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Editorial Reviews:

Amazon.com Review
When Chang Yu-I was three her mother tried to bind her feet. But the child's cries so tormented her brother that he convinced their mother to stop. This break with convention foreshadowed the extraordinary life Yu-i was to lead. After following her husband, poet Hsu Chi-Mo, a noted philanderer, to Oxford, she made history by becoming the first Chinese woman to have a western-style divorce at age 22. Determined to make her own way, she moved to America and served in a series of prestigious positions, including president of a bank. Written by Yu-i's great niece, Pang-Mei Natasha Chang, Bound Feet and Western Dress chronicles the life of this exceptional woman.

Product Description
"In China, a woman is nothing."

Thus begins the saga of a woman born at the turn of the century to a well-to-do, highly respected Chinese family, a woman who continually defied the expectations of her family and the traditions of her culture. Growing up in the perilous years between the fall of the last emperor and the Communist Revolution, Chang Yu-i's life is marked by a series of rebellions: her refusal as a child to let her mother bind her feet, her scandalous divorce, and her rise to Vice President of China's first women's bank in her later years.

In the alternating voices of two generations, this dual memoir brings together a deeply textured portrait of a woman's life in China with the very American story of Yu-i's brilliant and assimilated grandniece, struggling with her own search for identity and belonging. Written in pitch-perfect prose and alive with detail, Bound Feet and Western Dress is the story of independent women struggling to emerge from centuries of customs and duty.

Customer Reviews: Read 29 more reviews...

4 out of 5 stars

Excellent look into a different time & culture January 2, 2009
This book was wonderful read. It truly provides you a look into a different time and place. If you are a westerner that thinks foot binding was evil and kept women captive & subserviant that this book will be an inspirational look into the true power of women and all that we can accomplish with focus, dedication and hard work, regardless of your heritage, or birth rite.

5 out of 5 stars

Bound Feet&Western Dress: A Memoir March 24, 2008
This book was so interesting, I think I read it in less than two days. It shows the changes Asian women went through as history marched on. I had no other way of knowing any of this information, and it's so different from my own culture.

5 out of 5 stars

Complex, interesting true story, full of information about Chinese culture and mores February 12, 2008
I found this book to be a compelling read. It does reveal, while the author is relating the life of her great aunt from China, a lot of interesting information related to the customs, traditions and mores of the old Chinese culture in the early twentieth century. Her great aunt was the first in old china to get divorced from her husband, after being abandoned by him .She was young, poorly educated, with two children, one of whom tragically died shortly after her divorce. She morphs from a poorly educated, dependent woman into a self-reliant,educated, successful woman, who eventually becomes a VP of the Shanghi Woman's Savings Bank and helps ensure it's survival, while Japan was invading Shanghi. Luckily, she leaves Shanghi a day before the Japanese take over and moves to Hong Kong. Eventually, she remarries in 1952 and then, after her second husband dies in 1972, she emigrates to the USA. When her great niece finds her name in books while she is studying Far East Culture while studying at Harvard University, she is amazed to find her great aunt's name listed and then decides to interview her, and thus the idea of the book emerges and is completed over many years. A truely unusual and compelling book to read for anyone interested in the Chinese culture, people and history. Quite a different read, inspiring and moving in many ways.

5 out of 5 stars

An Intriguing Read December 9, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful

In the late 1990s, the Chinese-American Pang-Mei Natasha Chang wrote her first book entitled "Bound Feet and Western Dress," which accounts the life story of the author's great aunt, Chang Yu-i. The author was the first generation of the Chang family to be born in the United States. She wrote the book about her own search of Chinese identity in the American world and the tale of her great aunt's hard and interesting life.

The book is broken into fifteen chapters, which describe the early life of Yu-i, the history of the Chang family, the life of the author herself, the lifestyle of women in China, the marriage and the divorce of Yu-i and Hsu Chih-mo, and the last years of Yu-i's life.

One can understand the influence of modernity on the Chinese society and the Chinese women as one look at the author's great aunt as a traditional girl and her strength as a woman, why Chih-mo marry her, and the significance of their divorce in this book. "Bound Feet and Western Dress" is intriguing work and an enjoyable read.

5 out of 5 stars

Top-Hats, Half-Moons, and the Painful Glint of Changes July 16, 2007
11 out of 11 found this review helpful

Change can be a frightening affair, and looking back at change can be something that seems almost alien when beheld in the light of certain convictions. That seems to encapsulate the whole of the experience that Chang Yu-I talks about as she tries to explain something of who she is to her granddaughter, Pang-Mei, and it is one of the things that seemed to haunt me as a reader as I listened to Yu-I's tale. The chapters switch from Yu-I to Pang-Mei to give you and idea of how things have changed and to try to identify one person with the other, and I have to say that I found myself glued to the pages and not able to stop reading this book. At first I simply thought it was a story about a granddaughter wanting to explore her grandmother's life because she was the first person to have a Western-style divorce in China, and maybe that was her reason beginning the book. Still, the book goes well beyond that and touches on the dynamics of change and strength and how strong a person can be even when they think they are at their weakest.

Honestly, I thought I could vicariously feel my heart cracking under the weight of some of Yu-I's confessions, amazed by some of the things she was able to tell her granddaughter.

One of the best things about this tale is the detail that Yu-I goes into about China, and about the way things were seen in the past versus the way things became seen as war loomed on the horizon. Yu-I gives a great amount of detail about what it was like to be a child in a country like China, and she vividly recollects what its like to have one's feet bound and the reasons why this practice took place. All that breaking and rebreaking, the tying of the big toe over and over again; when I read this I cringed because it seemed so debilitating just to have a crescent-shape added to the foot. Furthering this are pictures in the book, showing what the feet actually look like when this happens - you can see the shriveled remains of feet that look almost mummified, and you can tell some of the extremes that went into making a foot look like that. Yu-I talks about the pain that's she, herself, experienced because of this practice, too; she tells her granddaughter about being three and having her mother try to bind her feet, and then talks about the torment of those moments and how it was her brother that made her stop this because he couldn't deal with her suffering. Yu-I goes on to tell of the pain that this caused her, too, with her always feeling as if she were ugly because she had "big feet" and "big feet" made a person almost untouchable when it comes to marriage. Still, she does marry the poet Hsu Chi-Mo and, for a time, she thinks this is perfect and learns the rites of being a wife. She cares for the mother-in-law, she takes care of the husband's family; basically she becomes a slave and thinks that this dedication is seem by her husband as love. It is only when she moves to a foreign country with her husband that she finds out what he is like and how she is alone, and when she understands that she is utterly abandoned she explains how it feels to want to die.

There are other painful things in the book, too, things I can't disclose without messing up part of the tale, but I can say that when she is in Germany and loses something more dear to her than anything that this was devastating to read, making the book almost too heavy to pick up because its honesty was like a barb in the soul. I appreciated that, to be honest, and can say that I have read a lot of pieces of literature but that I have rarely encountered a person like Yu-I that both loves the world she lives in, understands the things that she has experienced, and even knows what forgiveness is like.
While this normally would not be something I would recommend, it has my highest recommendation and the most humble form of respect I can give, thinking it an enduring read that really has something to say.
I cannot give the book or the voice behind it enough praise.

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