Granny Kao Ting Huei-chen (高丁慧禎) is eighty-six. She never dreamed that a childhood hobby would help her raise her family of five after she and her family fled the Chinese communists and came to Taiwan in 1949.
She was born to a wealthy family in Rizhao, Shantung province, around 1912. Its most notable scion was Samuel Ting (丁肇中), who won the Nobel Prize for physics. When Huei-chen was twelve, she wanted to give her baby brother a present for his first birthday. She had seen grown-ups making shoes out of cloth. “I thought to myself, shoemaking isn’t that difficult,” she recalls in a strong Shantung accent. “I could do that, too. So I found some unwanted fabric and secretly made a pair of shoes for my brother. That was my first ever pair.”
Before leather shoes were introduced to China in the late nineteenth century, everybody used to wear cloth shoes. The wealthy wore embroidered satin shoes, those a step or two down the social ladder had ordinary, plain cloth ones, and the poor either made do with footwear made from reeds, or went barefoot. Before the days of mass-produced commodities, shoes were manufactured in much the same way as clothes: by women stitching away at home.
“If a girl wanted to be considered eligible, she had to know how to stitch a good pair of shoes,” Huei-chen says. “Your mother-in-law would look at the shoes you made to see how good your needlework was.” So during childhood she learned how to make shoes and dresses and do all manner of sewing. “Not a single person in my hometown,” she says, gesturing with her hands to emphasize the point, “was better than me at needlework. Not one.” Her wrinkled but still attractive face broadens into a smile.
When she was twenty-three she married Kao You-san (高友三), also from a respectable wealthy family, and the couple had three children, two boys and one girl. Things seemed to be going well for her. But then came war, the great leveler, forcing the family to give up its cozy life in northeastern China. Wealth, servants, land, and a luxurious house were all gone. Huei-chen was thirty-nine when she and her family, virtually destitute, fled the Chinese communists and came to Taiwan.
Life in the early 1950s was difficult, especially for new immigrants, and Huei-chen was no exception. “My husband was earning only a few dollars a month at that time,” she says. “How could you raise a family on that?” At the suggestion of one of her son’s army colleagues she began to make cloth shoes, working at great speed to complete one pair a day. By doing this she was able to make enough to keep their heads above water.
As the name indicates, cloth shoes are made entirely out of fabric, soles as well as uppers, stitched together with needle and hempen thread.“You can use any kind of fabric,” Huei-chen explains. “If the cloth is thin, then you paste three pieces of it together and make it into one layer of sole. If it’s thicker, two will be enough. When you’ve done that, you paste three of these layers together and that makes a layered sole. You can have a four-layered sole if you like, and it will last longer.”
Once the sole is finished it needs to be pressed, using a heavy object, perhaps a piece of wood, and left to dry thoroughly until it looks rather like cardboard. “Then you drill holes in the sole and stitch it tight with needle and thread,” Huei-chen continues. “For the uppers, you cut the cloth and paste it back to back to a piece of linen, and then iron the two fabrics together immediately. If you don’t do that, the pieces won’t stick properly. Then you mount the sole and the upper onto a last and sew them together. And when that’s done, you turn the shoe inside out.”
Kao Ting Huei-chen—“I thought to myself, shoemaking isn’t that difficult. I could do that, too. So I found some unwanted fabric and secretly made a pair of shoes for my brother. That was my first-ever pair."
Granny Huei-chen’s feet were broken and bound by a footbinder when she was small, so she never goes shopping for shoes. She makes her own. A pair of cloth shoes lasts about three months. One of their drawbacks is they easily get soaked by rain. But this does not bother Huei-chen. “Well, they’ll dry out, won’t they,” she says in her matter-of-fact way.
There is not much profit to be made, as more than half of what she earns goes to the retailer who actually sells the shoes she makes. “I get NT$60 [US$2.20] for a pair of children’s shoes,” Huei-chen says. “But in a shop, they’d charge NT$150 [US$5.45] for them. And with adults’ shoes, I get about NT$100 [US$3.60] a pair, against the NT$300 [US$10.90] they’d charge in a shop.” Her voice is tinged with indignation. Asked why she does not open her own shoes hop, she replies, “I can’t, because nobody here would understand my Shantung accent.” She rarely makes shoes to sell now, for she is no longer hard up, and when she does get out needle, thread, and last it is more to pass the time than for any other reason.
At one time, even the embroidered satin shoes worn by wives of ranking government officials and rich businessmen were made with cloth soles. Embroidered footwear has undergone something of a revival in popularity in recent years. One shop that sells it is Little Garden Footwear, which was founded in Shanghai in 1946 and later moved to Taiwan with the Nationalist government in 1949.
Little Garden Footwear was originally located on Hsining South Road in Hsimenting, which was then the poshest area of Taipei’s old downtown area. But about twenty years ago Franky Chen (陳弘宜), a college graduate in mechanical engineering, took over the business and relocated Little Garden to a quieter area.
Chen developed a number of new styles, even coming up with a high-heeled variety of embroidered shoe. “But they don’t last,” he says. “The toes get scuffed and wear out more quickly than the flat-soled kind.” Nevertheless, the business was completely revamped under his leaders and before long he was getting orders from Japan. But Japanese importers were difficult and demanding. They found fault with the quality of the embroidered shoes Chen sent them and rejected stock when their sales were down. “Embroidered shoes are handmade,” Chen says. “How can you hope to standardize them?”
