Don's Diary

MONDAY. Wake up in a hotel room in Canton at 4am for fear of missing my flight to Zhengzhou. Having researched foot-binding in China for five years, this field trip is to be the culmination of my work. Breakfast starts at 7am. I have to leave at 5.45am. On the plane am given cakes for breakfast. I never eat cake.

Zhengzhou University and an interpreter. At the Foreign Guests' hotel, I am briefed then taken for banquet lunch. By now my incipient sinusitis is so bad I can hardly speak and breathing has become a thing of the past. The private dining room is bitterly cold. Afternoon. Chinese colleagues share information on footbinding. To my relief, my conclusions have been the same as theirs.

TUESDAY. Sympathetic Lu Meiyi brings tiny blue pills for my sinusitis. I wonder what is in them but feel too ill to care. We visit the library and work on our research. The temperature is well below freezing. Am now so cold my brain has seized up.

WEDNESDAY. 2pm. Six women and a male driver set out for Lushan county, a three-hour journey towards the mountains. Am told it will be colder there. The vice president brings me a fur-lined army greatcoat. I begin to feel warm. Our seven-seater minibus has no heater and the windows are open. I get cold again.

Two colleagues throw up but only one inside the minibus. A communal affair, everyone joins in to sympathise and pat backs. Am warned that Lushan is a poor town and the hotel will be basic. I fret. It turns out to be better than the one I have come from. The vice president tells us to wash then meet downstairs for dinner. I willingly share a room with two colleagues. It is quite warm, the linen clean, and the toilet flushes. We put our coats, scarves, hats and gloves back on to go downstairs to eat. Joined by local colleagues, we number 12 around the "lazy Susan" in a private room. I am guest of honour again, for the big fish's face is turned towards me. Am not required to eat it. The secretary of the Party for all Lushan county sits next to me and we drink many toasts together. After dinner, the secretary briefs me. Tomorrow we will go to tiny Xiao 'Er village in the mountains to interview old ladies whose feet were bound.

THURSDAY. The sky is a brilliant, cloudless blue and the air diamond clear. The sun streams down and we decide to walk a short and picturesque part of the way to the village. The hills are terraced and sowed with wheat. The green shoots are already six inches high. An occasional farmer ploughs perfect furrows with a hand-held plough and an ox. Am reminded of my grandfather who ploughed the same way.

The first informant is Mrs Dzau. Delightful, humorous, 80, she cannot wait to tell her story. Bound at the age of seven, she cried endlessly with the pain. After six years her feet were perfect four-inch "golden lilies": narrow, pointed, small enough to fit a man's palm. When she was 12, she was betrothed to a landlord's son and confined to the house until she married him. At 17 they had to unbind everyone's feet by order of the government. By the time she was married, aged 22, her feet had been let out, but they never regained their natural shape: she shows us. Her four "small" toes still curve under towards the centre. She demonstrates how the heel was drawn towards the ball of the foot. Lunch. Secretary for Lushan town, a burly ex-soldier, has a hedgehog haircut. The barber has used too much gel and the women tease him mercilessly. After lunch I go to see Mrs Chen. Aged 84, she never bound her feet tightly because she had heard a rumour that the fashion was dying out. She too had never seen her husband before she married him. She thought he was very handsome. She was dressed in traditional red with an elaborate headdress and taken in a red-curtained sedan chair to live with her parents-in-law. Her husband was executed for alleged spying after "the liberation".

FRIDAY. We travel back to Zhengzhou. Only one colleague throws up though several look green.

SATURDAY. Morning. My flight has been cancelled. Spend the morning running around town making alternative arrangements. Phone husband in Macau from four-star hotel to allay panic at non-arrival. The ladies toilet houses two filthy pedestals side by side. No partitions. No doors. I give thanks that I do not have diarrhoea and leave fast. At lunch we make sexist jokes about husbands being the same the world over. Discover the vice president and I are the lucky ones. The others envy us because our husbands share work in the home. Afternoon. I meet the chairwoman of the Women's Federation for all of Zhengzhou. She briefs me on the advances in women's position which have been taking place in China.

SUNDAY. My companions laugh at me, saying that now I look very beautiful because I will see my husband; my hair is no longer tied back and I am wearing make-up and earrings. My flight leaves on time and I make my connection in Canton. My husband meets me at Kai Tak, Hong Kong. Whew.

Sandra Adams

Assistant professor at the University of Macau.