AT The Chinese Lady, the audience is first confronted with a corrugated iron wall that spans the stage and reads: shipping from china. The doors to this impending simulation of a cargo container (designed by Junghyun Georgia Lee) open. What welcomes us also requires a bit of unpacking. It’s the title lady, Afong Moy (Shannon Tyo), seated in a recreation of an Oriental-style room decorated with flowers, lacquered tables and vases. The supernaturally poised young woman is dressed in traditional dresses, with heavy white foundation, red lips and pink eyeshadow.

This feeling of being invited and then excluded – for both the immigrant and the viewer – is one of the most powerful motifs of Lloyd Suh’s sonorous and effective piece. The 2018 Two-Handed Film (re-edited by Ma-Yi Theater Company and the public) is based on the true story of Moy, the first recorded Chinese woman to visit America in 1834, brought from Guangzhou Province by her merchant brothers Nathaniel and Frederick Carne. Moy, then fourteen years old, was exhibited first in her ersatz habitat in New York, then on tours across the country. She demonstrated the tea ceremony, ate with chopsticks, and walked around the room to show off her four-inch “little feet,” the result of foot binding. Eventually, PT Barnum incorporated his number into his list of exotic shows. Little is known about Moy’s life after the 1850s, and Suh uses this biographical gap to give his protagonist an incredibly extended life – to the present day.

The 90-minute drama traces Moy’s journey in America from hopeful teenager to jaded adult, a progression clouded by American attitudes toward Chinese immigrants, ranging from Orientalist condescension to murderous bigotry. Along the way, Suh’s piece introduces us to some of the 19andAmerica’s most heinous crimes of the century against Chinese immigrants, such as the torture murders of 1885 in Sweetwater County, Wyoming, or the Snake River Massacre two years later in Oregon. These history lessons remind us that the anti-Asian violence we see every day — especially during the pandemic — has deep roots in American soil.

While The Chinese Lady touches on tragedy, the general mode is ironic and comic. It unfolds as a series of tense but humorous interactions between Moy and his translator/handler, the gently mocking Atung (Daniel K. Isaac). Atung is a placid factotum whose serene exterior masks chaotic depths and a lifetime of disappointment. There is a hint of Beckett End of Game in the thorny master-servant relationship between Moy and Atung, the latter constantly moving tables and props around the physically restrained star attraction, dragging campy asides à la Tim Gunn. As in the recent cross-cultural play English, the character code changes to indicate when they speak English with an accent or in their own language. Or, in Moy’s case, his inner monologue.

While Tyo carries the bulk of the piece with consummate grace and charisma – aging and wiser before our eyes – Isaac is a mysterious presence, the true sealed vessel. In a sultry, soul-baring monologue at the end of the story, Atung shares with us his erotically charged dreams, his aggressive, pansexual fantasies of dominating white men and women who come to admire Moy. Above all, Atung confides, he desires the physical act of love with Moy, “because it is the most forbidden,” he explains. “She is like a will-o’-the-wisp, a memory, an idea, a poem.” We feel Suh’s authorial voice in this invigorating and lively passage, the writer wanting to own his subject, knowing that it will always elude him.

Matching Suh’s delicate blend of dry wit and poetic melancholy, director Ralph B. Peña crafts a lucid and vibrant production around the two magnetic central performances. The Chinese Lady is finally a sincere mediation on the act of looking as a means of knowing something or someone, of breaking down ethnic clichés or blinding prejudices. It makes you wonder—hope—that even in the bad old days of 1834, an American staring intently at that foreign girl in a foreign land could see himself a little.