According to a common estimate, up to fifty Chinese had actually stayed in America for various periods and reasons before the Gold Rush.Footnote 1 Most of them were transitory visitors, leaving no lasting impression on American society and very few sources for future researchers. Afong Moy is an exception: having lived in the United States for a long time, something that no Chinese had done before, she received extensive and continuous press coverage. It is therefore possible, and indeed important, to recover certain aspects of the early stage of Chinese experience in America by focussing on the relatively well-documented Chinese Lady (as Moy is called in many archives).
Afong Moy came to the United States in 1834 as an exotic curiosity and remained active in circulating exhibitions at local museums and art galleries across the country until 1850. There are conflicting opinions concerning the start and end dates of her public appearances. For instance, Jennifer Leah Chan contends that the Chinese Lady was in America as early as 1832.Footnote 2 But no existing archives can prove that. Chan may have mistaken as Moy one of the many “lady-monsters” exhibited before her arrival: human curiosities had been part of the American show industry ever since 1738.Footnote 3 Other studies severely circumscribe the length of Moy's career. In Judy Yung's and Ling Huping's brief considerations of Moy, they claim that she arrived in 1834, but disappeared altogether one year later. In contrast, scholars James S. Moy and Robert G. Lee assert that the Chinese Lady had returned to China in 1837.Footnote 4 These researchers may have been limited by the sources available to them at the time of their writing; in any case, it is not clear from their works why they have attached themselves to such particular dates. However, my research in early American archival collections, including the digital Readex and ProQuest databases, demonstrates that Afong Moy's public activities in America lasted from 1834 to at least early 1850, a time span much longer than most scholars have acknowledged previously.
Admittedly, by the time of Moy's arrival, Chang and Eng Bunker (1811–74), two conjoined brothers of ethnic Chinese origin from Siam (the former name of Thailand), had already acquired fame by exhibiting themselves as curiosities. However, the media advertised the Bunker brothers as Siamese, not Chinese, and American audiences certainly perceived them as such.Footnote 5 Before Moy's disappearance from the public record, there had been another series of Chinese exhibitions which occurred aboard the British-outfitted junk Keying in New York and Boston in 1847. Although a significant number of locals observed how the forty Chinese crew members conducted themselves, these shows were not intended to display living people as the main attraction; instead, the boat was designed to show inanimate Chinese curiosities and artifacts.Footnote 6 Therefore, in a strict sense, Afong Moy was the only Chinese who had been exhibited as a curiosity prior to Chinese mass immigration to America. That she was a woman only added to the allure of her shows. In the course of sixteen years, the number of Americans who came to see her must have been high indeed, particularly given the enthusiastic advertising, though it is, of course, impossible to provide accurate figures regarding attendance in the absence of statistical sources.
Thanks to the relatively plentiful newspaper accounts, scholars have studied Afong Moy more intensively than other pre-Gold Rush Chinese in America. Krystyn R. Moon, contextualizing Moy within the history of American popular music and performance, highlights her singing of “Chinese songs for American audiences for the first time” and argues that this action, along with her attire and exhibition decorations, was meant to affirm “her Chinese identity and its inferiority.” As to why Moy agreed to come, Moon believes that she needed money to remit back to her parents, who could not sustain the livelihood of the entire family.Footnote 7 Echoing Moon's stance on Moy's motive for coming, John Kuo Wei Tchen has argued that a contemporaneous engraving depicting Moy in a parlor scene suggests Americans' efforts to make safe the “display of potentially threatening ‘exotic’ and abnormal people.” Deemed anthropological and perhaps even zoological, Moy's stage appearances had enabled Americans to “gaze at and … understand” Chinese difference.Footnote 8 Other analyses, implying a deliberate scheme on the part of the exhibition sponsors, describe Moy as a racialized, sexualized, and exoticized other in early nineteenth-century America.Footnote 9 Teresa Brawner Bevis reveals the commercial motive of such a scheme, calling the Moy exhibitions “a successful advertising ploy” to sell Chinese merchandise, as typified by the furniture and decorations in her exhibit rooms.Footnote 10
Dominated by American show agents and spectators, was Afong Moy allowed any space for personal action? The answer from the current scholarship is no. One example comes from James S. Moy's analysis, which assesses Moy's shows as “a grand panoptic event which offered to the gaze of the spectator a sense of empowerment … exclusively for the sake of audience amusement.” Jean Pfaelzer concurs with this, considering the Moy events the start of a “long history of entrapment and burlesque” concerning Chinese women in America. A similar interpretation is found in Ping-Chia Feng's analysis of diasporic Chinese representations; Feng assures readers that Afong Moy had actually done nothing to counter “the persistent Orientalist gaze.”Footnote 11 Even when Scott C. Martin, along with Shilpa Dave and her coauthors, mentions Moy's participation in the production of American popular culture, they merely intend to demonstrate Moy's involvement in the process, saying nothing about her personal reaction to the imposed situations.Footnote 12
Definitely helpful to our understanding of the Moy exhibitions, these studies have sketched out the basic contours of Moy's experience in the United States, highlighted her helplessness before the powerful gaze of American spectators, and clarified Moy's and Americans' psychological and commercial motives for launching the events. Such findings are valid in their own right. Yet they appear so focussed on the displays and their arrangements as to have ignored the dynamic interactions occurring between Moy, the exhibitions, the spectators, and America's evolving racial paradigm for the Chinese. They have, furthermore, not discussed the space allowed Moy to change certain established views of Americans of the Chinese female, if not their overbearing exhibition arrangements and condescending gazes. This may be attributed to the fact that nearly all the existing scholarship deals with the shows merely as one small part of their larger projects; a narrow scope might be more suitable.
But if we were to cast our eyes beyond the walls of the exhibition rooms, we would find that the arrival of the Chinese Lady actually created a whirlwind of nationwide interest in Chinese culture and society, which for the first time in history would engage Americans in a lively discussion about how to accommodate a Chinese outsider living among them. What had governed these exchanges was a mode of thinking which has been ignored by academia before and which I am trying to establish in the following pages. I call it a two-tiered paradigm: one tier disparaged Chinese culture while the other extended paternalistic tolerance to the earliest Chinese residents in the United States. Seemingly contradictory, these two tiers converged in the common, foreseeable consequence of encouraging the Chinese to abandon their cultural roots and become acculturated in America.
Of course, when the Chinese became numerous and unwilling to let go of their cultural heritage, tolerance would be gradually replaced by harshness, as exemplified by the anti-Chinese movement that began in California as early as the 1850s. Afong Moy, on the other hand, lived in America before Chinese relations with mainstream America took a turn for the worse. American perceptions and interactions with Moy reflected the above-mentioned two-tiered mindset: Americans inferred China's cultural backwardness from Moy's exhibitions and loudly espoused this opinion, but Americans as audience and exhibitors allowed Moy a social space to counter particular stereotypes of Chinese women, even while she struggled for her survival in the United States. Her eventual disappearance into American society and persistent presence in American culture thereafter symbolize her ultimate assimilation, intended by the accommodation scheme.
