Ties That Bind, Ties That Break

Ties That Bind, Ties That Break (1999) is a young adult historical novel by Lensey Namioka that won the 2000 Washington State Book Award and the 2004 California Young Readers Medal for Young Adults. It focuses on a young Chinese girl growing up during a revolutionary period in the 1920s who refuses to have her feet bound as tradition dictates. A sequel, An Ocean Apart, A World Away (2002) focuses on the main character’s best friend, Xueyan, and deals with other aspects of the Chinese experience in America.

The girl’s name is Tao Ailin. The reader first encounters her as an adult in a California Chinatown restaurant where she unexpectedly meets someone from her past: Liu Hanwei, the person she was engaged to as a child. When they talk and he asks her why she ran away to work for an American family; it brings out her story via a flashback. The book is written in the first person.

Plot Summary

Ailin grows up in a wealthy but strict Chinese household during a period of increased Western and Communist influence, in which the future of China appears to be at stake. As a result, revolutionary events are happening, but some traditionalists stick even more stubbornly to the old ways—including the ancient art of foot binding.

At the age of five, Ailin is promised to Liu Hanwei, of a better-off and equally traditional family. Both families expect her to have her feet bound, as her mother, grandmother, and sisters did, but Ailin rebels. The idea that bound feet have represented beauty, wealth, and status for ages does not move her; she likes to run and play, and she does not want to have crippled feet that cause her daily pain.

When it comes time for the foot-binding procedure, Ailin struggles so much that her father agrees to allow her not to go through with it. The world is changing, he believes. As a result, Ailin’s engagement is broken, and her future is no longer secure.

Four years later, Ailin’s father decides to send her to a public school run by Western missionaries. Ailin likes this idea, especially since Hanwei had told her about his school. She is the first in her family to attend the public school, where she is happy.

During her time at MacIntosh School for Girls, she meets a fellow student, Zhang Xueyan, who also has unbound feet and wants to be a doctor. Additionally, she comes to know her teacher, Miss Gilbertson. A born mimic, Ailin soon learns English and excels in her classes.

However, Ailin’s father becomes sick and dies, leaving her stricter uncle as head of the family. He refuses to pay her tuition, so she can only stay in school for the rest of the term. Big Uncle believes her refusal to bind her feet has disgraced the family and gives her limited options: to become a concubine, enlist as a nun, or marry a tenant farmer.

Miss Gilbertson helps Ailin find a way out. The teacher had introduced the girl to an American family, the Warners—and now the Warners need a nanny for their children, Billy and Grace. Ailin mostly breaks ties with her family when she takes the job with the Warners. However, when the Warners decide to go back to America and offer her a place with them, she goes to her family to say goodbye. Eventually, she even makes a long-distance peace with her uncle.

On the boat to America, she meets and spends time with James Chew. He tells her he will be working in a Chinatown restaurant, but it is a while before the two meet again. As Ailin is becoming accustomed to life in the U.S., which requires her to help with housework, she encounters James when trying to locate spices she needs to cook Chinese food for the family.

Her bravery and independence have inspired James, who has decided to open his own restaurant. She leaves the Warners to marry him. Ailin has chosen a life of hard work and sacrifice.

Seeing Hanwei in the restaurant and contemplating what could have been, Ailin understands more clearly the choices she has made and is ready to tell her family about her life.