CriticalActs
The Chinese Lady
US History’s Object Lesson Becomes US History’s Interpreter
Colleen Kim Daniher
In the final moments of Magic Theatre’s production of The Chinese Lady, the house lights
come up on the audience as Afong Moy,
played by Rinabeth Apostol, implores us to
“look at each other.” At this juncture in the
play it is 2019 and Afong, we are to understand, is 199 years old — and she has been waiting for us. Wearing a purple shroud and seated
in a chair on an elevated platform stage inside
San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center for Arts
and Culture, Afong/Apostol asks us to look at
her and each other, and to consider “the relevancy” of her story to the present. “I’m looking
at you,” she says. “Are you looking at me? Can
you see me?” (Suh 2018:43).
My seatmates and I shift awkwardly, and
cast sidelong glances at each other. We have
been plunged back into the present. It is a cool
October evening in prepandemic 2019, and
approximately 70 of us have assembled in the
Magic Theatre’s intimate blackbox theatre
space. We sit in raked seating facing three sides
of an octagonal raised platform stage. The set,
designed by Jacquelyn Scott, brilliantly captures
both the 19th-century Orientalist excess and the
surveillant conditions of the real Afong Moy’s
life (1820–ca. 1850). The specially constructed
platform stage is draped in lush, embroidered
silk curtains; a rope is suspended from the ceiling to the front-left on the stage, with a chair
on the floor in front and to the right. Whereas
the curtained stage represents the museum
exhibition room wherein Moy spent most of
her documented life while in America, the rope
and the chair help to delineate the extension of
the play’s dramatic action beyond the edge of
the stage. When the mechanized curtains open,
we know that Afong Moy is available for public,
commercial view, and that we, by extension, are
cast as that historic museum public; when they
close, she is hidden away, cloistered behind curtains that our gaze can’t penetrate. These openings and closings, combined with the box-like
structure of the curtained platform stage set
within the larger blackbox playing space, reinforce the peep show–like titillation of the historical Afong Moy’s display and exhibition.
The Chinese Lady is a show-within-a-show.
It is thus filled with metatheatrical moments
when we, the audience, are made conscious of
our looking. The story of Afong Moy, after all,
is a story about looking. The historical Moy,
the play’s titular “Chinese Lady,” was ostensibly the first Chinese woman to come to
America in the early 19th century. Prior to
this, the “first wave” of Chinese immigrants
were mostly laboring men who arrived in the
Pacific Northwest in the 1850s, following
the 1849 Gold Rush and the building of the
Transcontinental Railroad (1862–69). Moy was
brought to the US in 1834, after having been
sold by her family in Guangzhou to Nathaniel
and Frederick Carne, two American traders
who specialized in imports from the “Far East.”
And she was brought to be looked at. Like an
exotic vase or a teacup, the 14-year-old Moy
Colleen Kim Daniher is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies in the Department of
Communication Studies at San Francisco State University. She is a cultural historian of race
and performance in the transnational Americas. Current book projects include an analysis of the
“mixed-race” femme performer as a fruitful interpretive problem of 20th-century US performance
historiography and transpacific performance and the idea of tropical Asia. ckdaniher@sfsu.edu
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The story of Afong Moy can
thus be understood within a long
and ugly history of human exhibition, where the racist, heterosexist,
and ableist freakshow served as a
lynchpin of popular mass entertainment (see Garland-Thomson 1996).
In this sense Moy, “The Chinese
Lady,” can be positioned alongside other iconic “freak” figures
such as Saartjie Baartman (“The
Hottentot Venus”), Julia Pastrana
(“The Ape Woman”), and Joseph
Merrick (“The Elephant Man”).
And, in the same vein as SuzanLori Parks’s Venus (1990), Shaun
Prendergast’s The True History of
the Tragic Life and Triumphant Death
of Julia Pastrana, the Ugliest Woman
in the World (1998), and Bernard
Pomerance’s The Elephant Man
(1977), Suh’s The Chinese Lady is a
theatrical work of historical fiction
that tries to imagine the human
story of someone who was understood to be less than human.
