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Glossary of Relevant Terms
• Andrew Jackson - Andrew Jackson was the seventh president of the United States. He is known for founding the Democratic Party and for his support of individual liberty. • Cantonese - variety of Chinese spoken by more than 55 million people in Guangdong and southern Guangxi provinces of China, including the important cities of Canton, Hong Kong, and Macau. • Chinese acrobatics - Acrobatics is an ancient art in China with its beginnings going back 4,000 years to the Xia Dynasty. The performances used such items and tridents, wicker rings, tables, chairs, jars, plates, and bowls. • Chinese Exclusion Act - the first significant law restricting immigration into the United States. • Chinese Massacre at Deep Creek - Snake River Massacre, as many as thirty-four Chinese gold miners were ambushed and murdered by a gang of horse thieves and schoolboys from Wallowa County. • Chinese Massacre of 1871 - Los Angeles Chinatown Mob, a race riot that occurred on October 24, 1871, in Los Angeles, California, when a mob of around 500 white and mestizo persons entered Chinatown and attacked, robbed, and murdered Chinese residents. • Chopsticks - one of a pair of slender sticks held between thumb and fingers and used chiefly in Asian countries to lift food to the mouth. • Civil War - also called War Between the States, four-year war (1861–65) between the United States and 11 Southern states that seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America. • Erhu - bowed, two-stringed Chinese vertical fiddle, the most popular of this class of instruments. • Foot binding - a practice first carried out on young girls in Tang Dynasty China to restrict their normal growth and make their feet as small as possible. Considered an attractive quality, the effects of the process were painful and permanent. • Gettysburg Address - a speech that U.S. President Abraham Lincoln delivered during the American Civil War at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on the afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1863, four and a half months after the Union armies defeated those of the Confederacy at the Battle of Gettysburg. It is one of the best-known speeches in American history. • GuangZhou Providence - also known as the Canton Providence, is the capital and most populous city of the province of Guangdong in southern China. On the Pearl River about 120 km (75 mi) northnorthwest of Hong Kong and 145 km (90 mi) north of Macau, Guangzhou has a history of over 2,200 years and was a major terminus of the maritime Silk Road, and continues to serve as a major port and transportation hub, as well as one of China’s three largest cities. • Liberty Bell - large bell, a traditional symbol of U.S. freedom, commissioned in 1751 by the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly to hang in the new State House. • Manifest Destiny - a phrase coined in 1845, is the idea that the United States is destined—by God, its advocates believed—to expand its dominion and spread democracy and capitalism across the entire North American continent. • New York Harbor - a body of water that surrounds Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island and some parts of New Jersey. For centuries, this harbor has played a crucial role in the regional economy and transportation network. • Nitroglycerine - a dense, colorless, oily, explosive liquid most commonly produced by nitrating
glycerol with white fuming nitric acid under conditions appropriate to the formation of the nitric acid ester. Chemically, the substance is an organic nitrate compound rather than a nitro compound, yet the traditional name is often retained. Invented in 1847, nitroglycerin has been used as an active ingredient in the manufacture of explosives, mostly dynamite, and as such it is employed in the construction, demolition, and mining industries. • Opium Wars - two armed conflicts in China in the mid-19th century between the forces of Western countries and of the Qing dynasty, which ruled China from 1644 to 1911/12. The first Opium War (1839–42) was fought between China and Britain, and the second Opium War (1856–60), also known as the Arrow War or the Anglo-French War in China, was fought by Britain and France against China. • Oriental - of, from, or characteristic of Asia, especially East Asia. OF NOTE: The term Oriental, denoting a person from East Asia, is regarded as offensive by many Asians, especially Asian Americans. It has many associations with European imperialism in Asia. Therefore, it has an out-of-date feel and tends to be associated with a rather offensive stereotype of the people and their customs as inscrutable and exotic. Asian and more specific terms such as East Asian, Chinese, and Japanese are preferred. • PT Barnum - American showman who employed sensational forms of presentation and publicity to popularize such amusements as the public museum, the musical concert, and the three-ring circus. • Qing Dynasty -The Qing Dynasty was the final imperial dynasty in China, lasting from 1644 to 1912. It was an era noted for its initial prosperity and tumultuous final years, and for being only the second time that China was not ruled by the Han people. • River Thames - the chief river of southern England. • Rock Springs Massacre – Sweetwater County Massacre of 1885, one of the most significant acts of violence against Chinese immigrants in United States history. • St Louis Station - a passenger intercity train terminal in St. Louis, Missouri. At the height of early 1900s train travel it was one of the busiest train stations in the United States. • Susquehanna River - a major river located in the northeastern (New York) and mid-Atlantic (Pennsylvania) United States. • Trade routes - an area or proscribed passage by land or sea used by merchants and caravans for economic purposes. • Trail of Tears - in U.S. history, the forced relocation during the 1830s of Eastern Woodlands Indians of the Southeast region of the United States (including Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole, among other nations) to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River. • Transcontinental Railroad – a railroad which passes or extends across a continent. Also, specifically the first transcontinental railroad, the Pacific Railway. • Translator - a person who translates from one language into another, especially as a profession. • Treaty of Nanking - Treaty of Nanjing signed after the Opium War between Britain and China. • Washington, D.C. - city and capital of the United States of America. • William Shakespeare - English poet, dramatist, and actor often called the English national poet and considered by many to be the greatest dramatist of all time.
