日志
Afong Moy
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| https://www.chicagoonstage.com/the-chinese-lady/ When the Washington sailed into New York harbor on October 17, 1834, it immediately generated excitement in the city. The cargo included some tea and the expected assortment of fancy non-necessities that had become the Carnes’ stock and trade. 10 But what made this ship’s arrival extraordinary were the unusual circumstances surrounding one of the passengers, who received mention in an announcement printed in the New-York Daily Advertiser: | 10 |
The ship Washington, Capt. Obear, has brought out a beautiful Chinese Lady, called Juila Foochee ching-chang king, daughter of Hong wang-tzang tzee king. As she will see all who are disposed to pay twenty five cents. She will no doubt have many admirers. 11 | |
A similar announcement in the New York Sun added that the father was “a distinguished citizen” of China who was “residing in the suburbs of Canton,” a detail that, whether or not it was true, placed her among China’s elite. 12 A short article in the New-York Commercial Advertiser printed her name as “Miss Ching-Chang-foo” and provided a detailed description of the practice of footbinding, which caused a Chinese woman “to twaddle about all her life.” 13 The new arrival from China had yet to appear before the public, but already the press was beginning to circle around her. | |
From the time of the Washington’s arrival, the Carne brothers required only three weeks to secure an exhibition hall (No. 8 Park Place); ornament it with appropriate objects, furnishings, and wall hangings; and have the Chinese Lady ready to entertain visitors. During this period, odd stories and rumors involving the Chinese Lady appeared in the newspapers. For example, the New York Journal of Commerce recounted what transpired when the Chinese Lady encountered a person sewing with her left hand. Having “never before seen a left-handed person,” she gazed for some time “to comprehend the mystery” and then “burst into an immediate fit of laughter.” Apparently the Chinese Lady aroused such curiosity that editors deemed newsworthy even the most trivial incident. 14 Other newspapers, however, printed stories that were more sensational in content, with one even claiming that the Chinese Lady had been reported missing. According to the Commercial Advertiser, guns fired during a political rally had frightened her into running away. In the same issue, the paper reported the rumor that she had been removed to Boston, presumably by the Carne brothers. 15 Such rumors evidently lacked validity, however, as preparations were well underway for the first day of her exhibition. | |
On November 6, when the first of many lengthy advertisements began to appear in city newspapers, two changes were apparent. In addition to doubling the price of admission to fifty cents, the Carnes had also requested that the Chinese Lady drop her longer Chinese name and adopt instead the moniker Afong Moy. The advertisements also offered the first physical description of her. She was nineteen years of age, four feet ten inches in height, “dressed in her national costume,” and her feet were “but four inches in length,” the result of her having worn “iron shoes” throughout her childhood. Starting on November 10, advertisements announced, the general public would be able to see Afong Moy from the hours of 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., and then again from 5 until 9. 16 | |
When that day arrived, the doors to No. 8 Park Place opened, allowing in a crowd of curious ticket holders. Included in this group was a reporter dispatched by the Commercial Advertiser to cover the unique event. He provided an account of his experience in a rather lengthy article that, when it appeared several days later, stood out in a newspaper that ordinarily dispensed the news in small capsules of pithy text. At ten o’clock, he wrote, Afong Moy emerged from her quarters and discovered that “a number of ladies and gentlemen were already occupying her drawing rooms.” The reporter described Moy as a “princess” who “resembles a healthy, bouncing girl of 14.” Her complexion was “tinged with copper” but “sufficiently transparent” to reveal that “roses are blooming” beneath her skin. In addition, she wore a costume befitting a lady “of her rank” and had evidently spent four to five hours at her toilette. Though he found her overall appearance prepossessing, her “little feet” provided by far “the most novel and interesting feature of her appearance.” | 15 |
The reporter then proceeded to offer a detailed account of the various activities undertaken by Afong Moy that were intended to show off this most remarkable physical feature. At first, her performance consisted of little more than sitting on a “throne of rich and costly materials” and displaying her feet by elevating them on a cushion before the intrigued spectators. As women in the audience approached her to take a closer look, the seated Moy would bow her head approvingly and smile. However, when males made similar advances towards her feet, she was less accommodating. “We saw on her brow,” the reporter observed, “a frown of indignant rebuke.” One “professional gentleman” in the audience, perhaps a doctor, harbored a deep desire to examine “the anatomical distortions of the foot.” However, since the removal of the Chinese Lady’s shoes apparently was not a part of the show and the rules of civility forbade this individual from even uttering his special request, his wishes went unmet. | |
Though Afong Moy did not speak English, visitors could communicate with her because she was joined in the room by her interpreter, a Chinese man named Atung. Audience members undoubtedly wondered about her life in China, the practice of footbinding, her long voyage to America, and her impressions of New York, and so it was questions along those lines that Atung most likely fielded and translated into the Cantonese dialect for Moy. In addition, Atung issued commands for Moy to follow. Every few minutes, he would speak a few words to her, after which she would rise from her chair and hobble with difficulty two or three times across the room before returning to her seat. A few more moments would pass, and Atung would repeat the same command. The sight of a woman so “disabled in her physical structure” inspired the reporter to pen a small diatribe against the “cruel process to which she has been subjected.” Chinese women lived in “vassalage to the lords of the other sex,” he wrote, who “tortured and deformed” their bodies and simultaneously kept their minds “in a state of ignorance.” The reporter expressed his sincerest hopes that missionaries bringing the gospel into China could effect the emancipation of the country’s female population. | |
