The Chinese Lady: Afong Moy in Early America'

H-Early-America O'Brien on Davis, 'The Chinese Lady: Afong Moy in Early America'

Review published on Thursday, April 29, 2021

Nancy E. Davis. The Chinese Lady: Afong Moy in Early America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 343 pp. $31.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-064523-6.

Reviewed by G. Patrick O'Brien (Kennesaw State University) Published on H-Early-America (April, 2021) Commissioned by Troy Bickham (Texas A&M University)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=56202

O'Brien on Davis, 'The Chinese Lady: Afong Moy in Early America'

In The Chinese Lady: Afong Moy in Early America, Nancy E. Davis pulls together a diverse collection of sources to take her readers on a captivating and multifaceted survey of mid-nineteenth-century America. Although Davis’s focus is Afong Moy—who was, when she arrived in 1834, in all likelihood the first Chinese woman on American soil—Davis extrapolates out from her narrative to explore the history of the early American economy, nascent American capitalism and consumer culture, contemporary American fashions, antebellum class dynamics, mid-century religion, and perhaps most importantly, early Americans’ understanding of the “East,” among many other subjects. And while the primary focus is on the at least seventeen years Afong Moy spent in America, Davis is also careful to draw connections back to Afong Moy’s home in Guangzhou to speculate on a subject few contemporary Americans cared to investigate: Afong Moy’s authentic character and her perception of the American people and their customs. The result is a tour de force of historical storytelling that, while impressive in its breadth, might leave some specialists wanting more expansive analysis.

Afong Moy’s importance supersedes her place as the first Chinese woman in the United States. As Davis notes, “Unwittingly, she served as the first cultural bridge in the American public’s perception of China. Her presence moved Americans from what had been an abstract, imagined, notion of ‘Chineseness’ to a more specific and concrete understanding of the ‘East’ through objects, clothing, images—and herself” (p. 2). Equally important, although Afong Moy’s notoriety spanned a mere seventeen years, Americans’ perception of China—and by extension, their attitudes toward her—changed over time. Thus, Davis divides her narrative into four parts, which, given Afong Moy’s role in many staged performances, she creatively titles with allusions to the theater. During these three distinctive periods, Davis explains, “Afong Moy serves as a bridge, a foil, and then equally as a window, to America’s cultural perception of China” (p. 7).

In part 1, “Setting the Stage,” Davis recreates, with some well-informed speculation, the circumstances that brought Afong Moy to America. The first chapter explores the diverse but interconnected backgrounds of those Americans responsible for Afong Moy’s passage to the United States. As American commercial interests shifted south from New England during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, more New York-based firms began outfitting expeditions to southern China. As Davis explains, the dilemma facing smaller firms “was to develop a successful business in a bold

Citation: H-Net Reviews. O'Brien on Davis, 'The Chinese Lady: Afong Moy in Early America'. H-Early-America. 04-29-2021. https://networks.h-net.org/node/8585/reviews/7642950/obrien-davis-chinese-lady-afong-moy-early-america Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Early-America and nontraditional way in order to compete with the more recognized New York China traders” (p. 21). To set themselves apart, one venture, run by cousins Francis and Nathaniel Carnes, developed a two-pronged approach that was decades ahead of its time. The first aspect of their business was the creation of an effective “‘V-shaped’ trade … [that] took French goods as models for imitation to China, where they were reproduced for eventual sale in America” (p. 23). The second was “one of the first advertising and branding campaigns” that aimed to drive up demand to for these goods by marketing them alongside an authentic Chinese woman (p. 24). In the second chapter, Davis takes her readers on the voyage to and from early nineteenth-century Guangzhou. Prior to 1839, American businessmen in Guangzhou operated under the ever-present and watchful eye of the Manchu—or Qing—Dynasty, which saw “the mingling of alien foreigners with any native people” as detrimental to both racial purity and their control (p. 32). The result was a highly regulated market off-limits to Western women and an increasingly common opinion among Westerners that the Chinese were naturally both archaic and insular. It is in this strictly controlled environment that readers first meet Afong Moy. While Davis admits that “we can only speculate about Afong Moy’s Chinese life,” the number of preparations the Carnes made to secure her transfer to America and her physical appearance provide some insight (p. 37). Her tiny, bound feet—the single most important characteristic in the eyes of the Carnes—reveals she was likely from a middling to upper-middling Han Chinese family that could afford “the sacrifice of their daughter’s labor” (p. 34). “Afong Moy’s status as the daughter of a local merchant or comprador, a middleman who assisted foreign merchants in their households or in their businesses, if the most likely explanation of background,” Davis concludes (p. 41).

