442: Afong Moy is widely recognized as the first Chinese woman in the U.S.

American merchants treated her as a talking exotic prop for Orientalist product placement. The American public perhaps paid the 25 cents to 50 cents mostly to gawk at her unwrapped bound feet, the chief selling point of the Western white gaze.

Her name was Afong Moy, and as far as available documentation can unravel, she was the first Chinese woman on American soil. She arrived in New York in October 1834 at somewhere between 14 and 19 years old. She was brought by American merchants, the brothers Nathaniel and Frederic Carne and Captain Benjamin Obear, who saw a Chinese woman as a promotional tool to advertise their Chinese goods in the United States. They also likely assigned her the name “Afong Moy.”

The Washington ship manifest indicates an unnamed Canton female servant, likely someone to tend to Afong Moy’s bound feet during the voyage. Her unknown fate may point to a lost “first Chinese woman in America” story.

Reproduced from "The Chinese Lady: Afong Moy in Early America"

Nancy E. Davis's book The Chinese Lady: Afong Moy in Early America notes that Moy’s upbringing in Canton (present-day Guangzhou) remains fuzzy, while theorizing that her father was a merchant who struck a deal for her servitude in return for money, an agreement that bypassed China’s strict laws against its citizens departing its shores. Moy’s family back in China was reported to be “handsomely remunerated,” though “whether Afong Moy or her parents saw any of her earnings is unclear,” says American studies professor Krystyn R. Moon in Yellowface creating the Chinese in American popular music and performance, 1950s-1920s.

The merchants first exhibited Moy, “in a costume of her own country” and surrounded by Chinese curiosities, in a New York salon, where she would essentially perform her Chineseness by walking around with her bound feet, talking about Chinese culture through an interpreter, eating with her chopsticks (gasp), and singing Chinese songs. Touring major U.S. cities, their exhibition of Moy included the New York Brooklyn Institute, Philadelphia's Peale Museum, The New Orleans's American Theatre, and a guest house in Havana, Cuba.

A lithograph of Afong Moy by Charles Risso and William R. Browne.

From The New York Public Library

Moy’s bound feet elicited patronizing pity and titillation for her Western audience, swallowing their proof of Chinese barbarity. Displaying her bare bound feet to Western doctors and the public—a violation in her culture—likely rattled her. When President Andrew Jackson met Moy, he implored her “to persuade her [Chinese] countrywomen to abandon the custom of cramping their feet.” Missionary Margaret Prior once approached her to offer her Christian eternal salvation. White poets lamented Moy’s circumstances in their verses.

Not that Moy, who eventually acquired a level of English, didn’t carry her own judgments of her American audience. A crumb of her opinion is sighted in a New-York Commercial Advertiser account on Nov. 15, 1834, which noted “on her brow, a frown of indignant rebuke” to oglers. A Sept. 2, 1835, Republican Herald entry quotes her perceiving American ladies’ feet as “too big—no good.”

A catalog of Chinese curiosities, spreading the misinformation that Chinese women with bound feet wore “iron shoes,” mentioning Afong Moy’s early interpreter, Atung, a male Chinese American immigrant.

From The New York Public Library

Ultimately, Moy’s handlers marooned her in the United States, delaying and then abandoning the agreement to return her to China (circumstances likely exacerbated by the Opium Wars that crumbled China-America diplomacy). In 1838, she ended up in a Monmouth, New Jersey poorhouse. Later, she ended up among the menagerie of P.T. Barnum, notorious for exhibiting people of color, like Joice Heth, Maximo and Bartola, Chang and Eng Bunker, and Pwan-Ye-Koo (another Chinese woman with bound feet), as sideshows. By then, her name headlined as “Afong Moy Nanchoy,” allowing researchers to speculate that she married a man of Cantonese descent.

By April 1850, Moy vanished from history. There exists theories that she returned to the Monmouth poorhouse or assimilated into the New York City Chinese community. Regardless, she became an expired exhibition, a ghost.

An advertisement in "The Charleston Mercury," from Wednesday, April 22, 1835.

Courtesy of Newspaper.com

Afong Moy on the 21st Century stage

But later, Moy’s story resurfaced on the theater stage. In 2008, the University of Oregon premiered Wendy Williams’s play Lotus Lessons, which follows an in-crisis Chinese American adoptee getting a pep talk from Moy’s ghost.

Shannon Tyo in Ma Yi Theater Company’s production of "The Chinese Lady," written by Lloyd Suh and directed by Ralph B. Peña, at The Public Theater.

Joan Marcus

A decade later, playwright Lloyd Suh saw the premiere of his play The Chinese Lady in July 2018 at the St. Germain Stage in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. I attended the 2021 Public Theater’s staging when it landed in the Stop AAPI Hate movement. In actress Shannon Tyo’s embodiment of Moy, she grows wary at her objectification even as she hopes that her performance bridges Eastern-Western diplomacy. But her commercialized, superficialized visibility doesn’t inspire the cross-cultural empathy of her dreams. In Suh’s fictionalization, she lives long enough to express outrage against the anti-Chinese racism besieging the Chinese American community. In the play’s ending, the actress emerges from Moy’s costume and stares back at the audience.