From cultural prop to circus freak: the first Chinese woman in US
- Afong Moy was brought to the US in 1834 to help sell Chinese goods to an eager American middle class, writes historian Nancy E. Davis
- She met president Andrew Jackson and served as a cultural bridge, but ended up in a circus sideshow being mocked for her differences
The Chinese Lady: Afong Moy in Early America, by Nancy E. Davis. Published by Oxford University Press. 4 stars.
It requires an inventive streak to write extensively about a person whose known biography only fills a few pages. This is the long shot taken in The Chinese Lady: Afong Moy in Early America, by historian Nancy E. Davis, who refers to her as “the first Chinese woman to arrive in America”.
Davis’s ambition pays off. She augments scant available material about Moy, who was brought to the United States as a “cultural prop” to help sell Chinese goods, by painting in the negative space around her. While keeping Moy in sight, Davis branches off to detail, among other topics, the foundation of US-China trade and cultural ties, the beginnings of China’s manufacturing industry, and the transformation of 19th-century American society.
Moy arrived in New York in October 1834 at about 16 years of age. She has a documented history in the country spanning 17 years, the middle half of which were spent in relative obscurity in a poorhouse in New Jersey.
Davis divides Moy’s public life into two acts. First, she was an exotic “presenter” of Chinese-made goods. Later, after an absence from a leering public – fallout from the economic panic of 1837 made her an expendable luxury – she became a sideshow attraction from the late 1840s, mainly under the devices of American showman PT Barnum.