Bound Feet & Western Dress: A Memoir

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.