Making Cloth Shoes

Moving from Dadu Mountain to the Guoziyuan dependents’ village on Datong Road in Tainan was in the summer of the forty-first year of the Republic. The dependents’ village was jiannan-style housing: very thick bamboo for pillars, fine bamboo strips woven in the middle, then lime mixed with rice husks and mud plastered on to make the walls.

The whole village had eighty households, officers and NCOs half each.

NCO families got three and a half ping per room, plus half a ping for the kitchen and a corridor about a metre wide in front of the door; officers could get half a room more, equal to one extra bedroom. Eighty households were divided into eight blocks, four for officers and four for NCOs. My husband was a master sergeant, so we could only be allotted three and a half ping of dependents’ quarters.

This photograph was at our doorway: my son had just finished urinating and was snapped secretly by neighbour Mr Chen.

The village had only one square cement platform big enough for four bath tubs, and two tap stands; every household queued to draw water and wash clothes.

In that era, used to a simple life as we were, remembering how we used to carry water home to cook and wash where we lived before, we were all very satisfied now to have running water.

On the platform beside the taps some carried water, some washed clothes. Everyone worked while chatting and laughing—a whole morning could be lively. But sometimes talking too much you said the wrong thing and quarrels broke out too.

I mostly carried water to the corridor in front of our door to wash. Of the eighty households then, only I and Mrs Chin across the way were natives of the province; all the rest were dependents from every province who had retreated from the mainland—north and south, their speech was sometimes hard to understand.

Once housing was settled I began looking for home piecework to earn a little to help the household. Later I found work pasting matchboxes—one thousand for three dollars. If you worked earnestly, minding the child while working, you could paste about a thousand a day. At prices then, one block of tofu was fifty cents; if I had three dollars income a day I was content. Sadly after half a year the factory stopped and I was out of work.

Later I came to know the wives of four gentlemen across the way who all drove lorries at the unit; one of them, like me, was native to the province. They were warm; we got on well. I was only nineteen then, young, so they all looked after me. Mrs Hsiao warmly taught me to make cloth shoes.

To make cloth shoes you first prepare materials. Find an old sheet, tear it open, then get a rolling board, buy some flour, cook it in a pot into paste, and buy a wall-painting brush.

When working, take a stool, put the board on the stool, cut the sheet to the size of the board. Lay the first piece of cloth on the board, brush paste on the cloth, then paste on another piece. Paste five layers like this; when the sixth layer is laid on, the first step is done.

When the sun has dried the cloth, Mrs Hsiao gives me the shoe pattern she has cut and carefully teaches me to draw lines on the dried cloth with a pen, then cut out the sole pattern with scissors. Each sole needs three pieces, so one pair of shoes needs six pieces cut.

Stack the three sole cloths together, then buy ready-made binding tape, spread paste on the binding tape, and slowly roll it along the edge of the sole. When dry, sew with thick needle and thread stitch by stitch—that completes one cloth shoe. Whether child’s or adult’s cloth shoes, the method is the same. One pair took me about a week, because of housework and minding the child. Later I used this craft to make cloth shoes for myself and the child.