The dynamics between Moy and American society recall the racist-love-versus-racist-hate binary proposed by Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan in 1972. According to Chin and Chan, love is offered by white Americans in exchange for racial minorities' submission to white-constructed stereotypes, while hate is an extreme dislike embodied in a system of discriminatory laws and social practices that serve to force those uncooperative minorities to concede white power.Footnote 13 But in Moy's case, “love” was granted not as a means of negotiating her behavior but as a sign of whites' confidence in their ability to retain dominance over her, whereas the criticism of China was not intense and bigoted enough to be classified as “hate” by Chin and Chan's definition. The image of Moy constructed in the process displays an intricacy that denies it an easy identification with either of the reigning Lotus Blossom/Madam Butterfly and Dragon Lady representations of Chinese American women.Footnote 14 Rather, Moy had blurred the distinction between the two stereotypes by combining the lovability and amicability of a Lotus Blossom/Madam Butterfly with the resolve and determination of a Dragon Lady. At the same time, she was neither sexually supplicant to white men, as a Lotus Blossom/Madam Butterfly should be, nor sinister and tyrannical, as a Dragon Lady must appear.
So it seems difficult to position Moy comfortably within the prevailing interpretive schemes concerning mainstream Americans' approach to the Chinese, but this difficulty does not invalidate those frameworks; instead, it points to an earlier, different shape of the relationship between mainstream America and the Chinese, which pre-dates what we are familiar with and which I have termed a two-tiered paradigm. From that starting point, white America was to gradually formulate Chin and Chan's “racist love” and “racist hate” strategies when finding it advisable to openly and forcibly demand submission to white dominance in the face of mounting Chinese immigration. Also from that source, Americans had come to know a Chinese woman earlier than, and unlike, a Lotus Blossom, a Madam Butterfly, or a Dragon Lady. Therefore Moy's experience in and with American society may be read as a manifestation of white America's mentality toward Chinese residents before Chinese exclusion engulfed the entire country, and as a rehearsal for its harsher, more obviously racist, dealings with the Chinese.
AFONG MOY'S ITINERARY
Even though many scholars have touched upon Afong Moy's travels in one place or another, there is as yet no full description of her itinerary across the United States. But it was Moy's extensive tour and experiences that set the stage for the lively discussions which brought forth the two-tiered paradigm. A reconstruction of her journey is thus imperative. As could be pieced together from extant archives, Afong Moy's experience in America comprises three distinct stages: the most radiant years of 1834–37, the hard years of 1838–47, and the closing years of 1847–50.
Quite expectedly, the first leg of Moy's tour was in New York, a city which had ushered in the era of direct US–China commerce. It was just on the New York wharf anchoring incoming merchant ships that Moy's premiere took place in October 1834.Footnote 15 Afterward, she relocated to 8 Park Place, a residence prepared by her exhibition agent. On 10 November 1834, a local newspaper formally announced the start of her exhibition while informing the public of her origin in Canton and identifying Washington as the vessel which had brought her to American shores. Adults paying fifty cents and kids twelve and a half, people were advised to visit either between 10·00 a.m. and 2·00 p.m. or between 5·00 and 9·00 p.m. Families wishing to see Moy were instructed to make reservations one day ahead of schedule due to an unspecified cap on the number of visitors each day.Footnote 16 Adult admission was roughly equivalent to ten dollars in modern US currency, and a child's $2.50. At face value, the charges are slightly less than the cost of entry in many American museums nowadays, but due to the dramatic increase of disposable income over almost two centuries, modern Americans may only need to spend 2 percent of their average weekly wage of $747 (2010) to finance such a visit. In contrast, their forebears in the 1830s would give up 5 percent of a weekly wage amounting to $10.38 on average.Footnote 17 Despite the cost, Moy's exoticism still created such a commotion that her show attracted nearly two thousand visitors in just one week.Footnote 18 The Farmer's Gazette and the Massachusetts Spy even exclaimed, “She is all the go, and is said to have received more ‘calls’ in a week, than the native ladies receive in a year.”Footnote 19 Four months later, Moy headed south, despite the steady streams of residents waiting to see her.Footnote 20
After leaving New York, Afong Moy arrived in Philadelphia. Local newspapers announced on 19 January 1835 that the Chinese Lady was ready to “receive company at her splendid Chinese Saloon in the course of a few days.”Footnote 21 As in New York, in the City of Brotherly Love Moy aroused huge interest. Just in the first week, hundreds of Philadelphia's “most respectable citizens” had come to visit in the company of their wives and daughters.Footnote 22 The Moy exhibition continued until the middle of February. On the eleventh of that month, the masses were told that the exhibition would end in one week and Moy was going to Washington after receiving “a very large number” of visitors.Footnote 23
While in Washington, DC and its environs for the entire month of March, the exhibition was hailed an “Unprecedented novelty!”Footnote 24 In a sideline arrangement, Moy even paid a visit to President Andrew Jackson in early March, but it remains unclear how the appointment was initiated or how it materialized, or if Jackson had taken a personal look at Moy's little feet.Footnote 25 When the exhibition moved to Baltimore in the middle of the month, the Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser advertised the event every day.Footnote 26 Two weeks later, an advertisement urged prospective audience to quicken their steps before the close of the exhibition on 28 March.Footnote 27
On 20 April, a newspaper declared Moy's arrival in Charleston, South Carolina and the sponsor's plan to open the exhibition on the Queen Street the following day.Footnote 28 The event lasted until 2 May, when Moy was scheduled to return to New York.Footnote 29 However, she did not travel as planned this time, since an examination of her feet by “the most eminent physicians” had taken place in Richmond, Virginia on 19 May, indicating that an exhibition was under way there.Footnote 30
Two months later, on 18 July, news came out that Moy was well prepared to appear before the “good people” of Boston.Footnote 31 Moreover, a special exhibition would open for the local women at 3·00 p.m. on 1 August.Footnote 32 It was just in Boston that American folk artists began to join Moy's performances to encourage the momentum of audience enthusiasm.Footnote 33
Afong Moy disappeared from public eyes after exhibiting in Boston. It was not until mid-November, more than three months later, that she reemerged, this time in Albany, New York. A report on the thirteenth of that month confirmed that the Chinese Lady had begun attracting visitors in a local museum, accompanied by a popular band.Footnote 34 During the one-week sojourn in Albany, Moy also performed at public concerts, where she sang in Chinese while other actors sang in English, French, and German.Footnote 35
In the early months of 1836, Afong Moy was again exhibiting in the American South. According to a New Orleans playbill, she had an exhibition in the North American Hotel of that city from Monday, 28 March to Saturday, 2 April. Though silent on how Moy had come all the way down from the North, the advertisement did reveal that the conductor of the exhibition planned to return to New York via Pittsburgh along the Mississippi.Footnote 36 However, Moy remained in the Gulf area after the New Orleans display. On 14 April, a short notice on the Public Ledger announced Moy's arrival at Pensacola from Havana and her plan to visit Mobile in the near future.Footnote 37 There are no clues concerning which state those places belong to, but given the factor of geographical proximity, Pensacola should be a township of Florida, and Mobile that of Alabama. As to Havana, it should be the current Cuban capital. Of course, Florida has a town of the same name, but that township was not incorporated and named Havana until 5 December 1906.Footnote 38 Obviously, Moy had crossed the Gulf of Mexico to Cuba from New Orleans and then returned to Pensacola and Mobile. Since Mobile is not on the Mississippi, it is not clear if she had followed the scheduled route back to the North when the Gulf exhibitions ended.
