From spectacle to exclusion, Afong Moy’s story reveals how Asian women have long been exoticized, surveilled and denied full belonging in the American imagination and the law.
This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy. Taking the form of essays, audio, poetry and original art, historians and scholars revisit the nation’s origins to center those written out of the founding documents and reimagine what a truly inclusive democracy requires.
The Asian woman in America goes by many names. Celestial Lady, Lotus Blossom, Dragon Lady, Yellow Fever, Slave Girl, Geisha, Concubine, Butterfly, China Doll, Prostitute. The simultaneous erasure and over-naming of the Asian woman in American culture have their roots in the 19th century, dating back to both popular culture and the law.
Historians believe that the first Chinese woman to appear publicly in the United States was a young woman called Afong Moy. Imported as an exotic attraction in 1834 by the merchants and showmen Nathaniel and Francis Carnes, Moy may have been as young as 14 when the Carnes brothers “leased” her from her father and brought her from Guangzhou, China. They put her on display as a tableau vivant touring major U.S. cities.
Little is known about Moy, who remained on exhibit as simply “The Chinese Lady” for several years before disappearing from public life and the records. No one knows what happened to her; even the accuracy of her name remains uncertain. Her enormous popularity as a sight to behold must be understood as the culmination of a centuries-long Western fascination for the so-called Orient, from Marco Polo in the 13th century to Christopher Columbus in the late 15th century when he went in search of the “Orient” and found America. (Ironically, in a way, America is a ghostly byproduct of the “Orient.”)
Out of this long durée grew the 19th century appetite for “edifying curiosities,” a kind of racist prurience, that fueled spectatorial fever in multiple venues, from circuses and freak shows to supposedly scientific salons and museums. Antebellum America’s fear of yet preoccupation with racial otherness, monstrosities and stereotypes made for good theater, and it conflated voyeurism with ethnography.
… There is a long and enduring history of the objectification of the Asian woman in America. Her personhood and her national belonging have never been a given.
Moy was displayed at the Peabody in New York, which eventually became the Museum of Natural History. Along with curiosities such as the Feejee Mermaid and Ursa the Bear Lady, The Chinese Lady offered American 19th century audiences the exoticism of “Oriental femininity,” a femininity that was seen as eccentric (from the chopsticks in her hair to her tiny bound feet displayed on a stool), passive (reinforced by the tableau vivant), decorative, thing-like, available for gawking.
The spectacularization and “thingification” of Moy epitomize the confusion between persons and things to which women of color are often subjected. They also exemplify the conflation of beauty and violence that attends the figure of the Asian woman. That is, the discourse of exoticization may appear to draw from a language of beauty, but it is a supposed idealization that is in fact tinged with and undergirded by a very ugly racial imaginary.
Anti-Asian racism and long-standing Western colonial attitudes about the plunderable “Orient” enable the possessive denigration and dehumanization of Asian women. In the anti-Chinese sentiments of the 19th century, the situation of Chinese women in America was precarious—haunted on one side by the specter of human trafficking, and on the other by the fracturing impact of Chinese male transpacific labor migration on Chinese familial structure.
Historically and even legally, America has long conflated Asian female sexuality with criminality.
The first time Chinese litigants appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court, Chy Lung v. Freeman, was a case in 1875 that involved the perception and legislation of Chinese women as prostitutes. Luridly known at the time as the “Case of the 22 Lewd Chinese Women,” the lawsuit centered on a group of young women who were denied entry into the U.S. at the Port of San Francisco despite having proper travel documentation (and despite the Burlingame Treaty, which allowed for such migration), because the state immigration inspector thought that these young women, traveling alone, must be prostitutes.
Trial transcripts revealed a dog-and-pony show where the serious legal issue of state versus federal authority over immigration turned on inquiries such as what the women were or were not wearing: the colors of their underskirts or a brocade collar, the style of head-kerchiefs, the width of a sleeve. (Such attire supposedly distinguished a respectful Chinese housewife from a prostitute.) The state of California argued that it had the right to protect itself from “pestilential immorality” represented by these young Chinese women.
The same year that Chy Lung was playing out its drama, the U.S. passed the Page Act, introduced by Rep. Horace F. Page (R-Calif.), to “end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women.” Apparently, to California officials, all Chinese women were prostitutes.
The Page Act became the first restrictive federal immigration law in the U.S. to ban an ethnic group, effectively prohibiting the entry of Chinese women into the U.S. It foreshadowed the more stringent Chinese Exclusion Act to follow, which in turn produced the mostly male “Bachelor Societies” of American Chinatowns, placing the few Asian women who were here in even more physical, social and economic jeopardy.
Such precedents further shaped the racial-sexual imagination about Asian women. By the 20th century, the foray of American soldiers abroad into Asia introduced new variations of a familiar figure, creating a malevolent lineage from “prostitute” to “Comfort Women” to “war bride” to “sex worker.” Today the figure of the eroticized-yet-degraded Asian woman can be readily found in movies and theaters, in everything from high art to cheap pornography.
… We, too, must acknowledge that we have not gone very far from the racial imaginary of 19th-century America.
The brutal shooting of six Asian American women in Atlanta, Ga., in March of 2021, at the height of anti-Asian sentiments during COVID-19, dramatizes the continuation of this racial imagination that ties Asianness to viral contamination. By his own admission, the shooter killed his victims because he could not control his desire for Asian women. Is there a starker expression of the projective force and killing intent of racist misogyny?
And almost immediately after the news of this tragedy broke, a certain kind of response started popping up on Twitter (now X): “No happy ending then?” “Youngs Asian’ massage parlor … they love you long time.”
