter. “So,” she said. “It is begun.”
    Chu’en forced herself to bow. “Thank you, Mother,” she said.
    Yu-ying nodded. “Perhaps a rest before it is time to eat.”
    In Chu’en’s bedroom, May and her mother lay on the bed and held one another and wept, their faces hot and wet and pressed into each other’s necks. The bed shook, but they made no sound. Outside, a dog barked; the cook lowered a bucket into the well and the rope squealed against the pulley.
    That night, the evening of the birthday of the Goddess of Mercy, May’s father did not return home from work. Instead he stayed out, playing poker and ma chiang at the home of the local police detective. It was another day before May had the opportunity to speak with him and to discover him unmoved by her tears, the look on his face one of ill-concealed exasperation. “Whimpering is for a mother’s ears,” he said, and he turned away.
    Who, or what, could have inspired such impertinent hopes in a daughter? Was not suffering the lot of females? After all, he himself enjoyed marriage to a nimble and delicate woman—a woman whose whole foot he could take into his rectum, even as her left hand cupped his testicles, her right squeezed the shaft of his penis, and her mouth wet his glans. There was a price for luxury, for a house with servants. Every daughter must arrive at that time when life as a child, petted, carefree, is over.
    E VERY THREE DAYS , May’s feet were washed and rebound. Every month she wore a smaller shoe. Yu-ying had a carved ivory ruler with which she measured May’s feet. The ivory was marked not in inches but in the gradations of pleasure May’s feet might one day arouse. Titillation. Solace. Satisfaction. Delight. Bliss. Ecstasy. As May progressed through measures of bewitchment the bones in her toes were slowly, inexorably broken. The skin on her