In any case, starting from 30 May, Moy could be found in Philadelphia again.Footnote 39 But there was no indication that Moy had left the city after the end of the planned one-week exhibition. Local newspapers explained that due to inclement weather and numerous families' requests, the proprietor had decided to delay the close of the exhibition until 11 June.Footnote 40 On that day, under the title “Now or Never,” an advertisement appealed to last-minute holdouts by declaring that Moy wished to “bid her Philadelphia friends a long farewell” that evening before departing for China.Footnote 41
Reaching Baltimore from Philadelphia, Afong Moy was exhibited at the local Museum and Gallery of the Fine Arts until 23 June while her proprietor reiterated her immediate return to Canton as the basic selling point.Footnote 42 Thereafter, Moy arrived in New York as scheduled, ready to receive visitors in the oriental-style lecture hall of the Peale's Museum from 28 June.Footnote 43 If the original plan had held, she would have boarded a ship destined for China at the close of the New York exhibition. But she remained in America as late as December 1836, allegedly due to the lack of ships for Canton.Footnote 44 Considering the large number of merchant vessels going to China all year round, this pretext was largely ungrounded; it must have been a trick to drive ticket sales. Moy reemerged on the New York stage in April 1837, before disappearing from the public spotlight for exactly one year.Footnote 45
Then, in April 1838, the media mentioned Moy again. But with this appearance she seemed to be in dire straits: she not only had no chance to put on an exhibition, but was even discarded in New Jersey by her proprietor, “a wretch of the worst kind.”Footnote 46 Her situation was so distressing that local residents decided to investigate if it was possible to finance her departure for China.Footnote 47 However, the story of Afong Moy's abandonment was instantly and fiercely rebuked by her guardian, one Caleb E. Taylor, who demanded that the slandering press publish corrections, so that the “cause of justice” could be promoted.Footnote 48 For fear of being sued, the press heeded Taylor's request and published positive evaluations of his person.Footnote 49
Also in that year, the press connected Afong Moy's presence with their interest in the conjoined Siamese twins Chang and Eng, who had been displaying their physical abnormality in America since 1829. The papers concocted a sensational romantic fantasy about Moy and one of the twin brothers. In April 1838, the “witty editor” of the Boston Morning Post made the “revelation” that “one of the Siamese Twins has offered himself to Miss Afong Moy.” The New York Mirror, while citing this “news,” betrayed the jocular color of the story by dubbing it a “marriage extraordinary” and doubting if the other twin could stand up with his brother for the ritual.Footnote 50 But the imagined story continued to circulate. Two months later, Moy was said to be entering imminent wedlock with one of the twins.Footnote 51 Of course, Moy was never married to either twin. The story might have been orchestrated by the twins' agents to excite audience curiosity regarding Chang and Eng, a tactic that was often repeated in the brothers' performance career.Footnote 52
After the 1838 press coverage of Moy's dire situation, the county authorities of Monmouth, New Jersey boarded her in the local poorhouse at public expense. She remained there without giving any public appearances until “a company of persons redeemed her, by defraying the expenses of her maintenance and giving security for the future” not long before 7 April 1848, when the State Gazette reported her change in fortune.Footnote 53 Moy's removal from the poorhouse was not, however, strictly philanthropic, but was intended to return her to the exhibition hall for the profit of her benefactor. Beginning in the latter half of 1847, people could once again see advertisements for and attend her shows. To secure a maximum return from that investment in the event of Moy's death, her redeemer-turned-show-agents had arranged for her to effect “a policy of Insurance on her life in the Hope Mutual Life Insurance Company … for $5,000” – today worth $100,000 – during her exhibition in New York in August 1847.Footnote 54
The following three years mark the decline of Moy's public life. After more shows in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, she was displayed at a venue on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC in November 1849. But her name had changed to Afong Moy Nanchoy.Footnote 55 It appears that by now she had truly been wedded, possibly to a man also of Cantonese origin, as can be inferred from her new surname. Before fading from public view, she may also have visited Baltimore. In the many handbills distributed by John E. Owens, a local theatrical manager, at the end of 1849, could be found one for “the celebrated Chinese Lady, Afong, Moy, Nanchoy, the only celestial who has ever appeared without the walls of China.”Footnote 56 Whether she had been to any other places remains unknown, but she had definitely returned to New York after all these travels. It was at the City Hotel there that her very last recorded display took place in early April 1850, when she received visitors along with an “Ohio Mammoth Girl, 15 years of age and weighing 430 lbs.”Footnote 57 After that, Moy became finally and absolutely traceless.
Due to the lack of adequate sources, some sections of Moy's itinerary are still missing, while the differences between various areas' and groups' responses to Moy remain elusive. Still, a relatively clear picture of her travels has emerged up to this point. In the sixteen years after her arrival in 1834, Moy visited many different places east of the Mississippi as a curiosity. She had even ventured to Cuba, but as the trip is poorly documented, a detailed description is almost impossible. Wherever she went, at least within the United States, her sponsor would decorate a Chinese museum or saloon for her exhibition. The arrangement of Moy's displays showed some disparities over time. In the first months, strong curiosity drew large numbers to visit the exhibitions where she was the main attraction. The turning point came in Boston in July 1835, when Moy had to share the performance time and space with folk artists, singers, and dancers to retain audience interest. This pattern would continue until she completely vanished into the larger society.
THE OTHERING AND DISPARAGEMENT OF CHINA THROUGH THE MOY EXHIBITIONS
Before Afong Moy braved the oceans to reach America, Americans had already had some conception of Chinese cultural differences, and also “inferiority,” from the narratives of Euro-American merchants, diplomats, and missionaries. Moy was brought to the United States just to satisfy Americans' increasing curiosity about China and its people. While encouraging people to personally witness Chineseness via Moy, newspaper reports and comments, many of which were penned by ordinary visitors themselves, actually consolidated Americans' imagined wall against the un-American Chinese Other. In this sense, American spectators not only cast an anthropological or even zoological gaze, as Tchen rightly argues, but also defined more clearly what America was not and should not be by observing the exoticism, perceived in many cases as “unprogressive,” of China's much-vaunted civilization.