This burst of indignant outrage aside, the reporter was, on the whole, pleased and intrigued by the novel spectacle he had witnessed. He concluded his article by writing that he did not need to write any more to “induce our citizens to attend.” As it was, Afong Moy was already “receiving more calls every day, than any other young lady of our acquaintance,” and the reporter doubted that the public’s curiosity would be sated during her sojourn in the city. 17 Despite his endorsement, not all New Yorkers flocked to see the Chinese Lady. Some viewed the public display of a woman, regardless of her country of origin, as a case of blatant exploitation. The New-York Mirror published an editorial explaining why the magazine had elected not to cover the Chinese Lady in its pages: “We have not been to see Miss Afong Moy, the Chinese lady with the little feet; nor do we intend to perform that universal ceremony, unless we should find the notoriety which the non-performance must occasion inconveniently burdensome. . . . The lovely creatures were made for anything but to be stared at, for half a dollar a head.” 18 That this editor bothered to print his justification for not attending the exhibition suggests it succeeded in sparking a tremendous amount of public interest. 19 | |
Indeed, for most Americans, the chance to see a Chinese woman with bound feet was too novel an experience to pass up. One can best understand the rarity she posed by recognizing that even foreigners residing in China around this time seldom set their eyes upon a Chinese woman from the upper class. “A Chinese lady I have never seen,” wrote John Latimer, an American trader living in Canton. “They never walk, indeed I believe they cannot owing to the barbarous custom of confining the feet while young.” Latimer added that a Chinese friend had promised him a pair of shoes, 3_ inches long, once worn by that man’s wife. 20 Brantz Mayer, a travel writer who visited Canton in 1827, described the “well-born lady” in China as “a hot-house plant, grown under glass and watched as carefully as the choicest bud”; her “paleness” was a symptom of her “concealment” and “seclusion.” At the time of writing, Mayer had successfully secured a pair of the greatly sought-after tiny shoes. 21 And according to Osmond Tiffany, foreigners’ intense fascination with respect to this Chinese custom eventually reached the awareness of Chinese shopkeepers. Eager to profit from this curiosity, some of them began to sell clay models of “contracted feet, painted flesh color and set into shoes of the same size as those actually worn.” 22 And so, quite ironically, while New Yorkers had access to a genuine Chinese lady with bound feet, Americans living in Canton settled for shoes placed on sculpted imitations formed from clay. | |
While the Carnes certainly profited off Afong Moy through ticket sales, the real gains were to be had elsewhere. The Carnes’ entry into the China trade coincided with a fashion trend that favored articles of clothing or household objects decorated in the chinois fashion—Western in origin but modeled in a style perceived as Chinese. However, despite this fashion, most Americans were not in the habit of purchasing fancy items in stores; being both parsimonious and adept at household arts and crafts, they preferred to buy inexpensive items that they could embellish with ornaments themselves. In 1831, Godey’s Lady’s Book, a popular magazine that both reflected existing fads and initiated new ones, taught women how to decorate plain objects “in the Chinese style”: | 20 |
A variety of articles, such as work-boxes and baskets, screens, and small ornamental tables, may be procured at the fancy shops, made of a beautiful white wood, quite plain, for the purpose of being ornamented, by ladies, in the Chinese style. The subjects generally represented are Chinese figures and landscapes . . . or grotesque ornaments. Patterns on paper . . . are also supplied at the same places. 23 | |
The article went on to explain how one could use tracing paper to transfer a desired pattern onto an object. | |
The Downs Collection at Winterthur Library owns a design book from this same period that had once belonged to an “H. Wrightson.” Wrightson, who was probably a young woman, possessed an interest in the same Chinese styles that Godey's Lady’s Book recommended. However, instead of purchasing “patterns on paper” in a shop, Wrightson drew Chinese scenes in her own hand and transferred them onto fabrics, wallets, screens, pouches, or boxes. Her design book is a valuable artifact not only because it provides evidence for the popularity of the Chinese style in this period but also because the sketches reveal the image of China lodged in the imagination of a young women (fig. 3.1). Though her drawings are understandably somewhat amateur, one can see that the pastoral ideal found on porcelain animates her Chinese scenes; she drew landscapes that were filled with flowers, butterflies, streams, fishermen, and Chinese architecture. It was as if she were attempting a close-up of the willow pattern in order to explore the figures, architecture, and vegetation it depicted only from afar. 24 | |
 Wrightson was precisely the kind of person the Carnes brothers hoped to entice with their fancy Chinese imports. They gambled that she would put down her pen, her tracing paper, and her needle and thread and instead open her purse. Of course, their hopes hinged on an American middle class that would actually go against deeply ingrained mores of frugality to purchase non-necessities from China, most of which served a purely decorative purpose. It was in this area that the Carnes probably hoped Afong Moy would play a crucial role. They believed her public display would stimulate consumer desire in the early stage of this commercial experiment. She could help create a vogue for the exact commodities the Carnes were attempting to introduce into the marketplace. | |
Toward this end, Moy appeared not in a sterile environment but rather before an elaborate backdrop, as the advertisement states: “At the same place are also to be seen various objects of Chinese curiosity, in themselves well worthy of the attention of the curious.” 25 As a surviving lithographic print indicates (fig. 3.2), she was snugly ensconced in an opulent setting of fancy Chinese articles—lanterns, mirrors, curtains, wall hangings, paintings, vases, lacquer furniture, and ornamental boxes. These were exactly the sort of items that the Carnes were concurrently putting up for sale. In sum, although the brothers presented New York with a text, Afong Moy, that was ostensibly ethnographic in nature, their not so subtle context was strictly commercial. New Yorkers not only witnessed an upper-class Chinese woman and her supposed possessions, but they also discovered that they could transport this desirable oriental elegance into their own homes—if they were willing to pay the price. |
