The Three-Inch Golden Lotus
A Novel on Foot Binding
By Feng Jicai; Translated by David Wakefield
SERIES:
Fiction from Modern China
University of Hawaii Press
This beguiling story is woven around the life of Fragrant Lotus, who has her feet bound in the supreme Golden Lotus style when she is six years old. Events in Fragrants Lotus’ life twist and unfold in a series of witty and often wicked ironies, obliterating easy distinctions between kindness and cruelty, history and fable, forgery and authentic work. The novel’s waggish narrator exists in the tension between judgement and description, wryly deflating his reader’s certainties along the way. Written in 1985, The Three-Inch Golden Lotus is a deeply affecting, thoroughly enjoyable literary revelation.
An excellent, truly engaging novel of high literary merit. Feng tells his story brilliantly, with a great deal of playful ironic distance, choosing foot binding as the means of investigating China’s past as a comment on the present.
The translation by David Wakefield is noteworthy. While he follows Feng’s text very closely, ... he strikes the necessary balance between readability and precision. As such, The Three-Inch Golden Lotus will be understood and enjoyed by a broad spectrum of educated readers.
Presented with self-conscious, postmodern sophistication, and raises questions of universal relevance: about the sexual allure of the unnatural... and about the extremes that fashion—mental as well as physical—can take us to.