China's exoticism was vividly reflected in the details of the furnishings for Afong Moy's displays. Aiming to highlight the cultural peculiarity of those events, in various cities sponsors would house Afong Moy in a “Chinese saloon” or Chinese museum. With furniture and accessories supposedly originating from Canton, these places were oriental and magnificent, hailed as excellent specimens of Chinese indoor decoration.Footnote 58 Recalling a visit to Moy's residence, a reporter for the New York Star emphasized its striking difference from the surrounding buildings: “large gilt characters in Chinese” on both sides of the door, which formed “a novel and certainly not unpleasing contrast among the brass plates and bell handles of the bourgeoisie in the neighborhood.” The difference was intentionally eye-catching so that Moy's venue could not be confused with or obscured by the vast number of American houses. Once in the room, the reporter saw nothing but ornaments “a la Chinoise: gorgeous lamps, porcelain vases filled with beautiful flowers, lacquered tables, cushioned chairs, models of junks and pagodas, window screens, paintings, steel mirrors, guitars, and workboxes. This “most felicitous arrangement of superb objects” created such an illusion that “we might have imagined ourselves almost at Pekin.”Footnote 59 Key words and phrases like “Chinese,” “a la Chinoise,” and “Pekin” instantly assured the readership that they should hope to see exotic scenes and spaces. By paying a visit to Afong Moy, Americans were crossing a border into Chinese culture. The extensive reprinting of this report suggests that Americans may have been inundated with these implied messages.Footnote 60
Americans' reactions to Afong Moy herself were not vastly different from the way they reacted to the furnishings. They generally assessed her appearance as oriental but not unpleasant. One description read: “short, but rather robust in stature; her features are pleasing, her forehead high and protuberant, and her face round and full, with two languishing black eyes placed with peculiar obliquity of the outer angle.” She had “a profusion of jet black hair,” combed upwards and decorated on the top with artificial flowers and gold pins. Americans defined these physical characteristics as the traits of “the Mongolian variety of the human race, from which this people [Chinese] are descended.”Footnote 61 In other descriptions, Moy was likened to a fourteen-year-old Western girl, but was well proportioned, energetic, and healthy, though her skin was “slightly tinged with copper” – again clearly different from American women.Footnote 62
Moy's attire reified her exoticism. Wherever she appeared in public, she would dress in resplendent Chinese costumes.Footnote 63 During her first days in the United States, Moy mainly wore a sumptuously embroidered outward mantle of blue silk plus pantalets of yellow silk.Footnote 64 In her last displays, Moy was still found dressed in “her native costume, composed of the most superb Chinese Embroidery,” and prepared to display her “magnificent Worshipping Robe, of pure Gold Embroidery, which is of immense value.”Footnote 65 In order to appear as authentically Chinese as possible, something that might have been required by her agents, Moy spent long hours perfecting her appearance each day. One estimate suggested that before each display she must have stayed at the dressing table for four or five hours. She passed her daily life either “at her toilet, or at her tambour,” at both of which she excelled.Footnote 66
Afong Moy's physical deportment impressed Americans as typically Chinese as well. After attending her shows, spectators could not resist recalling solemn-faced Chinese officials whom they had often encountered in travel narratives. On one occasion, after observing Moy stand motionless for some time, except to very rarely incline her head, one visitor came to believe that her style very much resembled “a Mandarin image.”Footnote 67 In another case, Moy's nod from her chair was deemed not only “precious” but again, “a la mandarin.”Footnote 68 Given the universal nineteenth-century knowledge that Chinese women were not entitled to officialdom, no well-read American should be so naive as to expect Moy to bear any sort of title. Still, she was likened to a mandarin, a comparison which revealed American audiences' desire, possibly subconscious, to reify Moy's exoticism and difference from their own American identity.
Beyond embodying Chinese exoticism to American audiences, Afong Moy's shows provided Americans with an opportunity to reproach China's boast of superiority and ubiquitous self-centrism. In its feudal past, China styled itself a country of superior civilization, which radiated irresistible appeal to all foreign peoples that surrounded or visited it. Although this narcissistic mentality had already been challenged, the Moy exhibitions supplied an unprecedented chance for most Americans to personally feel the legitimacy of such a condemnation.
In particular, Americans scolded China's foot-binding requirement for women even though they were curious about Afong Moy's little feet. Since the “three-inch golden lotuses” had long been known as Chinese women's most conspicuous physical mark, when Moy first arrived, Americans' impulse was to grasp the chance to take a personal look. Without exception, all advertisements promised to grant viewers such an opportunity.Footnote 69 A more “ingenious” method of displaying Moy's feet was advertised in several cities, with the venue promising to showcase them “on a cushion sufficiently elevated.”Footnote 70 On other occasions, Moy was required to walk a few steps on the stage so as to give spectators an opportunity of “observing her truly astonishing LITTLE FEET! for which the Chinese ladies are so remarkable.” Beyond that, Moy sometimes had to remove her foot bandages; those present could thus have a graphic idea of “the curious [Chinese] manner in which the toes are folded under the foot.”Footnote 71 “Several eminent physicians” of Philadelphia examined Moy's naked feet and immediately publicized their findings in the newspapers: 4·75 inches from the heel to the end of the great toe, 2·125 inches from the heel to the end of the small toe, and 6·60 inches round the ankle. The doctors, excited and satisfied, confirmed these figures as typical for Chinese women.Footnote 72 To sustain public curiosity, some media even carried articles detailing the binding process. One example is the Parley's Magazine, which justified its long explanation by claiming to save the potential audience the twenty five or fifty cents (five or ten dollars in today's money) that “Miss Afong Moy would charge you … I suppose, for a view of hers [little feet].”Footnote 73
The popular memory of Moy's feet proved strong and lasting, so that in the high times of her hardships that particular physical trait was repeatedly mentioned to arouse social compassion for the Chinese Lady. For instance, while denouncing her agent as inhumane, the Charleston Courier reminded its readership that they should not have forgotten “the little Chinese damsel, with her golden head attire, and dainty diminutive feet … who was exhibited in this city, some time ago.”Footnote 74 In the same vein, The Floridian sympathetically reported, “Afong Moy … who was not long since, exhibiting her ‘little feet’ in New York, has lately been discovered in a retired country cottage, in Monmouth county, New Jersey.”Footnote 75
More thoughtful people did more than simply satisfy their instinctive curiosity; they used the Moy exhibitions as a platform for expressing their disdain at a China that treated its women harshly and even inhumanely. After viewing Afong Moy walk on her toes, many spectators could not avoid thinking of the pains that Chinese women had suffered in their girlhood. Because of that cruelty, they would have to totter away their remaining years in this world.Footnote 76 While keeping in mind the “great difficulty and pain” caused by “the iron shoes that she wore for the first ten years of her life,” one visitor cautioned American society against believing Moy's feet to be a sign of beauty.Footnote 77 In this atmosphere of sympathy, her safe arrival in New York was not considered the start of possible homesickness, but equaled an escape “from the eternal prison of her sex in Canton.”Footnote 78 Moy's bound feet even alarmed President Andrew Jackson, who, on parting with Moy, wished her “the power to persuade her countrywomen to abandon the custom of cramping their feet, so totally in opposition to nature's wiser regulation.”Footnote 79
