Message, humor of Chance’s ‘Chinese Lady’ strives to reawaken our humanity ...Middle East

For all the Very Big Ideas that “The Chinese Lady” makes one ponder (racism, sexism, immigration, exploitation, xenophobia et al), it’s important to remember one crucial detail:

It’s very funny.

“I am ambivalent about the fork,” muses the earnest, 14-year-old Afong Moy, touted as the first Chinese woman to set foot on American soil  — and exhibited as a “living curiosity” — in 1834.

“I have seen it in use and I understand its functionality; it seems a useful tool for the stabbing of food,” she continues, stab, stab, stabbing. “But ultimately I feel it lacks grace. Chopsticks are poetic. Forks are violent and easy.”

Actress Michelle Krusiec then proceeds to do an over-the-top, arm-waving “chopsticks as objects of wonder” demonstration for her audience — worthy of a Monty Python routine — with a perfectly straight face.

Yes, the Anaheim Chance Theater’s regional premiere of “The Chinese Lady” by Lloyd Suh arrives with devastating timeliness in fertile soil. A remarkable 30% of Orange County residents are foreign-born, and 47% speak a language other than English at home, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Nearly a quarter of county residents are of Asian descent, and about a quarter of those trace their heritage to China. Both of my daughters are among them, and both look over their shoulders lately as China is cast as international villain, big bad bully, sinister force on the world stage. The government and the people, we keep saying, are not the same thing. But even here, in fabulously multicultural OC, they feel the unnerving gaze of otherness.

“My family has sold me for two years of service to Misters Nathaniel and Frederick Carnes, traders of Far East Oriental Imports to New York,” Krusiec’s Afong says. “I will be on display here at Peale’s Museum, for your education and entertainment, at a price of 25 cents adults, 10 cents children. Thank you for coming to see me.”

Moy was a real person, and she was displayed in a way that emphasized her “exoticism,” wrote Natalia Duong, Chance’s dramaturg — in long silk gowns and intricate jewelry, embroidering or playing the zither. “Living exhibits” were popularized by the likes of P.T. Barnum, “who monetized the display of non-Western bodies and produced the image of them as foreign.” Otherness — it can sell!

The play’s only other (human) character is Atung, played by Albert Park, the funny but tragic translator for and self-appointed protector of Afong. His self-proclaimed “irrelevance” says something about the societal invisibility of Chinese men of that era.

Afong, though, is genuinely excited to explain her culture to her audience. She’s alight at the prospect of being a bridge of cross-cultural understanding, fascinated by the differences as well as the similarities between the two cultures. But, for reasons we won’t spoil here, things don’t always work out as planned, and she can’t always get the message across.

“What I’m drawn to is her perseverance, the way the character is built with this internal light that just will not go out,” Krusiec said. “I think that is so human. We all — at one time or another! — had this undying ember, this desire to achieve something, to reach something. She is just so full of hope.”

Atung is her flip side, the world-weary antidote to her brazen, unabashed hopefulness, Park said. It’s important to tell this story now because experiencing — or, at least, attempting to experience — life through the lens of others couldn’t be a more timely lesson. Park hopes it will generate compassion —  but beyond all that, “it’s a funny (bleeping) play! It’s a really good time.”

Director Shinshin Yuder Tsai walks the actors through their blocking, the chopsticks schtick, the tea service, the respectful bows.

“I have a really personal tie to this play,” Tsai said. “My parents left their roots and support system in Taiwan for America in pursuit of opportunities we wouldn’t have had there. I have to imagine that Afong’s parents sold her with the idea there was opportunity to be had in America, that it was worth the sacrifice. She is trying against all odds to define who she is in a place that is not readily wanting to understand.

“We all want to understand others, and be understood,” he said. “In this show, Afong reclaims her history, reclaims her voice.”

Their experiences — and the experiences of the Chinese in America — cast an illuminating, if not particularly attractive, light on this particular moment in American history.

“Moy was part of a longer, complicated history of immigration that has resonance in today’s world,” dramaturg Duong wrote. “As Moy toured the U.S. during the mid-19th century, Chinese immigration to the U.S. increased, largely driven by the California Gold Rush (1848-1855) and an increased demand for laborers to construct the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1860s. However, the large majority of these immigrants were male.

“While her exhibit did educate American audiences about Chinese culture, it also solidified racial and cultural stereotypes that often portrayed Chinese people as a perpetually foreign monolith. These negative stereotypes, and anti-Chinese sentiment that was on the rise due to labor competition, particularly in places like California, resulted in the passing of The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred immigration of Chinese people to the U.S. and made it nearly impossible for Chinese immigrants to become naturalized.”

The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first legislation in history to restrict immigration based on nationality, and it remained in law for more than 80 years — ! — until the Immigration Act of 1965 officially did away with it, Duong wrote.

For those doing the math, that was only 60 years ago. “Keep these histories in mind as you encounter the story of ‘The Chinese Lady’ in today’s world,” Duong wrote.

Indeed. Other bits of Chinese American history Tsai thinks are important: Chinese American food is one of the most popular and voraciously consumed cuisines in the country; and it was Wong Kim Ark, born in San Francisco to non-citizen parents in 1870 and later told he was not, in fact, a United States citizen, who fought all the way to the Supreme Court and established the principle of birthright citizenship for all.

“The Chinese Lady” runs from May 16 through June 8. For more information, see chancetheater.org.

What does Tsai want folks to take away when they leave the theater? “That they can be an agent of change,” he said. “That it’s in their hands. That it’s through wanting to understand someone — someone we may not understand — that change can occur.”

With my older daughter at college, I’ll be taking my China-born younger daughter to this one, and we’ll certainly have a lot to talk about afterward. Meantime, though, I’ll never look at a fork, or chopsticks, quite the same way again.

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