Afong Moy’s life was a tragedy.
The first Chinese woman to come to the United States (or at least labeled as such by those who brought her here), she’d been either purchased or stolen from her home in Guangzhou in 1834 by two American traders who saw her as a way to help sell the then-unfamiliar Asian goods they imported. Billed as “The Chinese Lady,” she was a virtual sideshow act, displayed before a paying audience and made to eat with chopsticks, walk on her bound feet, and answer questions via an interpreter, all while also showing off the vases and silks for sale. Later in her life, she was employed by P.T. Barnum.
Afong Moy’s life is also largely a blank slate.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
After several years of hucksterish excitement, after the newspaper advertisements and press reports petered out, little detail remains. There is evidence that she lived for a period in New Jersey as an indigent ward of the state. It is unknown where she died, or when.
This combination makes Moy an enticing subject for a play, or at least an enticing canvas for one. The horror of her treatment echoes through history and resonates especially in our moment of greater cultural awareness. But the absence of much real biographical data allows for creative invention.
With The Chinese Lady, which opened tonight at the Public’s black-box Shiva Theater in a Ma-Yi Theater production, playwright Lloyd Suh has constructed a whimsically poetic and largely invented imagination of Moy’s life. He has, finally, given her a voice, and as she tells us her story, she reflects on her own life and provides an outsider’s view on 19th century America. Suh’s Moy forces us to confront both our own history or our historical treatment of the other.
It is an effective conceit, having Moy (an excellent Shannon Tyo, who played the role in a pre-pandemic production at Theatre Row and a mid-pandemic one at the Long Wharf in New Haven) address us directly. In a play that’s all about interiority—imagining what this mistreated woman is thinking and feeling—we need to hear from her. The man who served as her keeper and translator, Atung, is here, too, but from the first moments he is labeled “irrelevant.” (Played by Daniel K. Isaac, who has also spent several years with the show, he is both knowing and stereotypically servile, always bearing a wide grin.) Atung serves occasionally as Moy’s interlocutor, and at other times he comments on her perceptions and explanations.
As directed by Ralph R. Peña, Ma-Yi’s artistic director—and with simple but extraordinary scenic design by Junghyun Georgia Lee, costumes by Linda Cho, lighting by Jiyoun Chang and Elizabeth Mak, sound by Fabian Obispo, and projections by Shawn Duan—the staging unfolds elegantly and gracefully. We enter to see a modern shipping container onstage and the sounds of the sea; that container opens to reveal the framed room in which Moy will live her life; both Moy and Atung visibly age and stoop as they get older and lose whatever innocence they ever had. Moy’s clothes and makeup shift from Chinese traditional to gaudy, on-display Chinoiserie, to more standard Victoriana.
But while the direction and production glides elegantly into place, the script moves less pleasurably. I imagine that is to some degree by design: Moy lived a regimented, repetitive life, and so we see a regimented, somewhat repetitive story.
Each scene opens with Moy on display yet again, now in a new time, sometimes at a new location, more world-weary. Early on, she believes (in Suh’s speculation) that she is serving an important role, helping to bridge differences and connect East and West. Near the play’s end, as the Chinese Exclusion Acts have become law, she believes that she has failed. (She does not seem to consider, as perhaps Suh believes she could not allow herself to, that she served no geopolitical purpose, only a mercenary one.) She is given some trenchant observations, and she tells a sad story much larger than her own—Gold Rush and railroads, immigration and anti-Asian pogroms, slavery and Civil War. But all that telling can feel at times like a well-produced book report. Suh doesn’t really know anything about Moy’s life, and in the end, neither do we.
In The Chinese Lady, in other words, history finally reckons with what this country did to Afong Moy. She finally gets a chance to tell her story. But, yet again, it’s not really her story that she’s telling, and it makes for a less than fully fulfilling evening.
The Chinese Lady opened March 8, 2022, at the Public Theater and runs through April 10. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
