Bound Feet & Western Dress.

• Author: Clinton, Kate

This past October, I was a guest speaker at Deerfield Academy's "GROW"--Get Rid of Homophobia Week. The H is often silent. The Winona Ryder version of Little Women was filmed at Deerfield in western Massachusetts. The prep school's dorms are named Mather and Scaife, as in Cotton and Richard Mellon. My appearance was not deemed "educational" and therefore did not qualify for homework dispensation or extra credit. Nonetheless, the auditorium was packed with uniformed high school boys and girls and a few supportive teachers.

Before the show, I had dinner, served family-values style, with students in the vaulted refectory. We talked about movies, sports, and comedy. One student told me he didn't like another comic who performed there because "he talked down to us." I sat with Kim Wright, the teacher who had brought me to campus, and after she and a few of her students described to me the international women's literature class she was teaching, I asked for a copy of her reading list: The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Lucy, by Jamaica Kincaid; Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, by Harriet Wilson; Top Girls, by Caryl Churchill; The Passion, by Jeanette Winterson; Ourika, by Claire De Duras; and Bound Feet & Western Dress, a memoir by Pang-Mei Natasha Chang. The last were two I had not heard of and are wonderful gems.

Chang's book (Anchor Books, 1996) is a lovely dual memoir which describes the rebellious life in China of her great aunt, Chang Yu-I--from her refusal to let her mother bind her...