A more severe and sarcastic criticism is found in the 7 October 1848 issue of Scientific American, which, though not explicitly mentioning Afong Moy, was clearly part of the public debate prompted by her exhibitions. Called the victim of “one of the most refined pieces of barbaric nonsense,” a Chinese female's foot was deemed “devoid of all natural idea of female beauty,” “repulsive in the extreme and no wonder.” To Americans, the practice of foot-binding distanced China from civilized America, where “the countenances of uncrippled females are full of vivacity,” displaying a sharp contrast to that of a Chinese beauty “always void of animation and somewhat expressive of the suffering which her ligatured feet may produce.”Footnote 80
This attitude strengthened some Americans' determination to change Chinese women's status. A commentator believed that American Christians, women, and philanthropists “cannot visit this female [Afong Moy] without emotion,” because she was “an immortal being, disabled in her physical structure by the cruel process to which she has been subjected by her unnatural parents and trained up without any kind of education.” Moy was “but one single representation of the millions of her sex.” “Every friend of the human race” was called upon to help Americans elevate and emancipate Chinese females from “cruelty, barbarity, and degradation.”Footnote 81 In a similar spirit, some Bostonians held a fund-raising fair on behalf of Chinese women. An observer held that Moy and her little feet were the inspiration for this event: “Whether the visit of the charming Miss Afong Moy, to this country, has awakened the sympathies of the public so warmly, we cannot say, but we are inclined to believe that such is the fact.” The “too much time” devoted to binding the feet, as required by Chinese decorum, was said to have deprived Moy of the energy and chances to become “particularly intellectual.” Having drawn this conclusion, the organizers promised to send teachers to China to divert women's attention away from their feet and toward the acquisition of practical and literary knowledge.Footnote 82 Obviously, while condemning China's foot-binding tradition and its disastrous impact on female education, Americans believed that Chinese women like Moy were actually teachable and could make remarkable progress intellectually in a freer environment.
We are not in a position to determine how much influence domestic disapproval of this tradition had on American missionaries and charity workers in China. But Moy's deformity had, at least in part, destroyed China's self-claim of cultural politeness. Beyond that, some spectators had discovered in the exhibitions a chance to ridicule Chinese self-centrism.
In China's traditional worldview, China, represented by the emperor on the dragon throne, was the center of the world, whereas all the other areas and peoples were assumed inferior and could only hope to receive Chinese grace. Certain comments on the Moy exhibitions mimicked and mocked such a condescending mentality. For example, one visitor wrote, “We determined to put the best foot foremost, and to show her that we are not quite so uncivilized and such barbarous vandals as she perhaps had been taught to believe by the great patriarch of her country, Con-fu-chee (Confucius).”Footnote 83 In another, more exaggerated, depiction, Moy's chair was likened to a dragon throne, and an American's ordinary visit to a journey to pay tribute and plead for grace. Moy's mere action of sitting there commanded irresistible power for people to prostrate and kowtow thrice in the same manner as having an audience with the Chinese emperor. Any of Moy's unintentional glances were blown into a favor that was “coveted by others” and a courtesy that “not every barbarian, however distingue … can hope from a daughter of the celestial empire.”Footnote 84 It is for the same satirical purpose that Moy was described as “a lady of true republican principles” who did not hesitate to show anybody her feet “with a magnanimity scarcely to have been expected from a descendant of Confucius, the great philosopher.”Footnote 85
Intending to deride Chinese vanity, an American composed two fictional epistolary poems. The first letter, addressed to Afong Moy by a fictitious American correspondent, laughed at Chinese self-centrism under the pretense of sympathy. It wryly asked,
The second one, allegedly from Afong Moy to her friend in China, enumerated many “unthinkable” phenomena in American culture, including monogamy and normal feet for little girls. Confronting such shocking contrasts, Moy was very much “at a loss.”Footnote 86 It was well understood in contemporaneous American public discourse that qui (kawei) and fan-qui (fan kawei) were not only derogatory Chinese appellations for foreigners, but, further, betrayed China's “utmost self-esteem” and “most intolerable contempt for the rest of mankind.”Footnote 87 Being a qui himself, the poet had apparently weaved this criticism into the fabric of the first poem for the purpose of exposing China's ridiculous short-sightedness and self-infatuation. The second poem highlighted Moy's puzzlement at American women's elevated social status, attributing this ill-preparedness to her past experience with Chinese decorum for females, which looked anachronistic in the face of American gender norms and realities. Taken together, these two verses portrayed a China that managed to remain complacent by turning a blind eye to the progress of world civilization.
Also denoting China's seclusion and lack of confidence was the Chinese tradition that prohibited foreigners from seeing Chinese females. Moy's very action of leaving China had breached this ban. As an advertisement revealed, her exhibition sponsors had encountered “extreme jealousy of the Chinese in allowing their females to be carried out of their country, or even to be seen by foreigners.”Footnote 88 This theory was reiterated in later reports on her abandonment. An American who had been aboard the same ship as Moy testified that she was actually “stolen” from China and that “the persons concerned were afraid of punishment under the Chinese government if they return her.” Naturally, she was “shamelessly” deserted.Footnote 89 Another interpretation attributed Chinese prohibition on women's travel abroad and marriage with a “foreign barbarian” to China's traditional fear of being one day ruled by “the son of a barbarian, by a Chinese woman.” Therefore “Afong Moy can never return home in safety.”Footnote 90
No doubt containing biases, these allegations represented a significant part of the knowledge of China that American society had culled from Afong Moy's circulating displays. The audience had deepened their understanding of China, as the organizers intended them to. But instead of lowering cross-cultural hurdles, these events had actually hardened Americans' psychological guard against Chinese backwardness and vanity, which would eventually precipitate the larger anti-Chinese mentality.
PATERNALISTIC TOLERANCE OF AFONG MOY
Although the exhibitions prompted sarcastic commentary about China's pretension of civilized tastes, Afong Moy had fortunately escaped rebuke herself, despite being paraded around as the embodiment of Chinese exoticism. Not only had she received much sympathy and liking, she had also acquired social space, though limited, to demonstrate her adaptability to American culture. Americans were willing to tolerate or even care for Moy mainly because she was a lone, weak racial stranger who did not pose any obvious challenge, as China's claim of advanced civilization did, to their own cultural superiority complex.
