The Chinese Lady: "exotic, foreign and unusual"
17 May 2023

by Drew Rowsome - Photos by Dahlia Katz

We queue up to be ushered into a room to view 'The Chinese Lady.' Rollicking, incongruous, folk songs associated with the southern states, pre-civil war, play, as The Chinese Lady sits impassively on a throne atop a platform. Her smile is set. Her translator/handler holds up a sign letting us know it is 25 cents for adults and 10 cents for children. She begins her bally, her spiel, but her actual story leaks out around the edges and The Chinese Lady becomes a fascinating journey through one life. One life that reflects not only on history but right through to this moment. The popular entertainment of exhibiting people in a sideshow or museum has supposedly fallen out of favour, but one only has to look at reality TV to realize that it has merely evolved with the mediums available.

Afong Moy was a sensation in 1834. One of, if not the, first Asian women to come to North America, she was an object of great curiosity. All she had to do was exist, to be as her handler explains, "exotic, foreign and unusual." She was 14-years-old and had been "sold into service" by her family. She saw herself as being on a mission, her "responsibility," to bridge two cultures. She was to be bitterly disappointed. 

Moy tells us her story. Shows us how she eats with chopsticks, offers a history of the importance of tea, and, in a harrowing segment, explains the process of foot binding. Showing she can walk on what her feet have been transformed into, is the climax of her act. The tension between the presentation and the woman is present from the very beginning, but as the years accumulate and we see the act as it devolves, the true horror of what has been done becomes more and more apparent. And playwright Lloyd Suh pulls no punches in showing how brutal racism and colonialism are. Especially when masquerading as entertainment or education. By the time Afong Moy reaches 203-years-old and the catalogue of injustices has grown to monstrous proportions, Suh's point has been made woundingly.

As she is about to set out on tour to the magical lands of Baltimore and Pittsburgh, Moy wonders about the wonders she is about to encounter. She believes that "San Francisco, California" sounds like the most beautiful place on earth. She muses about taking an American girl to China to exhibit, to further facilitate the bridging of cultures. That the idea is so comically absurd, makes Suh's point bluntly. The colonizers are never the other, they are the conquerors. Rosie Simon as Moy draws us in with an initially naïve demeanour, a wide-eyed fascination with the world and a determination to see the best in everything that happens. She adds an edge of imperiousness, bravado, that grows as Moy ages into a white hot righteous fury. From object to avenger. Simon holds the stage in a firm grasp and turns our gaze back to us magnified.

John Ng as Atung her handler, has a trickier role. Moy initially pronounces him "irrelevant" but his story, untold, is a dramatic foil to Moy's. He is all the voices that never got heard. Atung feigns obsequiousness but continually protects, reprimands and undermines Moy. Suh and director Marjorie Chan (The Year of the Cello, I Call Myself Princess, A Synonym for Love) toy with the fourth wall before blasting it down in the final minutes. Moy is aware she is performing a creation that she is not, and Atung is the centre of that push and pull. There are supernatural elements, linked to the sexual and forbidden, that Ng turns into an anguished monologue. His possibly deliberate mistranslations of an encounter during a private audience, lays bare the sexual underside of "exotic, foreign and unusual." The man finds Moy's feet arousing, saying "you are beautiful in your ugliness." Ng dares to pitch his performance to the same place, letting the character become "disgusting and mesmerizing."

If the finale of The Chinese Lady feels a little heavy-handed, it earns that due to the subtle build-up and dynamic performances. Events and ideas proceed by careful gradations, ratcheting the drama to a catharsis that doesn't exist. The anger that The Chinese Lady justifiably feels, still exists. It is a powerful disturbing twist. Like Moy's unfortunate but illuminating visit to a zoo, our visit to The Chinese Lady has gone from coming to observe and gawk, to having to look inside. Nothing is known of the fate of the historical Afong Moy, but Suh has given her immortality.