A soul buried in colonialism
What Afong Moy (Rinabeth Apostol) has to do is ridiculous and racist and exploitative: parade bastardized versions of herself and the Chinese nation and culture around for Western eyes, as a human museum exhibit or zoo curiosity.
She doesn’t get paid. She doesn’t get an accurate translation from her handler, Atung (Will Dao), of what she says, which probably leads all the Americans who ogle her to think she’s “simple” or “stupid.” She never got to give informed consent to this whole arrangement, either; she was shipped, by herself, from her hometown of Guangzhou to the United States in 1834, when she was just 14 years old, as the first Asian woman to set foot in the United States.
In imagining Moy’s life beyond its scanty historical records, playwright Lloyd Suh doesn’t merely set out to wag fingers, to declare that Moy’s conditions were awful, to point out that behind the display that Moy was forced to put on was a real human being with thoughts and feelings. His “The Chinese Lady,” whose Bay Area premiere opened Wednesday, Oct. 16, at Magic Theatre, respects its audience enough to know that we can probably come to those conclusions ourselves.
Suh’s ambitions are grander, more artistic. He asks, what if Moy had a soul as capacious as two continents and the ocean between them? What if the voice we never heard was that of a poet, someone who could say that the fork “seems a useful tool for the stabbing of food, but ultimately I feel it lacks grace. Chopsticks are elegant and poetic. Forks are violent and easy”? What if the woman the world reduced to a fetishized, exoticized trinket actually would have made a powerful, inspiring representative of her nation, had she ever been given a proper chance?
The drama in “The Chinese Lady,” which is directed by Mina Morita, comes in large part from dramatic irony. We know how Moy’s audiences likely perceived her. The show casts us as them, first revealing Afong from underneath a tasseled green curtain, like a cover unveiling a birdcage. There she is, in a box, surrounded by chintzy vases and folding screens depicting peacocks and cranes ( Jacquelyn Scott did the scenic and props design), attired in garish shades (designed by Abra Berman).
“I have been told to highlight certain features that I possess,” she says, “as they may seem exotic and foreign and unusual to you.”
Yet, Afong assumes her mission is grand and noble. She regards us as if she’s a pageant queen, promoting world peace through cultural exchange. Everything is an honor and a joy — touring the country, meeting President Andrew Jackson, trying to get a rise out of the surly Atung. Apostol excels in showing how Afong delights in her own mind and spirit. She makes every utterance a divulgence. She has to stay seated for most of the show, her hands delicately folded, and yet she brims and bustles, as if she just can’t wait to share her next thought.
This dynamic can’t last, of course. Afong is too smart to stay naive for long.
“The Chinese Lady” might suffer from a few too many historical lectures and some stilted exchanges between Afong and Atung, but at its best it distills centuries of colonialism and sexism and oppression into one person’s profound loss of innocence, loss of self. When the conditions of society crush a rosy attitude and lyrical perspective and joyful spirit, what’s left? Suh’s answer is that, in spite of it all, there is something left, something beautiful and strong. It’s there in the way Apostol quivers, ragged and weathered, wrestling with herself to stagger on, still for her audience’s sake.
It’s there in the throbbing yet defiant vulnerability Dao’s Atung finally unmasks. For him, Afong is like “a poem about the sadness one feels after a brief fall of rain, so slight it leaves only a hint of dampness on the earth, and soon the roaming sun will evaporate completely any evidence that such a beautiful rain ever existed. This is not something one can possess.”
Dao’s speech seems to disintegrate all around him. As he puffs out a consonant, you might deceive yourself into thinking you feel a burst of air on your cheek, as if words could leave invisible scars.