Critical Acts
While broadly humanistic in
tone and historical in scope, the
Magic Theatre production enacts,
at the same time, a decidedly Asian
Americanist critique of the present. Under the skillful direction
of Mina Morita, The Chinese Lady
stages a reversal of the Eurocentric,
ethnographic gaze, such that Afong
Moy, one of the infamous objectiFigure 1. Rinabeth Apostol as Afong Moy in The Chinese Lady by Lloyd
Suh, directed by Mina Morita. Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture,
fied subjects of US history, here gets
2019. (Photo by Jennifer Reiley; courtesy of Magic Theatre)
reimagined as an interpreter of US
history. What results is a kind of history and anthropology of — what
was in October 2019 — the Trump-era preswas exhibited and displayed in a room alongent, told from the perspective of a ghostly
side artifacts promoted for sale to the American
Afong Moy.
public. She was first exhibited at Peale’s
Natural History Museum and later at P.T.
Suh’s Chinese Lady debuted in 2018, first at
Barnum’s American Museum in New York City.
the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield,
With her bound feet prominently displayed,
MA, and then in New York City in a coproshe would perform mundane tasks for her audiduction by the Barrington Stage Company and
ence, such as eating and walking, at a rate of 25
New York’s Ma-Yi Theater. Witnessing the
cents per viewer. Moy would later tour much
Magic Theatre production in San Francisco
of the eastern United States, disappearing from
in the fall of 2019, I find it nearly impossithe extant historical record after 1850, at the
ble to separate my viewing from the immediage of 30.
acy of my own place and time. First, there is
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the matter of place. Just a short bus
ride away from the Fort Mason
Center is San Francisco’s historic
Chinatown, the oldest Chinatown
in North America. To the north is
Angel Island, a former immigration inspection and detainment station (1910–1940) that intercepted
and detained millions of US-bound
transpacific Asian migrants during
the Chinese Exclusion Act era
(1882–1943). To the east and
southwest, respectively, are the
University of California, Berkeley,
and San Francisco State University,
two historic sites of the student-led
protests that 50 years ago became
the launching pad for ethnic studies
curricula and the Asian American
social movement as we know
it today.
Figure 2. Atung (Will Dao) provides the tea that Afong (Rinabeth Apostol)
drinks in front of her museum-going public/the audience in The Chinese
Lady by Lloyd Suh, directed by Mina Morita. Fort Mason Center for Arts
& Culture, 2019. (Photo by Jennifer Reiley; courtesy of Magic Theatre)
Then there is the matter of
time: Suh, one of the preeminent
Asian American playwrights of the past decade,
began writing The Chinese Lady in 2015 and
finished it in 2017 — during the transitional
period between the US presidencies of Barack
Obama and Donald Trump. In the wake of the
Trump administration’s overtly xenophobic,
anti-immigration rhetoric and policies (such as
the notorious “Muslim ban” of January 2017),
The Chinese Lady’s excavation of the history of
19th-century anti-Asian legal exclusions in the
US feels all too prescient. After all, as historians like Beth Lew-Williams and Erika Lee
have pointed out, laws like the 1875 Page Act
and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which targeted Chinese women and then men for immigration restriction and exclusion, preempted
the Muslim ban as the first laws in the country to bar immigrants on the basis of race and
national origin (see Lew-Williams 2018 and
Lee 2003). Positioning Afong Moy as a proto–
Asian American, the San Francisco production
of The Chinese Lady gains much of its polemical
force through the understanding that the history of Chinese immigration in the US is a history of exclusionary US citizenship writ-large.
As audience members, we understand that
we, too, are cast as diegetic characters within
the world of the play. In her opening monologue, Afong introduces herself, tells us that the
year is 1834, and thanks us for coming to see
her. Positioned thus as both witnesses to Suh’s
Critical Acts
The play is structured in two loose acts and
six scenes performed without intermission.
These scenes are demarcated visually by the
opening and closing of the raised stage’s cur-
tains, and sonically by the sounding of a gong.
The dramatic action unfolds primarily through
audience direct-address and dialogue between
the play’s two main characters: Afong (Apostol)
and Atung (played by Will Dao). Based on historical documentation of the real Atung, the
play’s Atung is Afong’s translator, stage manager, and general “minder”; he provides the
tea and meals that Afong eats in front of her
museum-going public, he tells her when to
walk the exhibition room’s perimeter during
her act, when to rest, and when the show is
over. In fact, as stage manager for Afong’s starturn as human exhibit, it is Atung who sounds
the gong (by pulling on the suspended rope)
and cues the closing of the curtains. He spends
most of his “onstage” time literally offstage:
seated in the chair on the floor in front of the
platform. Whereas Afong is an educated, upperclass Chinese woman (evidenced by her delicate manner and what she tells us are her bound
feet), Atung is a peasant. We are told repeatedly
by both characters that Atung is “irrelevant.”
