The Chinese Lady: An Interview with Nancy E. Davis
Interviewed by Hongdeng Gao
The Chinese Lady: Afong Moy in Early America
By Nancy E. Davis
Oxford University Press, 2019
344 pages
Today on the blog, editor Hongdeng Gao speaks to Nancy E. Davis about her recent book, The Chinese Lady: Afong Moy in Early America. Through creative use of disparate sources from many years of research, Davis captures the experiences of Afong Moy — the first recognized Chinese woman to arrive in America — as she introduced exotic goods from the East, as well as Chinese life, to the American public. The book provides rich insights into how Afong Moy’s presence changed Americans’ views of China and influenced American popular and material culture. It also sheds light on New York City’s role in the early US-China trade and the rise of the global marketplace.
First, can you give us an overview of who Afong Moy was and how you went about researching the book when, as you note, “little is said, written, or spoken of Afong Moy’s life in America”?
The young Chinese woman, Afong Moy, provided Americans their first public introduction to China. In 1834 she arrived in New York City from Guangzhou (Canton), not by choice, but rather through the instigation of New York merchants who likely coerced her parents to release her into their custody for a price. In her teen years, Afong Moy lived in New York City, then traveled with a manager throughout New England, across the South, up the Mississippi River, and to Cuba promoting the American merchants’ Chinese wares in small towns and cities, while simultaneously informing thousands of Americans about Chinese life. Almost none of those audiences in the 1830s had viewed a Chinese person, no less a Chinese woman with bound feet.
During nearly twenty years of her public life in America, little substantive information was known about Afong Moy’s personal circumstances or how the public responded to her messages. Though newspapers across the nation provided detailed descriptions of her public presentations, they shared little else. Even as sometimes occurs today, no journalist or promoter cared enough about Afong Moy to explore the person behind the presented stereotypical Asian exotic. Since she was unable to communicate her own story, it required historians’ tools to unspool her narrative today.
In China, I found documents in the Guangdong Provincial Archives that illumined the region’s difficult economic times during Afong Moy’s youth. Such conditions may have impelled her travel. Retracing her steps in America, I visited many of the towns and cities where she was exhibited. In those locations I sifted through hundreds of early 19th century diaries and letters housed at local historical societies and libraries to find firsthand commentary by those who saw her. Ship manifests and passenger lists verified her presence on incoming and outgoing vessels. And unpublished and published accounts of those who traveled the same routes in China, America, and Cuba, at nearly the same time, provided context and descriptive nuance. Documenting Afong Moy’s life took years of research because the records existed in such disparate places and required such time-consuming excavation.
You mention that Captain Benjamin Obear and his wife, Augusta Obear, were originally from Salem. What attracted them to work in New York City for Francis and Nathaniel Carnes? What does it tell us about the role that New York City played in the US-China trade during that time and the rise of the global marketplace?
Growing up a New Yorker, I always felt that the city and state played a special role in connecting America to the world. I can now validate that as a historian! Benjamin Obear, the ship captain who brought Afong Moy to America, along with his wife Augusta, knew that, too, by the 1830s. Both came from established Salem seafaring families. Leaving all you knew to pursue your profession in New York City, meant acknowledging that Salem and the Boston area were no longer the China trade centers. New York City was now the entrepot for this global trade. Surely, the commercial activities spurred by the establishment of the Erie Canal played a pivotal role, but the port had more than that advantage. It had a relatively ice-free, sheltered, deep and secure harbor with retail and wholesale power now centered here. New Yorkers also secured another advantage through the modification of their auction laws. By 1825 the state legislature passed a new bill reducing the state duties on imported articles, and additionally the law required that these duties be paid by the auctioneer. This advantage to the New York merchant pulled business away from Boston and Philadelphia, centering the global trade in New York City.
You describe the Carneses as merchant entrepreneurs who were “in the forefront” of capturing “the public’s curiosity and desire for knowledge about China.” Can you discuss a little bit about their business strategies and what those reveal about the American consumer and material culture at the time?
I am so pleased you inquired about the Carneses. Researching their lives led me to fascinating discoveries regarding international commerce and American culture. Born in Boston, the two cousins, Nathaniel and Francis, initially went their separate ways. Nathaniel as a supercargo on a China Trade vessel, and Francis to Harvard. In 1822 the cousins formed a dry goods brokerage firm advertising in the Boston directory. But the two were almost never together. In 1823 Nathaniel moved to New York City, and Francis to Paris, France. The firm advertised in the latter 1820s that having a partner residing in France gave them great advantage in their importation of Paris fancy goods. In 1831 they expanded their purview. It was likely Nathaniel’s China trade background that encouraged their new business venture in China with fellow Massachusetts citizen, Benjamin Obear, as their ship’s captain.
