What would we do without theater to teach us about history we wouldn’t otherwise learn? Thanks to playwright Lloyd Suh and his elegant, illuminating The Chinese Lady—now at the Public Theater—we now have a glimpse into the life of Afong Moy, reportedly the first Chinese woman ever to set foot in America.
Newly arrived from the Guangzhou Province at age 14, the youngest of seven children, Afong (played with great depth by Shannon Tyo) has been sold—yes, sold—to a pair of American merchants who probably imported her along with all the items that surround her on the stage: ceramic vases, ornately carved tables, hand-painted silks. All those items are, presumably, for sale; Afong, however, is only on display, “for your education and entertainment,” she explains chirpily, “at a price of twenty-five cents adults, ten cents children.” Outside of her handsomely decorated display case sits Atung (Daniel K. Isaac), her translator/prop master, who also hawks commemorative Chinese plates and bargain Buddhas between shows. (“You do not need to know who I am or where I come from, or how it came to be that I speak both languages with such practical and occasionally poetic fluency,” he tells us conspiratorially.)
Directed by Ralph B. Peña, Suh’s play is largely an extended interior monologue, in which Afong shares everything she is unable to with her actual paying audience. Those people, she says, have paid to see “things that are exotic, and foreign, and unusual”: things such as walking (very slowly, as her feet have been bound from age 4), eating with chopsticks, and pouring and drinking tea in an almost ceremonial manner.
[Read Jesse Oxfeld’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
The description of the foot-binding process—breaking the bones in her toes, binding them against the soles of her feet, bending the arches and binding them in silk ribbons, then repeating the entire process a few weeks later for an entire year—is not for the faint of heart. “Personally I don’t consider it barbaric,” Afong muses. “I have noticed there are traditions in the American identity that are similarly entrenched, despite some controversy about them among the populace. Such as corsets. Or the Transatlantic Slave Trade.”
Afong takes it upon herself to tell us about more Chinese history that’s not given its due in the classrooms: how the Transcontinental Railroad was constructed primarily by Chinese laborers; the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese from coming to the United States for 10 years (it was renewed in 1892 and later made permanent, and not repealed until 1943); the Los Angeles Chinatown massacre of 1871, which decimated an estimated 10 percent of the neighborhood’s Chinese American population that day; the 1885 massacre in Sweetwater County, Wyoming, resulting in “the mutilation, decapitation, and castration of fifty Chinese American miners”; the 1887 Snake River massacre in Hells Canyon, Oregon, in which 34 Chinese gold miners were robbed and murdered.
And since you’re at the Public Theater, it’s hard not to think about Christina Yuna Lee, murdered in in mid-February in her Chinatown apartment about a mile away—to say nothing of the staggering number of recent anti-Asian hate crimes in New York City; the NYPD estimates a 361% rise from 2020 to 2021.
“If only I could have shown you how we are so alike in many beautiful ways,” Afong says. “And how we are so different in beautiful ways as well.” That’s a lot for Suh to take on in 90 intermission-free minutes, but he does it—with humor and heart, without preaching or pedantry.
The Chinese Lady opened March 8, 2022, and runs through April 10 at the Public Theater. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
