Author's
Note: This is a reading response on, Ribbons.
I've gone back and updated this piece and turned it into an essay for my
next conference.
Superficial beauty can be defined as the way our
country insists we carry ourselves to fit in with our society. In
this country people buy the most expensive clothes they can find, wear as much
make-up as they have, and invest in plastic surgery. All to
make themselves look beautiful to our current day society. Our
society doesn't allow people of all shapes and sizes in, which results in many
people not being able to feel good about themselves. People of both
genders and all ages have insecurities. In many cases people are insecure
about their weight. Sometimes girls are even concerned about how big
their feet seem to be. What they don't know is that in China girls go
through physical pain to have small feet.
Foot binding is the process in which a female child's
mother bends their feet backwards slowly when they are growing up. The
reason this occurs in their country is because their belief is that no man
would marry a girl with big feet. To them it may be tradition, but I see
it in from an awful perspective. While we Americans are crying over our
shoe size Chinese girls are putting up with the pain of growing up with
small feet. The worst part is that the gentlemen of America don't care
what shoe size you are, if they love you they'll marry you. Simple as
that, but the men in China actually refuse to marry a girl with big feet.
You can't put blame on these men because it's simple tradition, but the
first man to break this unwritten law I will bow down to.
As these ladies grow up with their feet being bound, they
are put through many struggles. Eventually they'll get used to the
certain way they have to walk, in order to cause them the least amount of pain.
Now imagine someone, with those conditions, trying to dance with bound
feet, you could practically feel the amount of discomfort they would endure.
Now think about how popular dancing is in America. Every dancer
knows that there's a price to pay when it comes to wearing ballet shoes.
They're tightly wound, which make them very uncomfortable to wear.
Yet we wear them anyways, because it's part of the dancing culture we
have. As different cultures teach people alternate ways,
their assumptions cause misunderstandings.
A misunderstanding is the conflict in the short
story, Ribbons. The
grandmother has gone through the foot binding process, which caused her to demand
the burning of her granddaughter's ballet shoes. In her eyes the ribbons reminded her of
horrific childhood memories. I assume
the grandmother would’ve reacted in the same way, even if she wasn’t her
granddaughter. It seems foreign to her,
the reason anyone would do such a thing to themselves. Although her granddaughter wasn’t self-harming
herself, other’s do to achieve superficial beauty. In China foot binding is not a choice girls have,
otherwise they will never get married.
We look at foot binding like it’s a crime, think about how people of
other cultures see Americans superficial beauty.
In China girls go through physical pain to have small
feet. This is something people don’t understand. All in all, the people that see how wrong
foot binding is, may be the ones that look at themselves in the morning and
wonder why they weren’t blessed with a smaller face and bigger eyes. Maybe there’ll always be some form of superficial
beauty lingering around, keeping people up at night, but I hope not. I wish for one day where everyone can get up
in the morning and look at themselves in the mirror and thank god for what he
has given them, because that’s not superficial beauty. That’s true beauty, no matter how other
people see it, it’s still true beauty.
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