On Naming Afong’s Room

By Editorial Team

Who is Afong?

In 1834, Afong Moy (Ah-Fong Moy), arrived in New York from Guangzhou as a teenage girl, and simultaneously became the first recorded Asian woman to arrive in America. For years, she gained fame as “The Chinese Lady,” exhibited in a staged room filled with imported Chinese goods that American merchants had brought with her, meant to sell merchandise and the idea of the exoticized Far East. Visitors were eager to pay admission to watch her eat with chopsticks, drink tea, speak, and walk around the room many times a day with her bound feet.

Afong Moy was framed as a living embodiment of an imagined “orient” her whole life, even though the years she spent away from where she was born are far longer than the years she spent there as a young girl. This same pattern of objectification continues to be enforced today, an overpowering assignment of the homogenized and orientalist identity to Asian bodies. It haunts the history and present of what hegemonic spectators perceive as Asian and Asian American performance. For centuries, Asian and Asian American artists have been positioned as spectacles, their individuality subsumed into subservient images constructed by the West.

Amidst her deeply complicated yet significant presence in history, journalists and historians have long neglected to document her life beyond surface spectacle.  Her fame allowed her to appear before political elites, and her name drew curious crowds across the nation, but very little is known about her, and not even her true name. This erasure speaks to the persistent invisibility of Asian and Asian American subjects within hegemonic narratives, where Asian bodies have been commodified and objectified, yet rendered unknowable. To use Edward Said’s Orientalism, “The Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined. On this stage will appear the figures whose role it is to represent the larger whole from which they emanate. The Orient then seems to be, not an unlimited extension beyond the familiar European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe.” What Afong Moy represented as a figure of the Orient was an exoticized, mysterious, uncivilized antithesis to the Western world. Her performance was an embodiment of Otherness, from her clothing and bound feet to her exotic surroundings and the actions of speaking Chinese and using chopsticks, all intended for the entertainment of American audiences.

Despite the extreme constraints and harsh circumstances Afong Moy was in, we still find traces of documented moments where she asserted agency and resistance that disrupted reductive narratives following Asian bodies for nearly two centuries to come. She refused, for example, the humiliating demands to unbind her feet for public inspection, and countered the American public’s pitiful judgements about her feet by likening it to the restrictive corsets worn by American women, highlighting different yet shared bodily discipline and pain. These acts remind us that Afong Moy was not a passive spectacle. She negotiated and contested the terms of her identity under the hegemonic gaze.

We have chosen to name this journal Afong’s  Room as a reclamation of agency and give voice to Afong Moy, as well as amplify the voices of many who came after, who continue to subversively negotiate personal and collective Asian and Asian American identity within the performing arts. The title, Afong’s Room, remembers and reframes this history in view. The “room” both reminds us of the start at the site of Afong Moy’s historical confinement, but also represents the liminal space bridging Asian and Asian American performance. “Room” also metaphorically resonates with the legacy of Western feminism, including the early seminal literary masterpiece, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929). We hope to explore this generative chamber as a threshold where reflexive and empowering traditions and innovations, shaped by different positionalities and struggle, meet and stand in solidarity.

In our vision, Afong’s Room is a space to unsettle the gaze, to disorient what the West has long orientalized, and to reorient the narratives of Asian and Asian American performance toward resistance. Through Afong’s Room, we acknowledge that the stage is never neutral. Afong’s Room invites everyone in to transform that space, from confinement and commodification into a confrontation with history, generative dialogue, and insistence on our multiplicity.