“Without an act of transformation, history can leave its subjects stuck up there, frozen under the lights”: vcunningham reviews “The Chinese Lady,” a new play at the Public.
In the fall of 1834, a trading ship named the Washington sailed into New York Harbor bearing strange cargo—the human kind. Two merchant brothers, Francis and Nathaniel Carnes, had brought from China a teen-age girl who would become known as Afong Moy. She was believed to be the first Chinese woman in the United States. The canny Carnes brothers used her as an exotic object. First, she helped them sell goods that they’d brought from China. Later, she became the star of a travelling show.
That remark about the British, pointed in its anachronism, prompts disagreement from the only other character in the play, Atung . He’s an interpreter who knows both Chinese and English—we’re made to understand that Afong’s English-language skills are zilch—and, like Afong, was brought to the United States in his youth. With obvious effort, he puts on a toothy smile and conspires in his own self-effacement. When Afong calls him “irrelevant” to her show, he gamely agrees.
We get potted versions of the Opium Wars and the Treaty of Nanking, the building of the transcontinental railroad, and, eventually, the Chinese Exclusion Act. Afong Moy, the play’s centerpiece, falls into the background as capital-“H” history, with all its cruel adjustments, becomes the true star. At one point, Atung abruptly drops out of the show, eliminating its only source of interpersonal intrigue and allowing Afong to complete her transformation into an animate textbook.
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