The woman known as Afong Moy, the title character of playwright Lloyd Suh’s thoroughly compelling “The Chinese Lady,” was the first Chinese woman to set foot in North America. Or at least, that’s how she was advertised.
Afong Moy was the name assigned to a teenager brought from Guangzhou to New York City in 1834 by American traders, who put her on display for paying customers who wanted a glimpse of something exotic — a living artifact of 19th-century Orientalism, nestled at the center of a room filled with other commodities from her homeland.
