On this spot one afternoon in the tenth century, three hundred years before the teahouse was built and our story began, a Taoist priest and a Buddhist nun were strolling together and came upon a beggar. Filthy and poor, he lay by the side of the road and called out to them, “Come over here. I am dying. I have only this legacy to leave.” The beggar was waving something and the Taoist priest and the Buddhist nun moved closer to see what it was.
“Look,” said the beggar, “it is a piece of the very silk with which the emperor bade a dancing girl swaddle her feet that they might look like the points of the moon sickle. She then danced in the center of a six-foot lotus fashioned out of gold and decorated with jewels.” The beggar fell backward, exhausted by his tale, and gasped for breath. The Taoist priest and the Buddhist nun examined The dirty, bloody, ragged scrap of cloth and glanced at each other with great skepticism.
“Ah yes. It is an interesting way to step from Existence into Nonexistence, is it not?” said the Buddhist nun.
“Indeed,” replied the Taoist priest. “So much easier to escape Desire and sidle closer to Immortality when one can follow only a very few paths. But alas, in time, this too will pass.”
There was a rattle in the beggar’s throat then, and his eyes rolled upward and grasping the scrap of silk. He died.
The Taoist priest and the Buddhist nun murmured some words of prayer over the beggar’s body, linked arms and continued their travels. The ragged scrap of bloody cloth fluttered to the ground and was transformed by the Goddess of Resignation into a precious stone that lay at that very spot until the year 1266, when it was discovered and made into a ring by the famous courtesan Honey Tongue, star attraction of the Five Enjoyments Tea House, which had been built nearby some years before.
From “A Visit from the Footbinder”
I have no idea what prompted me to get this book. I’m guessing it was one of those “What are you reading?” threads that crop up on Twitter and Bluesky every so often; apparently it really intrigued me, because instead of just adding it to my TBR list, I bought it last December. Possibly I was swayed to action by the Goodreads reviewer who pronounced it “a little too offbeat for me.”
Offbeat? I’ll say.
The collection, first published in 1982, has only five stories. Two are regular story-length, one is quite long, and two are fairly short. One of the longer stories is absolutely over-the-top bananas, and has to be read in the spirit of Emily Prager, Feminist Humorist-Satirist of the 80s. The other stories are more straightforward. The title story is the standout, at least for me, and the final story makes an impact as well. But even the craziest story has an ending that resonates, in spite of, well, everything else.
Leading off, we have “A Visit from the Footbinder,” set in 13th century China. It follows six-year-old Pleasure Mouse as she looks forward with great excitement to her foot binding scheduled on the following day. Language does a good deal of work in the story. From the start, Pleasure Mouse dances, runs, darts, pounces, scampers, twirls, races; her mother, Lady Guo Guo and other grown up women who went through the procedure long ago, totter, shuffle, toddle, lose their balance, are carried.
The warnings at first are subtle. Pleasure Mouse visits her thirteen-year-old sister, Tiger Mouse, who kneels in her room counting her thousand pairs of tiny shoes, denying that there was pain. But just as Pleasure Mouse leaves, she breaks down a bit. But only a bit. “Why should I tell you?”
The others Pleasure Mouse visits – an artist decorating her mother’s future tomb, her father’s friend at the Tea House, his pregnant concubine, her aunt – yield more details. The pain will only last for two years, and then she will have the benefits: access to a high-ranking husband, the upper echelons of society, say all these limping, tottering, shuffling women. It isn’t until the footbinder, a Buddhist nun who is not only natural-footed but barefoot, binds her to a chair for the procedure that she realizes this may be more than the joyous coming-of-age celebration she expected.
Her mother’s interaction with her father deepens the story as he threatens to withhold the credit Lady Guo Guo is using to build her tomb – until she threatens to leave his daughter’s feet unbound. This exchange gives us a look into why traditions continue, how hard it is to buck them. The eventual revelation of why the mother, who performed Tiger Mouse’s footbinding as was the general tradition, hires this one out, makes her more sympathetic.
The quote above is a reasonably accurate version of the mythical origin of footbinding: Smithsonian Magazine gives a historical view of the practice, including its acceleration during the Mongol Invasion. And lest you gloss over this as just one of those awful things people did a long time ago, consider that footbinding persisted, though in more limited numbers, into the 20th century. Then look at the cover art, featuring a woman’s bruised, misshapen feet aside the sexy, elegant red pumps with four-inch heels.
The final story, “Wrinkled Linen,” also has an emotional impact while exploring the social pressures women face in the most trivial aspects of their lives. A woman and her boyfriend – she uses that term, “boyfriend,” as in, “I just don’t see what good it is having a successful boyfriend if he never talks to me” – go out to dinner. It’s a tense relationship, where she tries to talk and he pretty much shoots down everything. The Romantic vs the Realist. You have to wonder just why it is so important to have a successful boyfriend, when she says:
“Something happened today that made me understand the eighties: I was shopping and I came across these fabulous beige linen jodhpurs which I bought right away. I had vowed never to wear jodhpurs after seeing Elizabeth Taylor from behind in Reflections in a Golden Eye. But they look okay. They look good; I’m like a mini Ronald Reagan. Anyhow, linen is a classy material, really fine, and it was ‘in’ when I was in high school too. We had linen dresses, and when you wore them, your whole life was about keeping them pressed and starched. Linen wrinkles like a motherfucker but here’s the thing, it was really low and slutty and ill-bred if you wore a linen dress with a wrinkle in it. I remember never sitting down, never raising my arms, and still always having wrinkles. So, today, I’m trying on these jodhpurs and I glanced at the label and what do you think it says? ‘Guaranteed to wrinkle.’ And I realized that’s what the eighties is all about: off-color coordinates.”