The variety of imported goods on their China trade vessels was unlike any other coming into American ports. Their entire cargo consisted of small, inexpensive Chinese made objects, though some, like perfumes and preserves, were imitative of French and English fancy goods and comestibles. The Chinese “knockoffs” significantly undercut European imports. As one New York City business commentator of the time noted: “The speculation succeeded, and such a cargo was never brought to this country before. The profit was immense.”
The Carneses tapped into the middle class’s desire for affordable goods that provided them a sense of worth, distinction, and refinement. With his knowledge of European taste, Francis could direct the Chinese production of similar goods for an American consumer at much less a cost. In the process, the Carneses also stimulated an interest in inexpensive, yet exotic, native made Chinese goods. They encouraged public interest in China by publishing what is the first, albeit small, catalogue of Chinese objects in America in 1834. I found this in Samuel Tilden’s papers at the New York Public Library. Tilden later became governor of New York, and probably attended Afong Moy’s New York salon while a student, keeping the catalogue in his papers. It is the only known copy.
But the Carneses went one step further by bringing Afong Moy to America to brand and hawk their inexpensive Chinese goods. Her positioning in America was a bold entrepreneurial effort that cost them relatively little, but forever changed the life of the “Chinese Lady”.
Can you tell us a little bit about Afong Moy’s experience in New York City? Whom did she encounter? How did her experiences differ in other parts of the United States and in Cuba?
After the months-long trip at sea, young Afong Moy arrived in New York City to widespread fanfare that preceded her. In October 1834, visitors paid to view the “Chinese Lady” at Captain Obear’s home on Park Place, very near City Hall. There she greeted hundreds of people in an “oriental” salon environment, sitting alone and apart on an elevated platform surrounded by the Carneses’ imported Chinese goods. New Yorker Martin Van Buren, Andrew Jackson’s vice president, was one of the first to “pay his respects,” commenting that he was “highly pleased with her cast.” This may have paved the way for Afong Moy’s later trip to the President’s House in 1835. Then, soon after her introduction in New York, a young male Chinese translator joined her in the salon providing commentary on her bound feet and her Chinese ways. It was an exoticized and contrived environment, but it sold goods!
In New York, people viewed Afong Moy only in the residence she shared with the Obears. Mercifully, this gave her some opportunity to adjust to strangers’ stares — few Chinese women experienced the close company of unfamiliar men. This changed dramatically in February 1835. Whisked away to Philadelphia, she presented in a six-thousand-person auditorium that was decked out as a “complete Chinese Museum” with Afong Moy as the “Unprecedented Novelty” within. Here too, she was forced to unwrap her bound feet to be examined by eight Philadelphia physicians — an unthinkable violation in China. This began a humiliation that climaxed in Charleston, South Carolina where she was forced to present her feet in “all its native nakedness” before a public audience — but not without her objection! Not every American city’s people treated her with disrespect, and Cuba’s public were the most protective, as well as receptive, to her Chinese experience with an appreciation of the exceptional opportunity to meet the “first woman of the Empire of China to travel beyond its borders…”
As likely the only Chinese woman in the United States during the 1830s, how did Afong Moy’s womanhood affect how she was perceived and treated?
I found several sources from this period helpful in understanding how Americans perceived Afong Moy’s womanhood. New Yorker, and past mayor of the city, Philip Hone, wrote a fascinating piece about Afong Moy in his personal diary in 1834 after visiting her salon. And here I would like to express gratitude to the New-York Historical Society for permitting me to see his original diary, for the two-volume edited version did not include this lengthy passage. Not surprisingly, Hone focused particularly on her bound feet, and commented that Chinese women’s “…only occupation a little occasional Embroidery. Their only pride in the tinsel ornamenting of their persons.” Hone concludes his diary account by stating that they sit or lie all day and night, “and … perhaps hobble from one side of their prison to another and the most important object of life, indulgence in eating drinking and sleeping.” Finally, he noted “… the most arresting [sic] evidence of a nation’s prosperity is the improvement of the condition of the female sex.” Hone reinforced the notion of America’s “progress” by chauvinistic contrast. Ironically, Afong Moy, as a young Chinese woman, had a most rigorous and demanding schedule!