SUPP LEMENTAL MATERIALS
— Afong Moy ,
In the Classroom
The following is a review of Ma-Yi Theatre’s production of The Chinese Lady from the New York Times. Read this review and, after seeing Long Wharf’s production, write your own!
Review: A ‘Chinese Lady’ on Heart-Rending Display By: Laura Coll ins -Hugh es Nov. 15, 2018 T he teenage Afong Moy made headlines when she arrived in New York by ship in 1834. It’s impossible to prove that she was the first Chinese woman in the United States, but it’s certain that she was a rarity, brought here to be displayed before paying crowds of gawkers. “It is human nature to be curious,” she tells us in Lloyd Suh’s piercing and intimate new play, “The Chinese Lady,” a time-skipping, gently comical drama inspired by the story of the real Afong Moy. Chattel in a two-year deal struck between her family and some American importers, Afong (Shannon Tyo) is just 14 when the play begins. Aided, and sometimes foiled, by her put-upon translator, Atung (Daniel K. Isaac), she spends her days performing a distorted version of Chinese identity. Inside a little room decorated in chinoiserie, she is a living, breathing museum exhibit: price of admission 25 cents, 10 cents for children. Dressed in a silken costume (ooh!), she eats with chopsticks (ahh!) and — here comes the highlight — even walks around the room on her tiny bound feet. “I have noticed that my feet are a source of constant fascination,” she muses as she takes her little stroll. But Afong likes her feet, and she can’t help noticing, too, that some practices in the West are at least as barbaric as foot-binding is purported to be. “Such as corsets,” she says lightly. “Or the transAtlantic slave trade.”
Dexterously directed by Ralph B. Peña for Ma-Yi Theater Company, this quiet play steadily deepens in Shannon Tyo as the play’s title character, a young woman brought to the West and forced to perform a distorted version of her identity. Carol Rosegg
Daniel K. Isaac, as a translator, with Ms. Tyo. Carol Rosegg
complexity as we trail the idealistic Afong and the more knowing Atung through the decades, bickering with each other all the way. Ms. Tyo and Mr. Isaac have gorgeous chemistry, and with their rapport they cast a spell that Fabian Obispo’s music and Oliver Wason’s lighting unobtrusively fortify. The clever set (by Junghyun Georgia Lee, who also designed the costumes) begins as a shipping container, which opens to become the room in the museum. These are the walls that box in Afong and Atung’s cultural identity, as seen through white American eyes. It’s that gaze that infuses this beautifully acted play with pain and shame and sorrow — so it is both practical and kind that Mr. Suh has softened his script with humor. Because of course it is also human nature to look on difference with suspicion or hostility.
44 That has been a wounding part of the experience of Chinese people in this country, which barred them from citizenship — and severely restricted legal immigration — for many years. Though Afong didn’t come to the United States voluntarily, and didn’t mean to stay, “The Chinese Lady” is an immigrant’s tale. We watch her slowly acclimate to her new country, and grow more distant from the nation of her childhood. Throughout, she retains the palpable loneliness of an only — someone who, by virtue of being so outnumbered, is judged as a stand-in for an entire population. But by the end of Mr. Suh’s extraordinary play, we look at Afong and see whole centuries of American history. She’s no longer the Chinese lady. She is us.