She views this as a kind of freedom. I took a more cynical approach: there will always be a company, or a life partner, to tell you a bug is actually a feature. And by the way, my recollection of the 80s is quite different. This would have been the early 80s, granted, but – and I’m helped here by having recently watched a few episodes of LA Law, one of the pop culture tentpoles of the 80s – my impression was of the most buttoned-down, tightly-constructed era in recent history. Her boyfriend, in any case, sees catastrophe. Just wait ‘til you get to the 2020s, man, then you’ll know impending doom.
I was reminded of the Frederic Tuten story from this most recent Pushcart 2024, “The Restaurant, The Concert…” etc. There, we had a couple having what seemed like a brittle conversation, one that attracted a stranger at the next table to join in, but the mood was very different. Tuten’s banter was cooperative, comfortable, borne of years spent together, and of a shared struggle. In Prager’s story, it’s a woman in a cage she’s voluntarily entered, because she doesn’t seem to think there are better options.
Now let’s take a walk over to the monkey house and see what Prager can do when she’s whipped into a frenzy.
“The Alumnae Bulletin” features a periodic reunion of high school friends who get together to talk about experiences that have, um, widened their horizons. That sounds reasonable, but it goes from being a support group to a parody of the male brag session. Why is it when women want to be liberated, they emulate the most distasteful aspects of male behavior? The reunion begins with them strapping on wooden penises carved when they were back in school, and the experiences they discuss are primarily sexual. Because what other horizons are there for a curious girl? When Edda talks about her experiences with bondage, she waxes a bit poetic:
“It’s curious,” she began. “In bondage, you are forced to make a mental choice. You can either feel the sensation as pain, which is simple and immediate, or you can relax completely and investigate it further. If you make enough effort, you can even turn it into pleasure. It is a parody of the female experience in concrete physical terms. Going through it was simply extraordinary. Not sexual. Far more important than that.”
Sorry, I’m someone who doesn’t understand pain as pleasure, so I’ll just leave it for those who do. That isn’t even the craziest part of the story: that happens when Jerzy Kosiński shows up. I guess if you’re going to have an uninvited guest to your party where you’re wearing strap-ons and talking about sexual exploration, he’s the guy to have drop by. In her Acknowledgements, Prager thanks him for allowing poetic license. I’m not sure what that means, but that’s why I’m not the 80s guru of feminist satire. That’s where the story suffers, I think: in the 80s it might’ve been viewed as outspoken and gutsy; now at best it’s nostalgic for a time when women talking about sex was courageous.
If that wasn’t crazy enough for you, we then come to the longest story, “The Lincoln-Pruitt Anti-Rape Device: Memoirs of the Women’s Combat Army in Vietnam.” Think of it as a feminist Dirty Dozen. A small, diverse group of women – a Black Smith graduate who wants a career in the Foreign Service Office but finds it hard to get in, a small-town girl gone bad, a madam, a Bob Hope USO Tour performer – are recruited by Major Victoria Lincoln-Pruitt (whether that’s an official Army title or not isn’t clear) who has taken “Make Love Not War” to heart and invented a device that comes to be know as the Leopard: this machine kills rapists.
The L.P.A.R.D. has four instantaneous modes: the probe, which poisons the human intruder; the shredder, which polarizes wooden implements such as broom handles; the laser, which melts glass bottles and metal bayonets; and an iron cap which descends and makes penetration of any kind impossible. And it runs on – the major smiled mysteriously – microchips.
I have to wonder about the wisdom of shredding and melting items inserted, involuntarily or not, into the vagina, but maybe I don’t really understand how the thing works. It’s powered by pubococcygeal muscles, which becomes a plot point when it turns out the women of the unit don’t really know what those are.
The idea is to disguise the group as Buddhist nuns and drop them into enemy territory to lure, then destroy, the Viet Cong. “Visibility, vulnerability, and accessibility are the names of the game in this woman’s war. The success of this operation depends, oddly enough, as does the Miss America pageant, on poise, a neat appearance, and your ability to look adorable under pressure.” And of course, things don’t go exactly as planned. And while the difficulty of zipping up a body bag over an erect penis is a big reason why, it’s only the beginning of the problems. But they don’t go as planned for the VC, either: the sole female member of their squad tries to warn them that it’s a trap, but of course the men dismiss her.
For all the bawdy satire, the story closes with a surprisingly powerful moment if you can get past the bizarre circumstance: feminine solidarity across enemy lines. Because Major Lincoln-Pruitt wasn’t kidding around when she said her mission was to free women by making them feel safe.
While these more raucous stories aren’t my cup of tea, I have to admire Prager’s range: she’s able to go from exquisite subtlety of the Footbinder to conversational drama of Linen to the broadest bawdy humor. And yet, even in that humor, she captures recognizable moments of truth. If Prager’s mission was to highlight the social pressures women face, she succeeded, and it’s only because that territory has been well-trod in the forty years since publication that it falls a bit flat.
A Just Recompense 