Interview with Bo Wang

A number of well-known novels have focused on the life of women in nineteenth-century China, including a few I’ve featured on this blog. In most of them, the issue of foot binding plays a prominent role. The same could be said of Bo Wang’s new novel, The Chinese Lady, scheduled to appear with HarperVia next Tuesday. But as you can see from reading this interview with the author, The Chinese Lady takes a very different approach from most of its predecessors.

How did you learn about Afong Moy, and what made you want to write a novel about her?

I was working at GBH, Boston’s public media station. We had just started planning a digital US History Collection for teachers to use in their classrooms, and one of our goals was to integrate untold stories and diverse perspectives. While searching around the internet, I stumbled across both the Chinese Lady and Joice Heth. And I was struck by how little I knew about Chinese American history, even as a Chinese American who had studied American history and literature in college. I wanted to write about her because she was such a mystery—not just because there is no historical record of her perspective, but also because we don’t know what her life was before and after she was in the public eye.

Although the entire novel focuses on Afong Moy, three-quarters of the book actually reflects the viewpoints of people associated with her, rather than the experience of Afong Moy herself, Why did you decide that her story needed to be told in this way?

In my first draft, all four sections of the book were written from different viewpoints. I wanted to reflect the Chinese Lady’s reality, which was that she was always narrated through other people’s eyes. I also wanted to explore the spectrum of how women were collected and exhibited. On the one hand you have Joice Heth and the Chinese Lady, who were explicitly part of exhibit collections. On the other hand, you have Pearl and Margaret, who in a way have been collected by men for their own private viewership. In a way, I felt like exploring their experience also illuminated hers. Ultimately, my wonderful early readers and agent said they wanted the Chinese Lady’s perspective as well, and so I rewrote the last section to be from her viewpoint.

The first viewpoint character we meet is Pearl, living in Canton during the early 1800s and the mother of Little Sparrow. What would you like readers to know about Pearl and her daughter?

I’ve read and seen and written many Chinese mother characters who are tough-love, frugal martyrs. Pearl is none of these things! She is a self-centered survivalist who has a teenage obsession with her husband, which makes sense since she is a teenager when she meets him. She is incredibly intelligent and a skilled gambler. She sees her daughter as a disappointment and a nuisance, but Little Sparrow adores her mother.

The novel opens with Pearl’s decision to bind her daughter’s feet, a choice that plays out in various ways throughout the novel. Why focus on this element of Chinese culture?

Foot binding can be seen as a cultural trope, yet I felt the Chinese Lady’s bound feet were conditional for the Carnes brothers to buy her for their exhibition. Her feet were a focal point in their advertising, and in media coverage. To me, they were also one of the most intriguing mysteries about her. I’d assumed only a destitute family would sell their daughter to the Carnes, but while foot binding was a condition of female oppression, it was also a condition of privilege. Usually only well-off families had the resources to bind their daughters’ feet, since foot binding essentially debilitated them so they were less able to contribute to the family’s work in the house or fields or caring for siblings. So it’s surprising that the daughter of a well-off house would end up as an exhibit.

How does Little Sparrow become Julia, and what should we learn about Margaret, who gives the girl that name?

Margaret is the wife of the captain who brings Little Sparrow from Canton to New York. Just as her husband’s business associates call Little Sparrow’s father “John” because they can’t pronounce his Cantonese name, Margaret also gives Little Sparrow an English name: Julia. Margaret is an unusually educated woman who finds herself trapped in a childless marriage to an extraordinarily lusty man. Margaret sees Julia not just as someone she can mentor, but also an opportunity for her own ascension in society.

Please say a bit about Joice, the “oldest woman in the world.” How does she fit into the story of Little Sparrow/Julia, now renamed China?

A woman named Joice Heth and the woman called The Chinese Lady were both really exhibited by P.T. Barnum, but their timelines wouldn’t have crossed. I put them together in the novel to explore the possibilities of their relationship, given both their different and shared situations. Would they become allies, distance themselves from each other, or turn on each other?

The last quarter of the book takes place in San Francisco, starting in 1853. Here Mrs. Moy is the third-person narrator, but rather than focus on her, I’ll ask you to describe what San Francisco itself was like in the 1850s, especially for a Chinese woman.

San Francisco was centered around the mining industry, so a lot of the men who populated the city either were miners or catered to miners. The historical detail that most informs the background of the novel was that women were significantly in the minority, and Chinese women even more so. According to the 1860 federal census, Chinese women made up less than 1% of San Francisco’s population. There were about 6 Chinese men to every Chinese woman. Chinese women would have been even more drastically in the minority in the first half of 1850 when the novel takes place, but the 1850 census records were lost in a fire. Some historians estimate there were only 2–7 Chinese women in San Francisco in 1850.

And what of you? Will you write another novel, and if so, what can you say about it?

I am working on two novels right now, one set in the post-WWI United States, and one set in present-day China and the United States. Both explore themes of obsession.

Bo Wang was born in Cincinnati to Taiwanese American parents. Her childhood was peppered with stories of the Monkey King alongside those of Frog and Toad. The Chinese Lady is her debut novel. Find out more about her and her work at https://www.bowangauthor.com.