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play in the present and Afong’s 19th-century
exhibition audience, we time travel with Afong
and Atung through the play’s scenes, from 1834
when Afong is 14 years old and newly arrived
in America through to “our” present, in this
case, the year 2019.
Suh’s script is decidedly unnaturalistic.
From its outset, the play makes clear its investment in exploring performance as reenactment — that is, performance not simply as the
re-creation of the past but as what Joseph Roach
would call the surrogation of the past (Roach
1996). We are continuously reminded that the
actors’ bodies onstage stand in for but do not
replace the historical actors they embody. For
example, within minutes of Afong’s opening
lines of address, she explains that she appears to
be communicating in English only because she
is “not really speaking” at all:
AFONG: It would of course seem that I
am speaking, as my mouth is moving and
my thoughts are becoming articulated
through sound, but this is not in fact
what is happening. What is happening
is performance. [...] These words you
hear are not my own. These clothes that
I wear are not my own. This body that I
occupy is not my own. (Suh 2018:2)
Critical Acts
These actorly surrogations have two layers:
just as the historical Moy stood in for a mythical “Chinese Lady” presented to the American
public, so too does the actress Rinabeth Apostol
stand in for the historical Moy, who is given
language only through Suh’s fictional script.
Thus, while interested in Afong Moy’s subjectivity, The Chinese Lady insists upon the impossibility of restoring it.
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The first act follows Afong from ages 14
to 17 (ca. 1834 –1837), when she is young and
still cheerfully optimistic about her imposed
sojourn in America. Apostol’s precocious young
Afong, played with wit and verve, is especially effective here. In addition to believing that her stay in the US is only temporary,
young Afong understands her public exhibition
in terms of cultural diplomacy between China
and the US. “I am very pleased to be here in
this great country. I am very pleased to represent my homeland, my family, my culture,
and my history to you in hopes that this may
lead to greater understanding and goodwill
between China and America, and between all
the peoples of the world!” she says at the end of
scene 1 (2018:5).
The second act (ca. 1849–present) follows an increasingly jaded Afong from ages
29 to 62 through three seminal flashpoints in
Chinese American history: 1) the 1849 San
Francisco Gold Rush; 2) the 1864 building
of the Transcontinental Railroad; and 3) the
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. These landmark moments in Asian American immigration
history are referenced within Afong’s firstperson, direct-address monologues, but they
are never directly shown. This is because The
Chinese Lady is, for the most part, a “front-ofstage” drama. In a reversal of the conventions
of a backstage drama, we never see Afong outside of public exhibition hours, and in fact we
never see Afong even leave her exhibition room
(or “Room,” as anthropomorphized in Suh’s
script) until the penultimate scene of the play.
And even then, her leave-taking is ambiguous. Faced with the prospect of replacement
(by a 14-year-old girl from Peking) and abandonment (by Atung), a defiant 44-year-old
Afong announces her intention to walk and
ride the rails from New York to San Francisco.
Then, like Ibsen’s Nora, Afong walks out of
the theatre proper by descending from the elevated platform stage, crossing the narrow passage between the stage and the front row,
and exiting past the seated audience through
the lobby door. As audience members we
applaud her heroic exeunt, but we also know
the unlikelihood of her making it to the West
Coast: her feet are bound, she can’t speak
English, she knows no one. Nonetheless, this
highly kinetic moment stands in stark contrast
to the rest of the play, where Afong’s movements are constrained to both her museum act
and her museum room. Beyond re-creating the
limited gestural routines of her museum act for
us (walking around her room to show off her
clothes and bound feet; eating a bowl of food
with chopsticks), Afong spends most of the
play static, seated in a chair in the middle of
her museum room. Although Apostol approximates the bodily habitudes of the historical Moy in this regard, she does not attempt
to walk as if her feet are bound, in keeping with Suh’s expressed instruction in the
production notes.
Figure 3. Afong Moy (Rinabeth Apostol) on display with Atung (Will Dao), her “minder,” in The Chinese
Lady by Lloyd Suh, directed by Mina Morita. Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, 2019. (Photo by
Jennifer Reiley; courtesy of Magic Theatre)
The sixth and final scene of the play functions more like a coda or alternate ending to the
previous one. Dream-like, it opens with the curtains drawn on the empty museum room and a
voice-over of Afong introducing herself in her
usual fashion, indicating that the year is 1882
and that she is now 62. Unlike the previous five
scenes, however, theatrical time here is compressed: 130 years pass within a few lines of the
recorded voice-over. As Afong’s prerecorded
voice lists a litany of dates and instances of
turn-of-the-century anti-Chinese mob violence
and legal immigration restrictions that came
after her years on display, Apostol-as-Afong
returns to the theatre and silently reassumes her
seated position in the Room. When she begins
speaking again, it is in shared space-time with
the audience: “It is the year [2019] and I am one
hundred and ninety [nine] years old [...] I have
been waiting for you for so long” (42).1 The
effect is as disconcerting as it is circular: Afong
speaks to us both beyond the grave and within
the immediate present of live theatre.