Afong Moy’s position, first as a merchant’s billboard and then a spectacle, compromised and limited her place as a Chinese woman living in American society. Yet, she traveled widely and saw much that most American women did not. Once Afong Moy gained some proficiency in English, I noticed a slight change in her sense of agency. In Providence, Rhode Island when women in the audience commented about her bound feet, she retorted that theirs were just “too big – no good.” Much later, when her manager left her in a New Jersey poor house, area citizens came to her defense finding such treatment unacceptable as an international guest and “lady.” Again, she spoke out noting that the promises of her return to China had not been fulfilled. Though we have very few of her own words, her remarkable experiences attest to her stamina and fortitude.
You argue that Afong Moy’s treatment as a Chinese woman varied from the 1830s to the early 1850s as public views and sentiments about China shifted. She served as “a bridge, a foil, and then equally as a window, to America’s cultural perception of China.” Can you take us through some of these changes and how different phases of orientalism contributed to these changes? How do you think Afong Moy’s story can inform us about the historical roots of present-day anti-Asian racism and xenophobia?
The vicissitudes experienced by Afong Moy do seem to conform to changing American perceptions of China. When she first arrived in New York, she was presented (though not treated) as though a member of royalty. Her managers stoked Americans’ curiosity about the exotic, ancient, and esteemed culture of China; very few outsiders had been beyond the perimeters of the foreign enclave in Guangzhou.
When she arrived in Albany, New York in late 1835, crowds of visitors met “Her Chinese ladyship” in the Albany Museum. Numerous descriptions of her silk brocade outfit trimmed in gold and silver, and her “Chinese head-dress, richly ornamented with jewelry” established her place as one of distinction. The papers observed that the audience had the chance “to peep … into the customs of other countries and gather … valuable information from the truths of nature.” The newspapers published laudatory, albeit erroneous, articles about Afong Moy’s self-sacrifice for the support of her parents without mentioning the motives of the merchants who brought her.
Fast forward twelve years when P.T. Barnum plucked Afong Moy from a New Jersey poorhouse, to place her on the stage with Charles Stratton (Tom Thumb) at his New York City American Museum. During this intervening time, China’s standing in the public’s consciousness had suffered a severe decline. The consequences China suffered because of the First Opium War, left the country vulnerable to outside incursions and led to foreign disenchantment and a less credulous world.
The press treated Afong Moy’s comeback farcically, wondering about her origin as a Chinese lady. The association with Barnum, the master marketer of illusion, did not help. The presentations of Tom Thumb and Afong Moy drew crowds at the Museum with the headlines “two astonishing natural curiosities” as Afong Moy ate with chopsticks, and likely Thumb tried to imitate. Barnum’s seven-page pamphlet promoting Afong Moy and Tom Thumb in 1849 portrayed Afong Moy as vain, conceited, prideful, and shallow. His pamphlet claimed that her appetite for fancy goods, finery, and gold had induced her to escape China with her “advisors” for the riches of America. In this explanation, the volition to leave China came from Afong Moy herself, rather than entrapment by American merchants. Afong Moy fared poorly as China’s reputation declined in America. Eventually, she was no longer a feature on Barnum’s roster of spectacles.
Afong Moy’s story is a cautionary tale. We saw how easily those in control established Afong Moy as a stereotypical Asian figure without nuance or personhood. Rarely could she emerge from that shadow to claim agency. This predisposition is still with us today by those who attempt to impose stereotypical roles, behaviors, and stigmas based on racial designations. Denouncing such impositions requires a unified and resolute populace — something Afong Moy could never have hoped for in her age. Perhaps it is within reach today.
Is there anything else you would like to add about the Chinese Lady?
It is likely that Afong Moy returned to the New York City or the New Jersey region after her time with Barnum in the 1850s, for it was the most familiar place she knew. I have spent years, with many false starts, trying to establish her final years in America. Perhaps someone reading this blog will have a lead!
Nancy E. Davis is a curator emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History. Her research specialties include American material/visual culture, Asian influence on American material culture, consumption and market studies, and gender studies.
Hongdeng Gao is a History PhD candidate at Columbia University. Her dissertation examines how Cold War geopolitics and grassroots activism in New York City improved access to health care for under-served Chinese New Yorkers in the late 20th century.