It began in 1834 as an advertising gimmick: In order to promote sales of their Far East Oriental imported goods, the Carnes Brothers procured for their company a real-life spokesperson. This was the teenage Afong Moy, known to her New York viewers only as the "Chinese Lady"—a rarity in North America at that time—whose duties were to, well, be her own sweet Cantonese self. That involved demonstrating the techniques of eating with chopsticks, drinking green tea from cups without handles and strolling her dollhouse stage on cosmetically crippled feet.
Far from feeling herself exploited, our charming young ambassador embraces her educational responsibilities, certain of the international accord that will surely arise from this exchange of cultures. (After all, didn't England appropriate China's favorite beverage so enthusiastically as to later fight wars over it?) Her interpreter, Atung, strives to maintain this fantasy by deliberately mistranslating the crude comments of the spectators at the "freak" exhibit. As the years go by, however, Moy's intense curiosity regarding her adoptive/subjugative country gradually acquaints her with her racial kin's less welcome presence in a nation founded upon immigration, but quick to deny it.
At some point during the 90 minutes it takes playwright Lloyd Suh to recount our narrator's adventures in show business, we begin to suspect that this is no I-am-a-Famous-Person after-school lecture, and that the characters played by Mi Kang (Afong Moy) and Glenn Obrero (Atung) will not confine themselves to replicating the personas the playbill proclaims them to be. Indeed, we have been apprised thereof in the first moments of the play, while most of us were still gawking at our sumptuous "exotic" decor—costume designer Izumi Inaba's dainty elephant-vamp boots, for example, suggesting their wearer's podiatric body-modification (outlawed since 1912). Even as we enter from Theater Wit's lobby and seat ourselves, Kang sits on the forestage dressed in her own clothes, a curtain concealing the display of Carnes Bros's merchandise, observing the panorama of what Moy was convinced were seekers of knowledge like herself.
Maintaining the illusion of distance over a chronicle spanning more than two centuries in a space where actors and audience are separated by barely a foot of fourth wall is no easy task, but director Helen Young and her team of artists have used the delay in their production schedule to contemplate the significance of their story's mission. Playgoers anticipating the 2022 version of the familiar singsing-along travelogue will instead encounter a grim history of xenophobic misunderstanding and injustice, and perhaps also emerge a little wiser for the experience. Afong Moy would be very pleased.