This moment is the production’s clearest expression of its philosophy of time, specifically, the relationship between the past and
the present, and how the theatre can bend this
relationship. It is also a moment that is unique
to the Magic Theatre production: Suh’s script
does not indicate the use of prerecorded voiceover. Indeed, one of the most compelling propositions that the Magic Theatre production
has to offer is that, through performance, the
past can, in fact, look into the face of the present and speak. Like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of
History, Afong Moy returns to us “at a moment
of danger” and asks us to look at her...and
remember ([1955] 2007:255).2 This is a powerful political rejoinder at a moment in contemporary America when wall-building, kids
2. The longer passage in question reads: To “articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it
really was (Ranke).’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (Benjamin [1955]
2007:255).
Critical Acts
1. The original line in the 2018 published script is: “It is the year 2018 and I am one hundred and ninety eight years
old...I have been waiting for you for so long” (Suh 2018:42).
171
in cages, and now, as I write, virulent racism
against supposedly contagion-bearing Asians
has become the new normal.
Unlike Benjamin’s Angel, however, Afong is
able to do more than look silently at the present in horror. Through that strange alchemy
of surrogation and presence in performance,
Afong not only appears before us but also
speaks across time to teach us about the present. Throughout The Chinese Lady, Afong delivers a series of “history lectures.” She lectures
on everything from the history of commodities that led the US to China (tea, opium) and
China to the US (gold), to the Liberty Bell,
Indian Removal, Manifest Destiny and their
founding fictions of naturalized freedoms and
property that continue to shore up white nativist claims to America today. It is in this teaching that Afong reveals herself to be as much an
expert in the US culture that observes her as
the Chinese one she is supposed to unequivocally represent. By the time Afong utters the
final lines of the play — “Are you looking at
me? Can you see me?”— the answer is already
self-evident: “We” may not have been looking at “her,” but Afong has been looking, and
studying “us” all along.
Over the course of the production’s
90-minute runtime, Morita handles Suh’s
metatheatrical whimsy and dialogue-driven
script with a clear directorial vision of her
own. By the play’s Brechtian end, with the
house lights up and Afong’s final exhortation to
“really look at each other” (2018:43), it is obvious that — although sumptuously beautiful in
visuals and poetic language — this is no “culinary” theatre experience. What we are watching is political theatre, meant to reveal and
confront the xenophobia of our own present
conditions through the story of Afong Moy.
Critical Acts
Suh is just one of a handful of writers and
scholars to have turned to Afong Moy in recent
years. In 2019 alone, the story and figure of
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Afong Moy has appeared in a full-length biography by curator/historian Nancy E. Davis
(2019), in professor and cultural critic Anne
Anlin Cheng’s tract on the object-like racialization of “the Asiatic yellow woman” (2019), and
in award-winning poet Sally Wen Mao’s collection of poetry, Oculus (2019). As the Magic
Theatre production of The Chinese Lady attests,
the present-day lure of Afong Moy rests in her
ability to speak to present-day problems as
yet unresolved. Ultimately, she prompts us to
ask: who looks, who gazes, who sees, who can
be seen?
References
Benjamin, Walter. (1955) 2007. “Theses on the
Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations: Essays
and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, 253–64. Trans.
Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books.
Cheng, Anne Anlin. 2019. Ornamentalism. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Davis, Nancy E. 2019. The Chinese Lady: Afong Moy in
Early America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, ed. 1996. Freakery:
Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. New
York: New York University Press.
Lee, Erika. 2003. At America’s Gates: Chinese
Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Lew-Williams, Beth. 2018. The Chinese Must Go:
Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in
America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Mao, Sally Wen. 2019. Oculus: Poems. Minneapolis,
MN: Graywolf Press.
Roach, Joseph. 1996. Cities of the Dead: CircumAtlantic Performance. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Suh, Lloyd. 2018. The Chinese Lady. New York:
Dramatists Play Service, Inc.
TDR 65:2 (T250) 2021
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1054204321000149
© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Cambridge University
Press for Tisch School of the Arts/NYU