Even the soles consist of layers of cloth pasted together and then pressed, dried, and drilled in preparation for stitching.
The business is definitely in decline. There used to be four shops selling embroidered shoes in Hsimenting, but now Little Garden is the only one left. Chen knows why. “Fewer and fewer women wear the chipao [a traditional Chinese female gown],” he says, shaking his head. “And those who do wear it want hard-wearing, long-lasting leather shoes.”
Chen has seen at least one important change in the trade. In 1961 he started making embroidered shoes with rubber soles, usually manufactured from worn-out airplane tires. “Rubber gradually took over because cloth soles aren’t really practical in Taiwan,” he says. “It rains a lot here. It was different on the mainland. There, only rich people could afford embroidered shoes. They wore them at home or, if they went out, they rode in sedans. Either way, their shoes didn’t wear out so quickly.”
Falling demand has made it more difficult for Chen to find materials. “The stuffs available all right,” he says, “but l can’t afford to buy in bulk. A yard of satin will make six pairs of shoes. Ten yards, sixty pairs. But the textile manufacturers won’t sell to me unless I buy a hundred yards. How can I hope to sell six hundred pairs of embroidered shoes, let alone find enough skilled workers to make up that amount within a short time? It’s impossible.” He usually solves the problem by going to retailers on Taipei’s Tihua Street, where he can buy as little as he wants but at a higher unit price.
Two elderly couples, the Kuos and the Pans, have been under contract to make Little Garden’s embroidered shoes for many years, and one reason Chen continues with the business is for their sake. “As long as they’re making shoes, they’ll be using their brains and their hands,” Chen says. “That way they won’t get Alzheimer’s disease, although I have to admit that their skills are not what they were.”
Franky Chen’s embroidered shoe business is not the last on the island; at least one more survives. ROC President Lee Teng-hui shares something in common with the late presidents Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo—in his leisure time he wears black cloth shoes made by Tungtai Footwear. Or at least, that’s what Tungtai’s owner Hsia Yu-ming (夏玉明) claims. It seems that in a sense President Lee has stepped into the Chiangs’ shoes!
Tungtai is based in a modest-looking store that nestles between a fruit shop and a tiny noodle restaurant in downtown Taipei’s busy Chengchung market. It prides itseIf on being Taiwan’s first cloth footwear emporium, having started out as an illegal roadside stall in 1949.
A colorful, but not very profitable trade. A cloth shoemaker might get two dollars for making a pair of children’s shoes, but the retailer will sell them for more than twice that amount.
At that time things were particularly hard for the immigrant families of soldiers. Men discharged from the military were unable to find jobs in the new and unfamiliar environment. They had no money, no land, and no relatives in Taiwan to help them. Hsia’s father was one such ex-soldier. After he came out of the army he could not find work for a long time. “My mother, Hsia Chu Yu-chin (夏朱玉琴), she’s eighty-eight now, she remembered her old skills and thought, why not sell cloth shoes?” Hsia recalls. “So she began making and selling cloth shoes for children, to help out with family expenses.”
At that time, living standards were low. “Thirty years ago, there were no posh sneakers, so all the children wore cloth shoes,” Hsia says. “Business was good. A pair of children’s cloth shoes cost about fifty cents, and the adult variety eighty cents. We made enough money to support our four children.” The tiny stall attracted a number of shoemakers who needed work, and veterans who had the necessary skills would make shoes part-time when they wanted to earn a little extra money. After a while the government insisted that the Tungtai stall vacate its illegal location, so the business moved to its present spot in Chengchung market.
About fifteen years ago, Hsia inherited the business from his mother. “She stopped making shoes after my father passed away in 1981,” he says. “But other old people were still making shoes, and she felt it would be a pity to give up the business.”
Like Chen, Hsia buys his fabric at Tihua Street, and then subcontracts the embroidery and assembly processes to about five or six craftsmen. “Not many people are willing to learn how to do it,” he says. “You don’t have labor insurance or holidays in this business. Most of the people doing it are nearly seventy. Now they even use computerized sewing machines to do the embroidery.”
When asked about his clientele, Hsia’s face lights up. “The late President Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo both bought cloth shoes from us,” he says. “They wore cloth soles. President Lee is a customer. Although he sends his aides to buy the shoes—they’re the type with leather soles—we know they’re for him because he takes [larger than average Taiwan] size eighty-four. He wears them when he’s not meeting foreign guests. Madam Chiang Kai-shek buys from us too. And the late General Ho Ying-chin (何應欽) often came to the shop to buy shoes from us in person.” (General Ho accepted the Japanese surrender in Nanking on September 9th,1945.)
Hsia thinks that about 70 percent of his customers are Buddhists. “Buddhists believe that no animal should be killed for mankind’s use,” he points out. “Wearing leather shoes, which are made from animal hide, would be a sin. And some secretaries like to wear a pair of embroidered shoes, because they're more comfortable than high heels." Tungtai will also custom-make a pair of shoes for the very reason able price of NT$250, or US$9.“Send us the cloth and we'll find somebody to make you a pair of shoes," Hsia says.