Americans' liking of Moy's pleasing comportment was one of the most easily noticed signs of that tolerance. When viewing the Chinese Lady for the first time, spectators often described her as quiet. Moy was so motionless and silent that some visitors claimed to be overpowered by “her quiet demeanor and imperturbable composure.”Footnote 91 A longer stay at the exhibition, however, showed that Moy was actually “interesting, laughing, bashful,” and exhibited “much affability and good humor.”Footnote 92 In addition, the few words she uttered once in a while assured everyone present of her “remarkably flexible and even musical” voice.Footnote 93 Still, no matter how much “ease, grace and propriety” she displayed, careful observers had noticed “a frown of indignant rebuke” on her brow when some men ogled her through quizzing glasses, a detail that reinforced her propriety.Footnote 94
In the meantime, far from being dull and slow-minded, Afong Moy, once freed of China's suffocating gender conventions, was eager and quick to learn. Though knowing that her prior education may not have been good, even the first batch of visitors claimed to discover signs of “so much … health, intelligence and pleasure” from her countenance.Footnote 95 When Moy arrived, she knew no English at all, relying on the accompanying Chinese lad Atung (spelled Acong in some cases) to interpret between her and her visitors.Footnote 96 But in the first months of 1835, she began speaking English at public events. She tried only a few words at the very start, yet her progress was steady and obvious.Footnote 97 By 1836, Moy had mastered sufficient language skills to “converse freely in the English Language … and furnish many interesting accounts of her native country.”Footnote 98
Reports later suggested that the Chinese Lady had made so much intellectual advancement that she intended to publish a piece recounting her travels in America, with meditations on American manners. The Atkinson's Saturday Evening Post cited a “very good authority” to announce Moy's intention to do so. The consequent book was “to be printed simultaneously in the Celestial Empire and Philadelphia – none of the chapters are to be suppressed.”Footnote 99 The Georgia Journal claimed that not only was Moy going to publish her views of Americans, she even possessed brilliant literary excellence which surpassed that of “Miss Kemble.”Footnote 100 Frances Anne Kemble (1809–93), the notable British actress, came to the United States in 1832. She already enjoyed widespread popularity for authoring one play when Moy embarked on her tour of America.Footnote 101 Be it serious or jocular, the likening of Moy to the popular Kemble unmistakably indicated many Americans' belief in Moy's intellectual potential. One contributor to the Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser denied discovering “that intelligence of countenance which some of our brother editors have been more fortunate in noticing.” But like the critics of foot-binding, this unnamed spectator attributed Moy's seeming lack of intelligence to her “uneducated” status in China, suggesting that proper education could, in fact, redeem her.Footnote 102 Generally, skeptical voices paled in comparison to those that confirmed Moy's intelligence, as far as available sources can demonstrate.
Moy also quickly accustomed herself to being able, as a woman, to speak at public occasions, something that was almost unimaginable in China. Since the initial stage of her performances, Moy had been familiarizing American audiences with the sounds of the live, spoken Chinese language. On his first visit, a New York Star reporter had only received “a very polite card of invitation, written in Chinese characters, from Miss Afong Moy,” without hearing the Chinese Lady utter any words.Footnote 103 However, on his second visit, he was fortunate to witness a more talkative Moy, who “gave us … a speech in Chinese, four words in length, to … which we made due homage, as an honor that we deeply appreciate and shall long cherish.”Footnote 104 Though the reporter sounded sarcastic and we do not know exactly what Moy had said, this brief speech should be the first ever live words that Americans had heard from a Chinese female in America. Later on, Moy had more opportunity to speak independently or in conversations with the accompanying lad. Starting in late 1835, American audiences began to enjoy her singing both at the exhibitions and in public concerts. These appearances, admittedly one part of the display schedule, nonetheless enabled Moy to suitably impress American spectators with “a voice remarkably flexible and even musical,” and to demonstrate “the Language and Cadence of her country.”Footnote 105
Another area where Afong Moy showed her adaptability was in courageously revealing her genuine feeling and situation to the media. For instance, when a journalist pressed her for an opinion on the “absurd cruelty” of foot-binding, Moy “says” that this fashion “does not appear to her, at all, more strange” than those that she had noticed on American women spectators.Footnote 106 It is not clear from the brief report what peculiarities Moy saw on her American counterparts, but her brave disapproval must have impressed Americans deeply. In another “interview,” Moy was even reserved in commenting on Andrew Jackson after visiting the White House: “Upon being asked … what she thought of the President, she replied that she believed him to be a very good man, but not so fine an Emperor as they [the Chinese] have in China.”Footnote 107 Moreover, when she was allegedly deserted in New Jersey, she literally “stated” her miserable situation to the press, which turned out to be instrumental in soliciting condemnations of her agent and obtaining assistance for herself.Footnote 108
Of course, it is possible that Moy made those remarks at the behest of her agents or, in the last case, her potential redeemers, to foment more social interest in her exhibitions or in upcoming ones. Yet no matter who had been urging her to speak, the fact that she spoke frankly to social media should have impressed ordinary Americans of her personal courage and readiness to fit in with America's public discursive norm. Whatever the real reason behind the remarks, that the readership perceived the comments to be genuine is all that matters. The media, in turn, showed their paternalistic treatment of Moy by reporting on her opinion and situation without disparaging her.
It is unrealistic to expect radical changes in Afong Moy's status because of these efforts, but her personal actions had undoubtedly transgressed China's confining virtue system that reserved no place for female talents and allowed no women to appear and speak publicly. Based on the understanding of the Chinese system, Americans had expected Chinese females to be submissive, unintelligent, and shy. But Afong Moy turned out to be clever, loveable, energetic, and even brave in the face of difficulties. Her disregard, whether compelled or voluntary, of Chinese taboos happened under the paternalistic gaze of the larger American society, which had been unnoticeably pulling her away from the Chinese restraints and pushing her toward an identification with America's laxer gender roles.
AFONG MOY'S SYMBOLIC ASSIMILATION
The two-tiered accommodation paradigm extended to Afong Moy was based on the premise that her stay would not constitute a threat to America's existing sociocultural order. Moy, as far as Americans could see, did behave herself accordingly. Furthermore, she took advantage of the paternalistic tolerance to acculturate, the outcome desired by the practitioners of the two-tiered approach. Although her sudden disappearance in 1850 deters our investigation into Moy's probable assimilation into American society, her lasting presence in American culture and memory has completed that process symbolically.
