Chapter 1

My name is Hongzhi. I was the personal maid of Master Zhao’s fifth concubine.

I was only sixteen that year.

The age when a girl ought to be blooming, and I spent my days washing someone else’s feet.

I couldn’t bear the thought of being a servant all my life.

So I began working out how to catch the eye of sixty-eight-year-old Master Zhao.

I wanted to become his sixth concubine.

……

The Fifth Madam called me to wash her feet again.

I rolled my eyes inwardly, then respectfully carried in a basin of hot water and set it on the floor. Squatting down, I slipped off her shoes and stockings with practiced hands, lowered her pale feet into the water, and pressed the points along them, neither too hard nor too softly.

She leaned back with a contented sigh.

My hands kept moving, but I couldn’t stop looking at her feet.

I envied her. God, how I envied her.

My own feet were dark and covered in old scars. I’d scratched every one of them there myself. Each winter I got chilblains that itched so badly I could hardly stand it. There was no money for ointment. All I could do was scratch, over and over, as hard as I could.

If I became Master Zhao’s concubine, could I have lovely pale feet too?

He was nearly seventy, but he’d recently cut off that thin, rat-tail queue of his. It had taken years off him.

I was still letting my mind wander when the Fifth Madam, Su Xiu, asked, “Whose door has the red lantern tonight?”

That was Master Zhao’s rule. A large red lantern hung outside the room of whichever woman he meant to visit that night, a sign of his favor.

I thought for a moment. “The Fourth Madam’s,” I answered softly.

Su Xiu snorted and kicked hard at the water. It splashed all over my face.

“That bitch! All she has is a pair of tiny feet. Every day she uses those stinking, deformed things to bewitch him!”

I didn’t dare speak, though privately I agreed.

Master Zhao had bought the Fourth Madam out of a theater troupe. Those three-inch golden lotuses of hers had won him over. He never tired of fussing over them, kissing them again and again and pressing them to his cheek. Sometimes he even poured wine into her shoe and had her hold it up for him to drink.

I couldn’t understand it. Those long, foul-smelling binding cloths, those little feet like pig’s trotters—what was so wonderful about them?

I looked down at my own big feet and sighed to myself.

If only my father had had them bound.

Su Xiu caught my look and scoffed. “What? You envy her? You want little feet like hers?”

I shook my head quickly. “I wouldn’t dare.”

She gave a cold laugh, looked at her own feet, and suddenly asked, “Hongzhi, do you think it’s too late for me to bind mine?”

Of course it was. You had to start when you were little.

Before I could answer, she laughed at herself.

“A college woman, reduced to this…”

Once she started, she couldn’t seem to stop.

“Hongzhi, did you know I went to a women’s college?”

I kept massaging her feet and laughed at her in my head. Oh, stop boasting. If you went to college, what were you doing here as somebody’s concubine?

As if she’d heard me, Su Xiu went on quietly.

“My family used to be in business. We weren’t fabulously rich, but we never lacked food or clothes. I was my parents’ only daughter. They adored me.

“When I was little, my mother wanted to bind my feet. Father wouldn’t let her. He said he couldn’t bear to see me hurt. He’d already promised to send me abroad after college.

“Then he got hooked on opium.”

Her voice sank.

“It’s a terrible thing. It can turn a person into someone else altogether. He squandered the business and ran up debts. First he sold my mother. Then he sold me.”

She fell quiet for a moment.

“I wonder how many pipes of opium he got for me.”