The Binding Chair; Or, a Visit from the Foot Emancipation Society Hardcover - 2000

From the publisher

Like the spellbinding The Kiss, this unforgettable novel takes us to Shanghai, where a Chinese woman determined to bury her past takes over a Western family focused on the promise of a new, 20th century.

Beautiful, charismatic, and destructive, Mai escapes from an arranged marriage in rural China for life in a Shanghai brothel, where, in 1899, she meets Arthur, a Westerner whose philanthropic pursuits lead him into one scrape after another. As a member of the Foot Emancipation Society, against the foot-binding of women, Arthur calls on Mai not for his pleasure but for her rehabilitation, only to find himself immediately and helplessly seduced by the sight of her feet. Reforming Mai is out of the question, so Arthur marries her instead, and brings her home to live with his straight-laced sister Dolly, her husband Dick, and their two girls Alice and Cecily. In Alice, Mai sees the possibility of redemption: a surrogate for the child Mai has lost. And it is to Mai that Alice turns for the love her own mother withholds. But when the twelve-year-old is caught by her mother preparing her Aunt Mai's opium pipe, Alice is enrolled in a London boarding school, and sent far from the dangerous influence of the woman who will one day reclaim her, and control the whole family.

Kathryn Harrison's poised and elegant prose tells a startling story of women, travel and flight; of love and fear; of the search for home and the need to escape it. Among scenes of astonishing beauty and cruelty, where traditions and cultures clash, tragedy threatens a world built on the banks of unsettled waters -- from the filthy, bustling Whanpoo River to the lake of blood in the Chinese afterworld. By turns shocking andhilarious, The Binding Chair is a spellbinding literary triumph.