Motherhood Quote by Jung Chang

A single stone turns into an indictment. Jung Chang doesn’t lead with ideology or abstraction; she leads with a mother’s finger, pointing at an object so ordinary it could be overlooked. That’s the move: make violence tactile. The stone is not a metaphor dreamed up in a study. It’s a household artifact of control, the kind that survives long after the practice is supposedly “past,” lingering like a fossil that still reeks of lived pain.

The quote’s intent is quietly devastating: to show how patriarchal discipline is taught as practical knowledge, passed down through women as much as imposed by men. A mother explaining the mechanics of immobilizing baby girls carries a brutal subtext about complicity under constraint. She’s not twirling a villain’s mustache; she’s describing procedure. Chang lets that calmness do the dirty work, because normalization is the true horror. The baby’s impulse to “climb away” is framed as natural, even admirable, and the stone exists specifically to crush it.

Context matters: Chang’s work often maps history onto domestic memory, using family anecdotes as entry points into systemic critique. Here, foot-binding becomes less a distant cultural curiosity and more an early training in smallness - a literal, bodily enforcement of limits before language or consent arrive. The phrase “used to” tries to exile the practice to history, but the remembered stone refuses to stay there. The past isn’t past; it’s sitting on the shelf, ready to be demonstrated.