• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Reviews from Broadway and Beyond

  • Now Playing
  • Recently Opened
    • Broadway
    • Off-Broadway
    • Beyond
  • Critics’ Picks
  • Our Critics
    • About Us
    • Melissa Rose Bernardo
    • Michael Feingold
    • David Finkle
    • Will Friedwald
    • Elysa Gardner
    • Sandy MacDonald
    • Jesse Oxfeld
    • MICHAEL SOMMERS
    • Steven Suskin
    • Frank Scheck
    • Roma Torre
    • Bob Verini
  • Sign Up
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Now Playing
  • Recently Opened
    • Broadway
    • Off-Broadway
    • Beyond
  • Critics’ Picks
  • Our Critics
    • About Us
    • Melissa Rose Bernardo
    • Michael Feingold
    • David Finkle
    • Will Friedwald
    • Elysa Gardner
    • Sandy MacDonald
    • Jesse Oxfeld
    • MICHAEL SOMMERS
    • Steven Suskin
    • Frank Scheck
    • Roma Torre
    • Bob Verini
  • Sign Up
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
March 8, 2022 9:58 pm

The Chinese Lady: Exoticized, Mistreated, and Still a Cipher

By Jesse Oxfeld

★★★☆☆ The story of the first Chinese woman in America is horrifying, and all these years later we're still telling it

Shannon Tyo in The Chinese Lady. (Photo: Joan Marcus)
Shannon Tyo in The Chinese Lady. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

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 

About Jesse Oxfeld

Jesse Oxfeld was the theater critic of The New York Observer from 2009 to 2014. He has also written about theater for Entertainment Weekly, New York magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Forward, The Times of London, and other publications. Twitter: @joxfeld. Email: jesse@nystagereview.com.

Primary Sidebar

Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes: Let’s Hear It From the Boy

By Melissa Rose Bernardo

★★★★☆ Hugh Jackman plays a professor entangled with a student in Hannah Moscovitch’s 90-minute drama

Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes: Star Power Up Close

By Frank Scheck

★★★★☆ Hugh Jackman and Ella Beatty co-star in this intimate drama about a university professor who has an affair with one of his students.

The Black Wolfe Tone: Kwaku Fortune’s Forceful Semi-Autographical Solo Click

By David Finkle

★★★★☆ The actor, new to the Manhattan Stage, makes himself known, as does director Nicola Murphy Dubey

Five Models in Ruins, 1981: Dressed for Excess

By Michael Sommers

★★☆☆☆ Elizabeth Marvel shoots a gallery of swans in lovely circumstances

CRITICS' PICKS

Just in Time Christine Jonathan Julia

Just in Time: Hello, Bobby! Darin Gets a Splashy Broadway Tribute

★★★★☆ Jonathan Groff gives a once-in-a-lifetime performance as the Grammy-winning “Beyond the Sea” singer

John Proctor Is the Villain cast

John Proctor Is the Villain: A Fearless Gen Z Look at ‘The Crucible’

★★★★★ Director Danya Taymor and a dynamite cast bring Kimberly Belflower’s marvelous new play to Broadway

Good Night, and Good Luck: George Clooney Makes Startling Broadway Bow

★★★★★ Clooney and Grant Heslov adapt their 2005 film to reflect not only the Joe McCarthy era but today

The Picture of Dorian Gray: A Masterpiece from Page to Stage

★★★★★ Succession’s Sarah Snook is brilliant as everyone in a wild adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s prophetic novel

Operation Mincemeat: A Comical Slice of World War II Lore

★★★★☆ A screwball musical from London rolls onto Broadway

The Broadway company of Buena Vista Social Club. Photo by Matthew Murray

Buena Vista Social Club: ¡Qué Gran Fiesta!

★★★★★ A classic documentary on Afro-Cuban musical greats is transformed into a sparkling Broadway delight

Sign up for new reviews

Copyright © 2025 • New York Stage Review • All Rights Reserved.

Website Built by Digital Culture NYC.