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Imagine a time when Chinese people were considered so unusual that Americans would pay to see a Chinese woman wear traditional attire, eat with chopsticks, sing songs in Cantonese and display her tiny bound feet.
That’s the story of Afong Moy, a Chinese woman who was brought to the United States in 1834 by merchants seeking to promote interest in the Chinese goods they were selling. Displayed as a “curiosity,” and said to be the first Chinese woman in the United States, Moy was an instant media sensation.
From her debut in New York City, Moy toured the nation. In Washington, D.C., she was introduced to President Andrew Jackson, who is said to have touched her feet out of curiosity.
Honolulu theater audiences saw a version of Moy’s story in 2018 when Kumu Kahua Theatre presented Chinese playwright Yilong Liu’s “June Is the First Fall.” Liu included Moy’s story as part of a multigenerational look at the life of a gay Chinese American man and his family in contemporary Hawaii.
Manoa Valley Theatre brings another version of her story to the stage on Thursday with Lloyd Suh’s “The Chinese Lady.” Suh puts Moy front and center as the narrator of her experiences, and uses her to remind the audience that Chinese people have been subjected to racism in the United States for almost two centuries. It’s a story that Suh hopes audiences will connect to things that are happening these days outside the theater.
Honolulu will see cast members Diana Wan and Jennifer Yee Stierli portraying Moy on alternating performances; Wan begins July 13, Stierli on July 14. Alvin Chan completes the cast as Atung, Moy’s translator and sounding board.
Hawaii theater veteran Reiko Ho is directing. Ho directed a different two-person cast in a regional premiere of the show in Florida last fall. She said the play “explores history through a Chinese lens.”
“It also resonates I think, not just with me, but with all the cast and all of us in the room because we get to grapple with our own Chinese American history, as well as personal, whatever generational trauma we’ve all experienced, as part of the play. And that’s a very rare experience in my career.”
Playwright Suh requires that all roles be played by Asians. Ho has gone one step further; the entire cast is of Chinese descent. Chan was born in the United States to Chinese immigrant parents. Stierli’s father’s family has been in the United States for several generations; her mother was born in Taiwan and came to the United States after several years in Japan.
Stierli said her mother never talked much about her experiences. As with the life of Moy, much of her mother’s life is a mystery.
“She’s passed, and a lot of the things that I hear now about her young life are filtered through my dad’s perspective of her experience, and even hearing that — and, of course, trusting him, he’s my dad, and they had a wonderful relationship — some of it doesn’t sound like what she would have said, or what I imagined maybe, being her daughter and being also female. It’s almost a lost story, kind of like Afong Moy. So that’s another part of the show that really hits home for me.”
If Moy ever talked about her family in China, the information had been lost to history.
Moy disappeared from public record in 1850. Did she find a way to return to China, or did she die in the United States? Did she live her later years in poverty or comfort?
No one knows. But Suh’s play offers an opportunity for audiences to relate to Moy’s story on a personal level and consider how her story is relevant today.
“There are a lot of fantastic Asian American playwrights coming up now that I deeply admire, and I’m so happy that I get to do Lloyd’s piece again for Hawaii audiences,” Ho said. “I hope this story resonates with them and I hope that it is the start of many conversations about Chinese history and the legacy of the Chinese in America.”
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“The Chinese Lady”
>> Where: Manoa Valley Theatre, 2833 E. Manoa Road
>> When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday; continues at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, and at 3 p.m. Sundays, through July 30; also at 3 p.m. July 22 and 29.
>> Cost: $24-$42 (discounts available for seniors, military personnel and those age 25 and younger)
>> Info: manoavalley theatre.com or 808-988-6131
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