Brought into the United States “expressly as a ‘lioness,’ for exhibition,” Afong Moy's first and foremost integration occurred in her participation, which was to a large extent involuntary, in America's entertainment industry.Footnote 109 Shows of curious human figures, including mannequins of Chinese people, had occurred for some time before the Moy events. Moy was slotted into that same category, but as a living, breathing analog. One potential spectator, on hearing the news of Moy's arrival, immediately thought of “the models of the feet of these oriental damsels, in the Salem museum.”Footnote 110 Besides, her sponsors might have been tantalized by reports that their British counterparts had displayed two Chinese females in 1829 and that “the present attempt at emigration [of Chinese women] is the only one that has ever succeeded!”Footnote 111 Despite the lack of sources to attribute American “importation” of Moy directly to the stimulus of the British precedent, it should be certain that the British show, along with American displays of models of Chinese, had incited zealous expectations among Americans for a Chinese female debut, preparing the stage for Moy's eventual appearance in American entertainment.
Moy's coming had added a Chinese element to the “shameful exhibitions of monsters, and beasts, and other vulgar shows.”Footnote 112 Due to her deformed feet, Moy was indeed thought of as a “monster” by some people. A New Yorker, having already seen “a horror of lady-monsters of all descriptions,” professed that he would never “perform that universal ceremony” of visiting the new one of Moy, declaring such an exhibition “by no means to our taste.”Footnote 113 Yet few people publicly shared this understanding; most Americans simply took Moy as a live model of Chinese womanhood. Moy's exoticism, smartness, and lovely appearance countered her monstrousness, even earning her much concern and care. Her personal image was therefore not severely affected by her physical deformity.
Meanwhile, Moy was one of the original inspirations for yellowface, a variant of the better-known blackface that featured white performers with blackened faces to ridicule African Americans from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. As Sean Metzger and Moon have argued, yellowface is a type of stage performance using “yellowed-up” white actors to manifest degrading images of Chinese immigrants since the 1850s.Footnote 114 But the genre had been gestating before that decade: if the 1767 staging of The Orphan of China in Philadelphia symbolized its largely unnoticed origin, then the audience enthusiasm excited by Moy effectively sustained it, pushing it toward its eventual coming of age.Footnote 115 In January 1835, merely three months after the opening of the Moy exhibitions, her image had been invoked at a Washington masquerade, where “one lady with particularly small feet, went in the character of Afong Moy, a la Chinoise.”Footnote 116 On 4 April 1835 her life story was adapted for the stage in Baltimore's American Theater, with Mr. W. Isherwood playing Moy and Mr. Bob Farrell her attendant youth interpreter.Footnote 117 However, the prototypical yellowface represented by the Moy-initiated performances embodied more racial curiosity than the racial discrimination which was so prevalent in later developments.
Moy has also been raised to highlight American willingness to embrace newness and difference. An article introducing the Chinese mulberry tree, published when Moy started her exhibitions, embodies a metaphorical expression of this association. Fully satisfied with its shade effect and adoptability in the United States, the author called the tree an acquisition as valuable as “‘Julia Fooche ching-chang-king, daughter of Hang-wang-tzang-tze-king a distinguished citizen of the celestial empire, residing in the suburbs of Canton,’ who has just arrived at New-York to show her ‘darling’ little feet only three inches long.”Footnote 118 Without doubt, this strange name referred to Afong Moy, since no other Chinese female was reported in America until the 1850s. In another case, Washingtonians' “disposition to improve” and “public or private spirit” were regarded as crucial in winning Moy's consent to stay in Washington for a time.Footnote 119 Moy's visit to any locale was of course her agents' decision, but the commentator's mention of her as such was intended to prove the capital city's openness and to invoke Moy as one symbol and component of that openness.
Some Americans' liking and even imitation of Moy's dressing style provides one specific example of her symbolic participation in the always diversifying society. One month after Moy's premiere, the Georgia Journal had already become confident of her sartorial influence: “Miss Moy, the Chinese lady, is the ‘lion of the day’ in New York. Fashions it is expected will soon be all a la Chinoise, and ladies will put their tender pedal extremities to still greater torture to emulate those of the fair daughter of the celestial empire.”Footnote 120 In jest as this announcement may have been written, some people did watch closely or even follow the Moy style. The aforementioned lady who went in the character of Moy because of her similarly little feet was one ready example. Also deeply impressed by Moy's look, a female novelist had one character, Abby Louisa, suggest a Moy-like hairstyle to the heroine, Althea Vernon: “you should comb all the hair back from your forehead, unite it with your hind hair, and form the whole into a round plat or knot at the top of your head.” When Vernon expressed her reluctance to “look like Afong Moy,” Louisa insisted, “No matter – to very young people it is the most becoming style.”Footnote 121
In addition, Afong Moy has been associated with Chinese Americans' changing status in American public discourses. Before achieving relative equality with mainstream Americans in the latter half of the twentieth century, Chinese immigrants were often lumped together with other marginalized groups. Moy herself was not immune. The first such comparison occurred in 1834, when a spectator declared that Moy's “complexion is nearly that of the Indian, and her nose like that of the negro,” which were not beautiful “in our estimation.”Footnote 122 Then, in 1875, while describing Native American “savages,” the Philadelphian folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland (1824–1903) belatedly publicized one of his “earliest” observations: “the extraordinary likeness of Afong Moy, a Chinese woman who visited America many years ago, to an ordinary squaw.”Footnote 123 Though both associations focussed on Moy's physiognomy, the second one sounded more critical and negative, reflecting daily gathering anti-Chinese sentiment from the 1850s.
Chinese immigrants, in turn, were fully aware of the damaging impact of associations with other disadvantaged groups. This alertness prompted a Chinese merchant to distribute an open letter in San Francisco in 1853 which fiercely rebuked those white Americans who “come to the conclusion that we Chinese are the same as Indians and Negroes … These Indians … live in wild places and in caves.”Footnote 124 Teemu Ruskola, in a research on legal orientalism, confirms that American lawmakers did group Chinese and Indians together for their “asserted lack of ‘civilization’” in the anti-Chinese era.Footnote 125
Since the middle of the twentieth century, Chinese Americans have enjoyed more equality with mainstream Americans. In social discourse, correspondingly, Moy is no longer associated with Chinese Americans' disparaged status. As the first recorded Chinese woman on American soil, she is now often invoked to illuminate the start of the Chinese presence, especially that of Chinese females, in the United States. Scholars mentioned in the literature review have all followed this line of reasoning. The same is true of some journalistic narrations of Chinese American history. For example, a Philadelphia Inquirer article in 2004 describes Moy as the first Chinese woman in Philadelphia and attributes Philadelphians' initial acceptance of Chinese residents to the huge interest in the Middle Kingdom that Moy had aroused.Footnote 126
Even in fictional contexts, American memory of Moy could still shed light on the distant and murky past either of individual Chinese or of Chinese Americans as a group. A play produced for the 2008 University of Oregon theater season, Lotus Lessons, is an excellent example. The heroine Emma, a teenager supposedly adopted from China, suffers an identity crisis in the search for her birth mother. At one point in the play she is near the edge of collapsing when Afong Moy, “reputedly the first Chinese woman to come to America, 174 years ago!” appears and recommends a twelve-step program for recovery. Following Moy's guidance, Emma eventually recovered her sense of self.Footnote 127 For others, Moy could lead them down rabbit holes of horror – into the terrifying, windowless basement rooms of a brothel, to gawk at the miseries of Chinese women purchased in Canton and forced into prostitution in America in the latter half of the nineteenth century.Footnote 128 In either context, Moy is endowed with a magic power to reveal the usually untold secrets of Chinese American lives and history.
