Bound Feet and Western Dress: A Memoir

While Pang-Mei Natasha Chang was a Chinese Studies major at Harvard University, she stumbled across the name of her 83-year-old great aunt Chang Yu-i in a history book. Over the next several years, Pang-Mei spent long afternoons drawing forth her aunt's story. Born in Shanghai to a well-to-do family, Chang Yu-i lived a life of defiance, continually breaking class and culture barriers. Her saga, told touchingly by her first-generation, American-born niece, includes her marriage to the preeminent Chinese poet Hs| Chih-Mo, how she ran the Shanghai Women's Savings Bank in the 1930s, and how she endured the anguish of China's first Western-style divorce.