Afong Moy

Speaker 1: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Nathan Connolly: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory. Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Nathan Connolly.

Joanne Freeman: And I’m Joanne Freeman.

Nathan Connolly: If you’re new to the podcast, each week, along with our colleagues at Ed Ayers and Brian Balogh, we explore a different aspect of American history.

Speaker 4: All right, the trade wars first shots are officially fired. At midnight, the president’s tariffs on Chinese goods went into effect and China-

Speaker 5: Tonight, the US hit China with tariffs on $34 billion worth of goods. China immediately responded with its revenge tariffs of equal value accusing the US-

Speaker 6: Today’s tariff announcement is another protectionist move against China threatening to disrupt the world’s economy.

Joanne Freeman: For close to two years now, president Donald Trump has been sparring with China. The issue, US tariffs on Chinese imports.

Nathan Connolly: Late last week, news broke that a potential deal between the US and China is imminent. The story is ongoing, but so far it’s not clear when or how the trade war will end.

Joanne Freeman: When it comes to the topic of US China relations, the conversation often revolves around trade, tariffs, and lately the president’s tweets.

Nathan Connolly: But we wanted to get below the surface of all this trade talk to take things in a slightly different direction. We’re honored to have a special guest here to help us host the show, Erika Lee, welcome to BackStory.

Erika Lee: Hey Nathan, thanks for having me.

Nathan Connolly: Erika teaches Asian American immigration history at the university of Minnesota. She’s also the author of several award-winning books, her latest book, America for Americans, A History of Xenophobia in the United States hit shelves later this month. And I guess I should be saying welcome back to BackStory because you’ve been a guest on the show before.

Erika Lee: Yeah, that’s right. But this is my first time co-hosting BackStory, so I’m excited to be here.

Nathan Connolly: And were ecstatic to have you. So Erika, are you ready to start the show?

Erika Lee: Definitely. On this episode of BackStory, we’re bringing you the extraordinary stories of three Chinese and Chinese American people who made an indelible imprint on American culture from the 1830s and beyond.

Joanne Freeman: These were people who changed the way Americans saw China and Chinese people.

Nathan Connolly: And sometimes that change took place on the silver screen, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Erika Lee: Yeah, that’s an important part of the story, but before we can get there, we have to go back to the 1800s. Joanne, I’ll let you take it from here.

Joanne Freeman: Afong Moy lived an incredible and incredibly important life, though you’ve probably never heard of her. Born in the early 19th century in Southern China, Moy arrived in the United States in 1834. According to historian Nancy Davis, this makes Afong Moy, the first Chinese woman to arrive in America. Not much is known about Moy’s life back in China, but in the United States she helped merchant firms peddle Chinese goods, things like games, puzzles and lanterns to American consumers. This took Moy across the Eastern seaboard where she went on stage and introduced Americans not just to new goods, but also to new ideas about China and Chinese people.

Nancy Davis: Well, I like to think that probably their way of viewing China was from porcelain or from tea container. Some places that would show or some way that would show what a Chinese person looked like.

Joanne Freeman: That’s Nancy Davis. She’s the author of The Chinese Lady, Afong Moy in Early America.

Nancy Davis: But by and large, no one knew what a Chinese person looked like. There were some men, Chinese men who did come to America before Afong Moy, but they were not really out in front of people. One was a merchant and others would be sailors, so no one would have been presenting this kind of face of China, such as she was doing.

Joanne Freeman: Since Afong Moy’s role in America was to sell goods, Nancy says she performed a particular vision of Chinese identity that appeal to Americans.

Nancy Davis: Fortunately, we have an image of her in her salon in New York in 1834, 35. So she was living with the ship captain and his wife who accompanied her back from China. The salon was fitted up to look like a very exotic Chinese salon. All around her were interesting Chinese objects. Of course, the other part of this is that she was exotic too, with her bound feet and her clothing that was certainly very different from any clothing that any American had seen. And she took tea and she had an interpreter who would help explain the objects and Afong Moy would walk on her bound feet. And this was both a show and also a way to talk about China.

Joanne Freeman: Nancy says Afong Moy provoked a range of responses from Americans. In New Orleans for instance, she performed for close to a thousand people at a beautiful gas lit theater.

Nancy Davis: So there was a woman from New England who went to that theater and talked about the fact that when you looked out into the audience, everyone’s hairstyle was [inaudible 00:06:21]. So, all of them were looking like Afong Moy. Their hairstyle, very similar, swept back, up in a bun. So it’s fascinating to see the way in which her style, and not necessarily clothing, but the way in which she held herself was being reflected in current magazines like Goatees where her hairstyle was commented upon and women found it appealing and followed her lead and fascinating information in various newspapers in Albany, for example, about Afong Moy and how people needed to dye their hair black to be like her.

