Hehuang Daughter Trip

In the 24th year of the Republic of China, on the banks of the Huangshui River in Qinghai, 11-year-old Chen Yujuan took the initiative to have her feet bound. In her world, there is no reference to "no foot binding" - A Dayan said that "small feet are decent". Girls in the neighborhood all wear bow shoes, and feudal ethics permeate into "normal order" through families and communities. Like a fish unaware of the existence of water, she only regards the pain of the foot wrap and the broken toes as the duty of being a "serious girl", not as oppression. She endured the severe pain and wound up into a two-inch nine-point golden lotus. She learned how to make bow shoes and practiced female red. She regarded these feet as her greatest honor. When the Anti-Japanese War broke out, her husband Wu Mingtai joined the army with the bow shoes she had sewn. She stepped on the three-inch golden lotus to support the family business alone: ​​dealing with the Ma's army's apportionment, rescuing the Red Army in distress, taking care of the funeral affairs of her parents-in-law, and guarding the precarious home in troubled times. She has never questioned "women's duty", but only adheres to kindness and perseverance in the stability of the rules. After the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, she waited for the sad news that her husband had died for the country, and her mother-in-law also passed away sadly, leaving her alone in the empty house. It wasn't until liberation came, the talented Shi Haixia returned in military uniform, and the new government implemented reforms that she glimpsed another possibility - women could make a living independently without binding their feet. She still cherishes her golden lotus, but takes the initiative to hand over her land and factories to support the changes in the new era. Seeing that girls on the street no longer have their feet bound, and the custom of foot binding is gradually disappearing, she wakes up in the tide of the times: "duty" is never the only thing. This is an epic of survival in troubled times for women with bound feet. It witnesses the process of feudal ethics from "dailyization" to loosening, and also explains the gentle reconciliation of individuals between tradition and the new order. Purpose: Through Chen Yujuan's foot-binding life, the novel reveals the implicit oppression of feudal ethics that have been internalized into individual value standards in the "daily" process, and shows the survival and awakening of traditional women in the transformation of the times, between the framework of ethics and the glory of human nature, traditional cognition and the new order.