By Janet Song
Not much is known about Afong Moy. Reportedly the first Chinese woman to step foot in America, Moy was brought over by merchants as a means of advertising Chinese wares. Moy toured across the country as a live exhibition, providing for many nineteenth-century Americans their first exposure to a Chinese woman and to Chinese culture. Afterwards, she seemed to “vanish” from history.
Bo Wang’s debut novel, The Chinese Lady, attempts to reify Moy’s sudden absence from the archives. Wang fictionalizes what Moy’s life could’ve been by imagining her life as witnessed by three women: Moy’s mother, Pearl; Margaret, a former schoolteacher and the wife of a merchant; and Joice, an African American member of P.T. Barnum’s troupe, playing as “the oldest Negro in the world.” Through Moy, they each come to realize what it means to be a woman in the nineteenth century. Or, as Moy herself puts it, what each woman in her life “sought in being good women wasn’t the love and gratitude of their beneficiaries after all but significance—because the only significant thing they were allowed to do with their lives was save somebody else’s.”
When I started The Chinese Lady, I expected the novel to be narrated by Moy herself in its entirety. Indeed, each of the novel’s four parts are introduced in the first person by Moy, but the novel, for the most part, is told in third person. These parts are also given the title of the various names that Moy takes on: Little Sparrow, her name in China; Julia, the name Margaret gives her; China, as P.T. Barnum names her when he takes her in; and finally, Mrs. Moy, the name she gives herself. Moy does not narrate her own story (in the third person) until the final part of the novel. What emerges from this narratorial decision is a metacommentary on how Moy has been remembered by history: an object onto which observers can cast their judgments and insecurities. Each of these women see in Moy the woman they ought to be and the woman they cannot be. For Pearl, Little Sparrow represents the former’s own failures to birth a son and secure herself a strong position as a concubine in Aiguo’s court. Margaret, on the other hand, projects her white saviorism onto Julia, seeing in Julia an outlet to fulfill her duties in motherhood and womanhood. Joice, meanwhile, initially views China with envy but comes to see the ways in which P.T. Barnum’s position as a white patriarchal figure pits her and the other minorities against each other.
As YZ (wordwanderlust) on Goodreads points out, Afong Moy’s voice strengthens and becomes prominent as we progress through each woman. This culminates in the final part of the novel, where the woman who will become Mrs. Moy finally takes control of her story. Mrs. Moy has transformed herself from exoticized object into a performer, a woman who knows how to put on an act in the eyes of authority. Even so, she too must confront the systems that are at large. Through all four women of the novel, The Chinese Lady makes this apparent: working with the system does not save them from it. Given this, the narratorial structure of the novel powerfully demonstrates how Moy found her voice and came to be Mrs. Moy. But that development is weakened by the first-person introductions of each part. For me to truly feel Moy’s transition from voiceless object to a woman with authority, I think Wang could’ve omitted the introductions and preserved Moy’s interiority for the end.
Still, Wang manages to capture the worlds of nineteenth-century China and America with extensive detail. The novel is clearly well researched (even when it fictionalizes Moy’s life entirely in the last section) yet does not feel pedantic when it illustrates to us the numerous historical events happening during Moy’s life: the Opium Wars, American slavery and the abolition movement, and San Francisco’s Chinatown during the Gold Rush period. In particular, what lurks in the background of Wang’s nineteenth-century America is a sinister entertainment industry that objectifies minoritized subjects for the amusement of white audiences. Wang’s novel asks us to consider the performances that minorities and women during this period underwent in order to survive. It is a question that translates onto us today—we are all still performing in accordance with a white supremacist, patriarchal system that continues to categorize us today. The question becomes, then, whether we can break out of that system or, like the women in The Chinese Lady, must simply navigate its script the best we can.
Janet Song hails from Long Island but tells people she’s from New York. She is pursuing her Ph.D. in English at the University of Southern California.