Part 2, “The Show,” explains how the Carnes carefully crafted Afong Moy’s appearance to drum up popular demand for imported Chinese goods. As Davis notes, “Afong Moy’s American world was, from the very first, framed by a stage. Here, objects, images, clothing, and Afong Moy herself provided the setting for a narrative that other scripted” (p. 49). In the third chapter, Davis relies on the written testimonies of those who paid to see Afong Moy, like merchant Philip Horne, and an 1835 Charles Risso and William R. Browne lithograph the Carnes commissioned to mark her arrival in the United States to set the stage. To advertise their Chinese goods, the Carnes needed to depict Afong Moy as both exotic and relatable. Although Afong Moy, with her small feet, was the centerpiece of the Risso and Browne’s lithograph, the viewer could not help but ogle the diverse goods placed around her. As Davis explains, “The message of the staging was apparent. By situating Afong Moy as an elite woman with objects familiar to her life, visitors were encouraged to envision a similar experience for themselves” (p. 59). In chapters 4 and 5, Davis investigates early American consumer culture and the rise of “commercial orientalism.” Pulling heavily from a five-page catalogue that advertised the sale of goods that had traveled with Afong Moy back from China, she documents how the Carnes marketed these items to New York’s increasing middle-class clientele who, by the early 1830s, had developed an “eagerness for proper appearance” (p. 104). Davis takes her readers through condensed but insightful histories of a variety of everyday personal items—including imported games that appealed to children, like “ivory tangram puzzles” (p. 72), and articles that would become staples in American fashion, like the shawl (p. 80), the fan (p. 82), and the handkerchief (p. 85)—and household items—including seemingly expensive lacquered writing desks and tea caddies (pp. 99-101), exotic teas and spices like ginger and cassia (p. 106-107), and decorations like bamboo matting (p. 110) and window blinds (p. 122). While some the items the Carnes marketed were not traditionally Chinese, “Afong Moy presented the objects and afforded the ‘oriental’ bridge that gave

In part 3, “On Tour,” Davis recreates Afong Moy’s travel around the United States, and even to Cuba, to explore how Americans in diverse cities—from Boston south to Charleston, and from the Caribbean to New Orleans, and upriver to Cincinnati, and then to Pittsburgh—reacted to and understood “the Chinese Lady.” Relying mostly on local newspaper coverage and using the travel narratives of contemporary foreign travelers to infer about Afong Moy’s experience, Davis demonstrates how Afong Moy became less connected to Chinese goods and more a spectacle in her own right. In some cities, including Providence, Albany, and Havana, spectators appeared to approach the foreign woman with genuine curiosity and empathy. In others, including Charleston, Pensacola, and Natchez, crowds gawked and mocked the visitor. In chapter 6, Davis takes her readers on Afong Moy’s travel from New York to Charleston, South Carolina, between January and May 1835 with stops along the way in Philadelphia, Washington DC, and Baltimore. As Davis explains, “Her southern journey would illuminate different facets of her experience in the United States, including both attractive and unattractive aspects of American life” (p. 135). Chapter 7 details Afong Moy’s travel north to New England through the late autumn of 1835, where, at least in Boston, educated crowds looked on the foreign woman as “the antipode, the very opposite, of what American idealized as a ‘republican’ woman. With her bound feet, perceived backwardness, and encumbrances of her culture, she was what American women should not be in a democracy” (p. 178). Chapter 8 documents Afong Moy’s half-year excursion to Cuba, Pensacola, New Orleans, Natchez, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh. Although Afong Moy was not the only traveler to experience such a whirlwind tour, as Davis notes, “very few [others] faced the triple exigencies of racial difference, disability, and gender” (p. 217).

