What is footbinding?

Thought I'd share some stuff I wrote as an intro to footbinding, I haven't cited the source yet.

One cannot fully comprehend any discussion related to footbinding without understanding the process of how footbinding is done. There are different methods for binding the feet, of course, but all of which involve pressing the toes down as far into the soles of your feet as possible, so that the bones of your toes and your arch break. Then using cotton or silk bandages that are approximately ten feet long and 2-3 inches wide, the feet is wrapped firmly to keep the toes pressed against the sole, so that the broke foot is folded at the arch, and also breaking the side bones to make your feet narrow. The binding is then sewn tightly together and, depending on how wealthy the family is, the bandages get changed from once a week or everyday so that the feet can be cleaned and bandages can be tightened to continue making the feet smaller. This is done for about two to three years until the feet are the ideal length, which is around 3-4 inches.

In spite of the excruciating pain that results from having your feet broken and bounded by tight bandages, the girl is also asked to walk around to further crush the bones of her feet into a desired shape. Often, during this process, infections would result, sometimes leading to gangrene. However, it was seen as fortunate if the toes fall off, as that would make the feet even smaller. What would not be good is when the entire foot needs to get amputated. In fact, an adage that’s often recited by mothers who help bind their daughters’ feet transliterates as “no rot no small, more rot more good”, essentially pointing out that if the flesh doesn’t rot and decay, then it would be difficult for the feet to achieve the desired effect. (CITATION)

Very General, Non-detailed Update of TW

It seems as though I've even abandoned my weak attempt at micro-blogging, not that anyone was encouraging the behaviour to begin with. My Internet at home pretty much blows (slow as hell), though I should be grateful that my friend Bruce has lent me a USB connection stick that allows me to connect tothe Internet anywhere in Taiwan as long as there is cell phone reception.

At any rate, here is a short update with what has been going on in my life in the last few weeks after I left Toronto:

Week 1 (June 24-28th): Taiwan Tech Trek's orientation. We went to TaiChung and area, which is approximately the center area of the Taiwan island. There are about a little more than 200 of us in the program and we were divided into 24 groups. My group only had 8 people and we spent the next four days touring together. I finished uploading the photos of the orientation after three weeks (at the rate of 5 pics a day) on Facebook.

Week 2: First week of work and Adam's arrival. On Monday, I began my position in the Historical Demography Program at Academia Sinica. I am a research assistant for the head of this program and he wants me to do research on footbinding in order to write a conference paper on the subject, backed up by historical demographic data in Taiwan, to be presented at the TTT academic conference. I'm also holding Seminars on how to write effective academic papers. On Tuesday, Adam arrived. I picked him in the wee hours of the morning and from thereon, we toured Taipei whenever I'm not at work.

Week 3: Second week of work and Hong Kong. Nothing general to report except that we took a trip to HK on the weekend. I hope I will end up making an entry about how much HK sucks (IMO).

Week 4: This week. Well since it's not over yet, I will report it later. Prof. Harris and I finally finished the paper we are going to submit to the Cognitive Semiotics journal! I will hopefully upload more pics on Facebook when Adam heads home and I'm less busy after work.

TTFN!

Happy Birthday Pooface!!

Four weeks ago, I ordered Adam a present, unfortunately, it takes very long for it to be made, so even though it's his birthday today, he still doesn't have it. =(

However, as I would like for him to open something on the day of, Adam's sister, Amanda, and I bought some felt, ripped open an old pillow from my house and decided to make him a stuffed poo (with a penguin attached). Amanda taught me how to make blanket stitches and we started our test subject the penguin. I ended up doing everything ok, though Amanda had to help me fix my templates (cuz they were always lopsided) and the stitches obviously look amateur. I did most of the work on the penguin and Amanda made and stuffed the feet.

The poo was actually a little more work! Amanda made the top poop with one round circle, one long rectangle and three triangles. I made the two bottom parts with some instructions from Amanda and together we put the three parts together. There were a lot of errors on the poo that I never bothered fixing, I figured it's a piece of poo anyway :D Below are the pics!

 

Happy Birthday King Pooface!! 

Camping 2009

So....Camping this year at Silent Lake (again) was quite..erm...interesting...
Recap:

• Day 1 was cold and wet, as it rained in the morning. We spent the entire morning putting up and taking down tents and tarps due to poor planning.
  
• Once we stopped moving and settled down, we began to feel the cold and I began layering on clothing and socks. I managed to put on five layers of clothing and three pairs of socks in the course of the evening.
• Went to sleep with all five layers of clothes and three layers of socks in two sleeping bags, feet were frozen and had trouble sleeping.
• Day 2 was colder than day 1. I changed into 7 layers of strategically layered clothing early in the morning: was still cold throughout the day.
• We took a very short hike with the boys taking turns carrying the 2 ton botchey (sp?) balls only to come back and not use it.
• Drove to the picnic area and guys played a game of football, with a lot of cheating.
• Justin poked Carmen in the face with a huge log Three Stooges style.
• Perry managed to get stuck into a ditch despite we told him it would be bad idea to drive into it. Took 7 guys to get him out in the course of at least 30 minutes.
• Adam accidentally pushed me and i almost fell face forward into the campfire.
• Any time any of us were not doing something (which is most of the time) we stood around the charcoal bbq with a ton of clothes and our hands out like hobos under a bridge.
  
• Went to bed in more layers of clothing and socks but was still frozen and could not sleep.
• Day 3: Nice and warm and sunny but we had to pack and go home.
• Important to note that we were constantly eating. For the first two day, we must have had like 6 meals and the last day we had 2 meals in four hours in the morning before we headed home.

Cost of the trip: $103 each (how did we spent $1400?)
Lessons learned: Priceless

• Now I know why homeless people dress the way they do as they are outdoors 24/7
• We use more than a bottle of water when brushing our teeth.
• There are almost no bugs in the cold. When camping, pick your battle: bugs or freeze.
• Be grateful for shelters and central heating and the luxury of wearing one layer of clothing in May when walking around outdoors for all but five minutes.
• I see no point in living outdoors.

Pictures to come.

Microblogging

I've been really busy. I don't want to say that I'm gonna be giving up on blogging, but it's going to be a while before I can sit down and write something longer than 140 characters. Why 140 you ask? Because that's the max number of characters Twitter allows you to have. For those of you who have not noticed, I have managed to place a Twitter Gadget on the sidebar for quite a while now, under the title "That's what she said" (I don't even like the Office). Anyway, I've been microblogging nowadays in replacement. You don't need to get twitter to follow it but say hi if you have it :)