“moy” // “mui” (excerpt)
Afong Moy was the first Chinese woman in the United States, fourteen years old when she was imported and exhibited as “The Chinese Lady” by merchant traders Nathaniel and Francis Carnes in 1834. She was used to sell other oriental commodities, a spectacle of difference first staged in an “oriental parlor” in the Carnes’ New York City home, and going on to be displayed in cities and towns across the U.S. and Cuba. She was used to shape Americans’ impressions of China, mutable to whatever fantasies would help sell her managers’ goods while also inspiring poetry and fashion trends. In her later years in the U.S., Moy was managed and exhibited by ‘master of spectacle and difference’ P.T. Barnum. Despite having been advertised to stay in the United States for only two years (“on loan from her parents”), records indicate she was in the U.S. for at least eighteen years before disappearing (from records). Not much is known about her, and she has been a speculative figure for Chinese diasporic artists, theorists, and writers inspiring creative works such as Lloyd Suh’s The Chinese Lady (2018) and Jamie Ford’s The Many Daughters of Afong Moy (2022).
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I wish I could sit with you.
Amongst those objects. Up on a dais - on display to be seen. Drapery, objects, furniture, knick knacks — enframing, mediating, muffling, coloring, triangulating as the backdrop to the frame to the scene to the lithographic capture, European replicas of “Chinese” portraits overlooking. I conjure a new mythology for them, for us.
[Which them which us we are all ]
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I wish I could sit with you. Sit. Linger. “Lingering presupposes a gathering of the senses” (한병철, The Scent of Time, 87). Can I feel the space as you do, sense it and perceive it like you? Could we feel it together? Might we be connected by a racial/ized lineage that allows us to move along an affective vector of space that reflects off surfaces and bounces into corners to reveal our shared intimate spaces? It colors a field. Where is this? Who enters it?
“Contemplative lingering is also a practice of friendliness. It lets happen, come to pass, and agrees instead of intervening… Contemplative lingering gives time. It widens that being that is more than being-active. When life regains its capacity for contemplation it gains in time and space, in duration and vastness” (한 113).
Static life synthetic life gives rest life.
Rest.
“She goes by many names: Celestial Lady, Lotus Blossom, Dragon Lady, Yellow Fever, Slave Girl, Geisha, Concubine, Butterfly, China Doll, Prostitute. She is carnal and delicate, hot and cold, corporeal and abstract, a full and empty signifier…What happens when we consider ornamental forms and fungible surfaces, rather than organic flesh, as foundational terms in the process of race making?”[1]
She — the ornamental figure, the “yellow woman” — is this where we began?
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I wish I could sit with you.
I wish I could be your limbs, serve you tea, tend to your feet. I wish I could care for you and all the unacknowledged trauma you go through, the dehumanization and racialized aesthetic objectification you experience. We were too young for this. I wish we could clear the mental, spatial, emotional clutter of being surrounded by stuff that is not ours, that we will never possess but shape our being nonetheless. We have no choice. The space of the ship, the cargo hold, the parlour, the suffocating spaces of whiteness and commerce and constant consumption, no room to lie, to rest, to be at peace. A life marked by movement, precarity, contingency. Where did you end up?
I wish I could sit with you. Dizziness from the waves rolling, nausea from the crew yelling. Did you convince yourself you were on a great adventure? Did you board the ship with nervous excitement? Or did you utterly dread it? Did you know what was going on, what was going to happen? Did anyone tell you anything? You were only fourteen.
I wish I could sit with you. Where would you have sat on the ship? Would anyone have told you where you are going, what is going on? Did you interact with Mrs. Obear much? Did she ever try to care for you? Or did you always communicate with her through Atung? How long? Were you freely allowed on deck, to breathe the fresh salt ocean air? Or were you restricted and confined, freedom always-already limited? Were you kept away like a treasure to be hidden, another object in the registry of mercantile cargo? Maybe that time alone in your room-hold-crate was preferable to whatever color of un/familiarity [difference] they chose to treat you with:
- An object, part of the cargo-manifest.
- A treasure, an ornament, delicate, infantalized, protected, hidden away (from the crew?)
- A person, but one unknown and unfamiliar, impenetrable, inscrutable.
- A robot.
- A clone.
- An alien.
- A prostitute.
- A doll.
Where in time are we?
Where in the legacy are we?
You are fundamental to my being.
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I wish I could sit with you.
I wish I could sit and watch the parade with you. The parade of bodies coming to see the pretty living object. Who is [the one] on display? I wish I could stand behind you and glare at those who gawk, yell at those who point and mutter and snicker and delight at our spectacle. Maybe we’d giggle about it later while making fun of the gweilo or maybe …
I don’t like parades.
//
I wish I could sit with you.
Your ornamental presence racializes the architecture of home and its interiors, the specific configuration of objects and commodities and features and intimacies that constitute the performative interior service surface stage.
You architect the space through sartorial splendor, accessorizing the intimacies of the home even as they dress and enveil and encrust you in turn.
I wish I could sit with you.
What did it look like, beyond the frame? Beyond the frame of the lithograph, of what we see as the stage. Was it a harsh divide? Did it feel like a stage, a set, a facsimile? Or did you seep out past your containers? This is not our home, but it is someone else’s. We do not belong here but we are here.
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[...]I wish I could sit with you.
"moy"//"mui" (excerpt)
printed in exhibition zine New seed. XXXXXX. New seed. XXXXXX.
Human Resources LA, July 2022
notes
[1] Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
[2] Alvin Lucier, I am sitting in a room, (1969).
[3] Byung-Chul Han, Saving Beauty, trans. Daniel Steuer, 1st edition (Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA: Polity, 2017).
[4] Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict, Nineth edition (London ; New York: Verso, 2006).
[5] Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, 1 edition (Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 1992).