bound reputation

Growing up in the Midwest was not ideal for me but it did force me to conform to white middle America.  My cousins in Los Angeles would tease me and tell me that I was a banana.  Yellow on the outside, white in the inside.  Maybe I was.

In World History class, in the tenth grade, I was the only Asian.  My teacher was a cantankerous and held high expectations from all his students, especially me.  Whenever he lectured about any Asian country, he expected me to be an expert in them.  All of them.  What did I know about the Vietnam dynasties?  What did I know about Ayutthaya Kingdom?  I was fucking Korean.  I didn’t know shit about other countries, other than most of Asia was either taken over by the Chinese, Japanese, Mongols, British, French, or Spaniards.  

Mr. Pride was unrelenting.  If I told him that I didn’t know the answer to his questions, he kept going at me.  Question after question.  It was non-stop harassment.  It came to a point where I either became a scholar in Asian history or I was going to be humiliated every day and fail.  I chose the first option to my chagrin. 

As I was reading about the history of China, I came across footbinding.  I found that the whole footbinding being a rite of passage to be…dog water…Ohio, if you will.  Young girls folding their toes underneath the soles of their foot, tightly bandaged, causing their bones to break.  This was to give the illusion of smaller feet and further perpetuated the patriarchy of men exerting control over women’s bodies, reinforcing gender roles and classism, and of course male dominance.  Mr Pride mentioned that it also prevented the women from running away from their husbands because they were in pain and/or their gaits were usually unsteady, often times the toes were infected and gangrene because it lacked circulation.  Like…why? It boggles my mind to think that this was considered high class and dare I say “sexy” at that time?