Social media comments are notorious for their allergy to thoughtfulness, but these brutal jokes speak to a prejudice that is deeply ingrained, if largely unacknowledged, in American society. The shooting speaks directly to this long history of the simultaneous eroticization and denigration of Asian women that is as old as the birth of Western imperial ambition itself.
Racism and sexism are partners that stoke each other with frightening ease. Racism may be caused by many factors—demagoguery, religious intolerance, economic resentment, inherited bigotry—but its expression is almost always about the assertion of power. And whenever revengeful male power is in play, it is never good news for women.
Beauty, especially for Asian American women, is an ugly business.
Let us now return to the arresting and arrested image of Afong Moy. It is not a coincidence that she is shown, not naked but fully dressed, in a Qing Dynasty silk gown with matching trousers; to the West, Asian women have long been associated with excessive and decadent ornamentality.
Moy’s hair is pulled back in a bun decorated by two chopsticks like hairpins. Her feet, bound with petit, pointy slippers, rest on top of a wooden pedestal, as if to emphasize their impossible smallness, invoking Western fascination for Chinese bound feet, a sign of both “Oriental” civility and savagery. Indeed, every single object in this room—the silk, the mahogany, the porcelain set, the tea within, and the woman herself—are all commodities, coveted objects of desire, arising out of the West’s engagement in the so-called China Trade.
In many ways, Moy exemplifies the reification of Asiatic femininity at the intersection of racism, sexism and imperialism that Asian American scholars and feminists have highlighted since the late 1960s. But to see this scene as merely a scene of fetishization and objectification is to miss out on the unspoken dynamics between person and things in this spectacle. This silent image has much to tell us.
If a classically Orientalist imagination reduces the racialized woman to a thing, then the scene of The Chinese Lady, when read as a symptom of colonial appetite that exposes itself, might be read by us today as exercising a silent performance of its own with its rather perverse insistence on the liveness of things. The Woman may not be speaking, but her woven entanglement with all the commodified objects around her speaks volumes about the ceaseless transglobal dynamics and exchanges (of bodies and things) that enable this scene of distilled domesticity.
The main subject here is not so much the captive woman but the logic of the tableau vivant: the art of transforming life into the oxymoron of still life. It makes us wonder whether we enjoy still life because it imitates, or because it eschews, life. It makes us question our own “liveness” and how our subjecthood may be indebted to the objectification of others.
In 2021, Moy made her way back to the New York stage, this time in the hands and imagination of playwright Lloyd Suh. In Suh’s version of The Chinese Lady, Moy has voice, memory, ambition, and disappointments. The play reimagines Moy as a cultural ambassador from China to the U.S., even having her meet with President Andrew Jackson. Yet despite the niceties of a “cultural exchange,” misrecognition and misunderstanding intervene. Suh stages his play in the aftermath of the anti-Asian violence that swept across our country during the pandemic and during a time when the then-president was hawking the threat of “Chinavirus.” As Moy 2.0 discovers the limits of her diplomatic mission, we, too, must acknowledge that we have not gone very far from the racial imaginary of 19th-century America.
There is much that we must reckon with on the 250th anniversary of our nation, especially given the disheartening and frightening contemporary trend toward the systematic dismantling of social justice and national belonging for women and racial minorities. Social progress (for women, for people of color, for education, for the environment) has always been painstakingly slow to build, but destruction can happen all too easily.
From fantasy to law, from Marco Polo asserting that one can hardly tell the difference between Chinese women and the decorative baubles that they wear, to the case of sartorial judgment in Chy Lung, to the murderous desire of a killer, from microaggression to outright violence, there is a long and enduring history of the objectification of the Asian woman in America. Her personhood and her national belonging have never been a given.
The curious case of Afong Moy, a living woman treated as a thing whose fame was only matched by her anonymity, reminds us how the dignity of personhood remains, for many, still a battle to be fought.
Explore the entire FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists essay collection:
- The main Founding Feminists page contains original art and a historical timeline and invites readers to submit original poetry.
- America’s Founding Feminists: Rewriting America’s Origin Story, by Janell Hobson, professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at the University at Albany.
- Haudenosaunee Governance: The Matrilineal Democracy That Shaped America, by Michelle Schenandoah, founder of Rematriation, a Haudenosaunee women-led nonprofit organization.
- ‘This Is Our Country Too!’: The Enduring Legacy of Spanish-Speaking Women in Early America, by Allyson M. Poska, professor of history emerita at the University of Mary Washington, translated by Antonia Delgado-Poust, associate professor of Spanish at the University of Mary Washington. Lea este artículo en español aquí.
- Claiming the Revolution: Gender, Sexuality and the Radical Promise of 1776, by Charles Upchurch, professor of British history at Florida State University.
- Reclaiming Phillis Wheatley (Peters): Imagination as a Feminist Founding Project, by Dana Elle Murphy, assistant professor of Black studies and English at Caltech.
- The Radical Potential of Traditional Femininity, by Jacqueline Beatty, associate professor of history at York College of Pennsylvania.
- Queer Possibilities in Revolutionary America, Jen Manion, Winkley professor of history at Amherst College.
- She Wanted to Be Free: Black Women’s Revolutionary Resistance, Dr. Vanessa M. Holden, associate professor of history, director of African American and Africana studies at the University of Kentucky, and director of the Central Kentucky Slavery Initiative.
- Sally Hemings and the Making of Democracy, Jessina Emmert, doctoral candidate in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Kansas.
- The Abolitionist Origins of American Feminism, Manisha Sinha, Draper chair in American history at the University of Connecticut.