In the final section, appropriately titled “Finale,” Davis explores Afong Moy’s fall into relatively obscurity in the late 1830s only to reemerge in 1847. Chapter 9 details how the Panic of 1837 in America and British imperialism in Canton during the First Opium War coupled to exacerbate Afong Moy’s plight and prolong her time in the United States. The economic downturn of 1837 “eviscerated the savings of the middle and laboring classes,” leaving Afong Moy without employment (p. 226). As tensions between the British and Qing Dynasty officials in China escalated over the importation of opium, she had no hope of returning to China. But after an absence of eight years—during which time Afong Moy probably subsisted on the meager $2.50 a week her former manager paid to the family that boarded her in Monmouth County, New Jersey—the arrival of an authentic Chinese junk, named the Keying, in New York revitalized American interest in China, and Afong Moy once again found herself in the public’s eye, where she had no say in how her story was crafted. In chapter 10, Davis describes how Afong Moy’s new manager, P. T. Barnum, understood that mid-century Americans had grown more suspicious of outsiders, especially the Chinese whom popular culture had increasingly depicted as “beyond the pale of Western respectability and reason,” and used Afong Moy to channel this image. In Barnum’s shows, as Davis explains, “Afong Moy indirectly represented all that the West found curious and reprehensible in Chinese customs, lifestyle, and the treatment of women” (p. 247). Although Afong Moy disappears from the record in 1851, there is little reason to believe she returned to China. “She likely resigned herself to a life in America without hope of seeing her native land again,” Davis speculates (p. 265).

Davis’s greatest strength is her mastery over a diverse group of sources. She draws from travel narratives, newspapers, ship invoices, popular literature, personal journals, and, as a testament to her career in museums, an array of material culture to recreate early to mid-nineteenth-century

America and Americans’ fluid understanding of “the Other” through Afong Moy. In the process, she also provides many glimpses into the construction of race in mid-nineteenth-century America, which might leave some specialists hungry for more. For example, Davis informs us that during Afong Moy’s time in Philadelphia, a number of doctors examined her bound feet, while Samuel Morton, a phrenologist and one of America’s most outspoken proponents of polygenesis, examined Moy’s head (pp. 141-42). Davis speculates that during Afong Moy’s travel by steamship from Pensacola to Mobile and then New Orleans, the traveler could have “encountered the devastation of Indian removal” that may have reminded her of the destruction wrought by famine in her native China (p. 204). Davis also describes how Afong Moy arrived in Cincinnati just weeks after white mobs attacked the free black community (p. 213). In each of these examples—and many other, similar situations where Davis connects Afong Moy’s story to constructions of race—scholars of race in antebellum America might wish Davis had expanded her analysis to better place Afong Moy’s story within the historiography and more explicitly frame Americans’ understanding of Afong Moy’s “Chineseness” alongside their understanding of similar racial constructions. But perhaps in doing so, Davis would have lost some of Afong Moy and again relegated her to a spectacle to be compared alongside others. Davis’s book is not only a triumph of historical scholarship and storytelling, but also a surprisingly human story that restores to Afong Moy much of the dignity her handlers, managers, and audiences denied her.

Citation: G. Patrick O'Brien. Review of Davis, Nancy E.,The Chinese Lady: Afong Moy in Early America. H-Early-America, H-Net Reviews. April, URL:2021. https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56202

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