So Afong Moy, as she is remembered, has been “domesticated” by American culture even though we may never know her final fate. Underlying the entire history of Moy's experiences, both literal and metaphorical, has been her departure from China and integration into America. Moy, alone in the United States, not only changed certain American stereotypes of Chinese women through her performances, but attempted to grasp opportunities to secure a place in American society. In later years when Americans' dislike of the Chinese hardened into hatred, there would be other Chinese women cautiously navigating obstacles for a rightful position. Among them was the first Chinese American movie star, Anna May Wong (1905–61), who had been trying to escape the snares of both Lotus Blossom/Madam Butterfly and Dragon Lady representations, on and off the American screen, with repeated failure.Footnote 129 In contrast, Moy's struggles were less glamorous, more humble, more personal, and perhaps more successful, due to less American hostility to the Chinese.
The larger society, in turn, permitted and even helped Moy's endeavor, but with certain caveats. As long as Moy never challenged white Americans' social dominance, her presence was welcome. Thus Moy had to gradually abandon the “inferior” Chinese culture she grew up in and appropriately integrate herself. This is what I argue is the goal of Americans' two-tiered paradigm as described in this essay.
In the overall history of Chinese presence in the United States, the paradigm has a larger significance beyond illuminating Moy's personal experiences, both during and beyond her active years on the exhibition circuit. In fact, it suggests a gentler attitude to Chinese nationals in America before the advent of extreme sinophobia in the 1880s. The dual accommodation might have already been extended to the few Chinese who had stayed in America prior to Moy's arrival, but not until Moy's long and impressive public presence did it have the chance to be fully demonstrated in American discourse. In this sense, the paradigm should be defined as the prototypical frame into which mainstream America had been trying to fit the Chinese.
The paradigm ceased functioning when Americans acutely perceived a “threat” posed by Chinese immigrants. California was one of the first such places, with anti-Chinese sentiment spreading eastward from the Pacific coast. In response to the wave of immigration beginning in 1849, Californians initially welcomed the Chinese and invited them to participate in celebrations of all kinds. Immigrants from the Celestial Empire were considered, however briefly, “one of the most worthy classes of our newly adopted citizens.”Footnote 130 A piece in the Christian Register characterized this treatment as displaying the core feature of the two-tiered paradigm: granted “a perfect political equality” denied them by “their own country,” the Chinese could develop their “excellent natural genius” to achieve “the most important results” on the American side of the Pacific.Footnote 131 With the eruption of widespread anti-Chinese hostilities in 1852, both Chinese residents in the state and their culture began to be despised without differentiation, indicating that it was no longer viable to assimilate.Footnote 132
Yet the two-tiered approach continued to function in areas not yet overwhelmed by sinophobia. One example is New York in the 1850s, where several dozen Chinese, who had reached the city for various unspecified reasons, still enjoyed the option of assimilating or returning to China. No one knows if Afong Moy was among them. But similar to Moy's situation, those who were willing to acculturate were depicted as “evincing great quickness at learning” and showing “an alacrity of movement and flourish of manner that were quite exemplary.” A customer, possibly white, at a tea store run by such a Chinese was “taken aback” by the boss's radiating confidence, leaving “with quite a subdued air.” In contrast, those who chose to return did not receive any praise and were even deemed unworthy of detailed description.Footnote 133 Here again, welcoming of Chinese people coexisted with general disapproval of China, but this coexistence did not survive the anti-Chinese movement that had spread to the eastern coast by the early 1870s.Footnote 134
Lying in the Deep South, which was unattractive to Chinese immigrants because of its association with the notorious slave system, Augusta, Georgia might have been one of the last places to experience sinophobia and see the demise of the two-tiered paradigm. In the late 1870s and early 1880s, when most other parts of the United States were busy expelling the Chinese, this township welcomed its first Chinese resident, Willie Loo Chong. Considered “spruce and intelligent,” Chong was showered with local hospitality. Not only did his store business prosper, he even married a “pretty, bright-eyed” white girl with her father's consent. The county Ordinary deliberately interpreted the state constitution to define Chong as “not a man of color,” making him qualified for a marriage license. However, when fifteen or twenty other Chinese followed Chong to seek “Melican wifee” plus opportunities to trade, white hostilities – destructions and expulsions – ensued. Thus ended Augustans' paternalistic care of the Chinese and began the reign of hatred against them, although Chong himself might have continued to reside there.Footnote 135 As an individual, Chong did not pose any threat to Augusta's existing sociocultural order, so he was well treated and encouraged to forget his identity as “a man of color” and to assimilate. Yet when a group of Chinese came, Americans deemed this dangerous, and the local people heaped all their contempt reserved for China on the Chinese among them. Augusta finally joined other areas in total discrimination against the Chinese.
It may thus be valid to say that Afong Moy's arrival in 1834 heralded an era in which the two-tiered accommodation both fully displayed itself and gradually but irrevocably lost ground to the control mechanism that Chin and Chan have aptly termed racist-love–racist-hate. Under the latter arrangement, Chinese were not only discouraged from assimilating but were compelled to accept, act, and diffuse white-granted stereotypes in order to secure a foothold, just as Anna May Wong did in the first half of the twentieth century. The space allowed for Chinese agency was compressed to such an extent that whatever Chinese immigrants did, it could only serve to reinforce Americans' increasing contempt for them. This situation would remain in place until the US Congress repealed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943. Henceforth, Chinese Americans have steadily reasserted themselves, challenging mainstream America's stereotypical notions of them much more vigorously than Afong Moy had done in the 1830s and 1840s. The two-tiered approach that this essay has been elaborating thus represents the very first distinctive stage of American accommodation of the Chinese. But before the Exclusion Act formally announced the end of the approach in 1882, the duration of its implementation in practice might have varied geographically in response to the actual emergence of sinophobia in each locale. Such complication surely adds to researchers' difficulty in following and studying the paradigm's travel across the country. To compound the trickiness of the situation, the more visible and intense anti-Chinese discrimination could easily conceal the paradigm from detection by scholars. Still, given its importance to our understanding of early Chinese–American interactions, it deserves continuous scholarly attention in the future.