Joanne Freeman: So what was some of the negative response to her?

Nancy Davis: In Boston, they were very negative. They said she looked like a native American with salmon colored skin and were really nasty in their commentary about her. There was a lot of concern that perhaps audiences were being fooled by her small feet. But what happened in South Carolina, which was particularly unpleasant when the manager, her manager decided that in order for people to recognize that this wasn’t a hoax, he would have her unbind her feet and show them in public, which was just unheard of, of course, in China.

Nancy Davis: And so, unbinding your feet in public was a complete disgrace to her. And it was recognized in the newspaper that this wasn’t a front, because it was noted that she was not happy. So, the negative aspects of this related to her body and how her body was configured.

Joanne Freeman: Nancy says, it’s hard to know what Afong Moy thought about all of this. In addition to not speaking English, she didn’t write Chinese, nor could she communicate with anyone in the United States unless it was through her interpreter or her manager, a man named Henry Hannington. This made her situation incredibly difficult when an economic recession known as the Panic of 1837 hit the United States.

Nancy Davis: Well, she traveled with her manager and when the Panic occurred there was little interest in Chinese goods, and there was also less money for people to pay to see her. And the manager just dropped her and she had nowhere to go because she had no family obviously. And even the ship captain who brought her or the wife of the manager, no one came forward. So she was compelled to go to a poorhouse in New Jersey and she was there for eight years.

Nancy Davis: But, the thing that really struck me, and in a sense heartened me was that people in Monmouth, New Jersey found her. They found her in I imagine it was a putting out situation. So she was in a poorhouse and then probably was in a home of someone who was paid a little bit by the poorhouse managers to house her. And they found her there and caused a real uproar. They went to the local paper, they talked to reporters, and they started a search to find out who had dropped her in Monmouth. And it became a national investigation with the Monmouth paper as the headquarters commenting about who was at blame, who was at fault, and really responding to her as a guest who had been abused.

Nancy Davis: Eventually it was clear they found who it was. And that forced the manager, it was the manager to add money to the coffers in Monmouth, New Jersey, so that her life was a little bit easier though she still was in the poorhouse for that entire eight years.

Joanne Freeman: But that’s not the end of her story. So what happens after that point?

Nancy Davis: Hannington new PT Barnum because he had done work for him and obviously Hannington was ready to have her off his dole, and it was also when the Chinese Junk, the Keying came into New York city. It was a Chinese ship that was commissioned by an Englishman and brought … It was supposed to go to London, but veered off course and landed in New York city. But there people were seeing Chinese sailors and also Chinese objects, and PT Barnum knowing that there was a Chinese woman who might be available to extend this interest, plucked her out of New Jersey and brought her into his fold.

Joanne Freeman: I asked Nancy how Afong Moy’s return to the stage reflected changing notions that Americans had of China and Chinese people.

Nancy Davis: In the early period, in the 1830s when she came, she was considered a very special and very exotic, and in many ways respected because China was respected, because people did not know what China was really like except through her, but come the Opium Wars-

Joanne Freeman: And maybe give us a one sentence version of what the Opium Wars are.

Nancy Davis: Yes. The Opium Wars occurred because the Americans and the British were bringing opium into China to sell, to cover the costs of their products. So, it was a product that was not appreciated in China. In fact, it was illegal to bring opium into China. And so, the Chinese rebelled and the British declared war on China. The British won and the Americans followed soon after with a similar treaty forcing the Chinese to open additional trading sites. But it also allowed Americans and British to go inside China, which they had never done before. Americans could explore China and see that there was actually some weakness there.

Nancy Davis: This made China seem less exotic and just less respected. And so when she comes back out in the 1840s, she’s not treated the same way. It is not with the same reverence or respect, but now the Americans have seen the underbelly and a couple of biting ways make fun Afong Moy.

Joanne Freeman: Now, she, according to your work, you note that she drops from the public record in the 1850s at some point. So what do we know about what happens to her?

Nancy Davis: Well, that’s the challenging part because I spent an enormous amount of time both on my own and working with genealogists to try to locate her. She just does not show up. After about 1851-1852, Barnum drops her because he brings another Chinese woman into his troop. And so, there really wasn’t a place for her and I’m not sure whether she married and so her name might have changed, but there is no record of her in poorhouses in New York city or in New Jersey. There’s just no record in Barnum’s accounts. So we don’t know what happened to her.

Joanne Freeman: Nancy Davis is the author of The Chinese Lady, Afong Moy In Early America.