Fractured Reflection:
The Chinese Lady and the Cost of Being Seen
She doesn’t enter. She appears—still as a painting, but alive, watching. In Lloyd Suh’s The Chinese Lady, now haunting the Chance Theater with a whisper that lingers long after curtain, Afong Moy isn’t introduced. She’s arranged. Composed. A presence to be consumed. A figure suspended between spectacle and silence.
Afong Moy was real. In 1834, she was brought to America and made into a living exhibit of “China,” a spectacle for white curiosity. People admired her bound feet. They watched her eat. They stared at her as if she were a doll with a secret. By 1838, she was gone. Some say she was institutionalized. Others just stopped paying attention.
Suh doesn’t try to reconstruct her. He lets her drift—through language, through time, through whatever space exists between memory and invention. She says early on, “These words are not my own. This body is not my own.” It doesn’t sound like a confession. It sounds like a warning.
The Chinese Lady is a two-person play, anchored entirely by the dynamic between Afong Moy and Atung, her translator and chaperone. He speaks English and Chinese, and in theory serves as her conduit to the outside world. In practice, he becomes something more ambiguous—a buffer, a handler, a co-performer in a narrative neither of them fully controls.
Suh’s play is built on a rhythm that unsettles. History repeats. Scripts repeat. Phrases echo across decades until they no longer sound like education but incantation. Each retelling seems to cost more than the last. This is not just a chronicle of erasure. It’s a portrait of what gets worn away when a person is asked to perform herself too many times. Afong’s repetition is not idle; it is corrosive. The play watches her dissolve in real time, one polite gesture at a time, while the years pass like shadows on the wall.
That corrosion doesn’t arrive all at once. It creeps in under layers of charm and carefully placed laughs. Humor in The Chinese Lady isn’t a break from the heaviness—it’s a mechanism of survival. Afong’s formal cheer, her featherlight sarcasm, the playful tug-of-war with Atung over who controls the narrative—all of it masks a deeper ache. Their banter often plays like a soft-shoe routine at the edge of an abyss. Atung, especially, wields deadpan like a shield. He shrugs. He cracks a joke. He performs irrelevance. But the laugh often comes just a beat too late, or too early, and in that off-kilter rhythm, the play makes its sharpest cuts. Humor here isn’t release. It’s recoil.
Director ShinShin Yuder Tsai leans into that duality—spectacle and intimacy—framing Afong’s presence as both literal exhibition and quiet revolt. There’s a lightness to Tsai’s touch, especially in the early scenes, where the script’s vaudevillian pulse is echoed in the rhythm of the performances. But beneath that surface buoyancy is a slow, deliberate unlayering. His direction lets time stretch and buckle, sliding effortlessly across decades to reflect Afong’s internal unraveling. The artificiality of the display is never in question. In fact, it’s amplified.
Christopher Scott Murillo’s set stages that tension with brutal clarity. A box sits center stage—literal, metaphorical, inescapable. Its interior gleams with curated opulence: reds, golds, celadon greens, a riot of chinoiserie designed for Western fantasy. Nothing feels lived in. It’s a museum diorama built to flatter the gaze of those outside it. But as the play wears on, that box doesn’t change—Afong does. Or maybe the audience does. What once seemed ornamental starts to feel suffocating.
Michelle Krusiec plays Afong with a poise that frays by degrees. In the early scenes, she moves with delicate precision, as if acting from muscle memory. She pours tea, smiles gently, describes her customs with the air of someone narrating a museum plaque. But that composure shifts. Her pauses lengthen. Her eyes lose their softness. By the time the audience has settled into her rhythm, she’s already begun to break it.
Albert Park’s Atung begins as interpreter and guide, a kind of translator-chaperone hybrid. At first, he keeps the tone buoyant, even cheerful. But as the scenes multiply, his role begins to twist. He stops bridging cultures and starts erasing one. By the end, he looks like someone still smiling only because he’s forgotten how not to.
What lingers isn’t any single image. It’s the play’s strange relationship with time. The presidents change. The language shifts. But Afong stays where she is, her presence unmoored from chronology. It doesn’t feel like a timeline. It feels like a haunting.
The deeper histories surface gradually. The Chinese Exclusion Act. The exploitation of Chinese railroad laborers. The lynchings and massacres. The box Afong inhabits isn’t just symbolic. It’s a diagnosis—of how spectacle deforms identity. A warning. A frame that flattens whoever steps inside it. She is there to be looked at, yes, but the brilliance of Suh’s script is how that gaze boomerangs. Eventually, she’s looking back.
This is one of those rare evenings in the theater that rearranges something inside you.
And here is where I falter. As a white male critic, I’m wary of describing this play without also describing my own position inside it. I kept wondering whether I was interpreting too much, or not enough. Whether this review is just another form of display. The play doesn’t answer that question. It just holds it up, and leaves it there, unanswered, in the silence.
This isn’t a history play. It plays like Brechtian estrangement inverted. We don’t grow distant from the drama to observe it critically. Instead, the drama refuses to let us leave. What remains after the audience stops clapping, and the lights refuse to come up.
I thought I came to observe. But I was part of the exhibit the entire time.
photos by Doug Catiller
The Chinese Lady
Chance Theater
Cripe Stage, 5522 E. La Palma Ave. in Anaheim
80 minutes, no intermission
ends on June 8, 2025
for tickets, call 888.455.4212 or visit Chance
for more shows, visit Theatre in LA
