Lotus Foot Metamorphosis

Da Zi Bao, Red Empire Changing Colors: A novel-in-progress


18 DECEMBER 2019, 
HALL GARDNER


In black silk, head covered over in a yellow and white scarf, she hobbles in pain down the street. An elderly woman, her feet and four toes had been mangled and bound as an infant, a relic of yesteryear's Confucian ideal of elite Han beauty—a bizarre and aberrant statement of protest against the bestial behavior of the Manchu barbarians—that foot fetish of the three to five-inch lotus root.