The Many Daughters of Afong Moy(36)

Dorothy blinked as she looked around the room. “I’m… confused.”

“That’s a common side effect. As trauma is revisited it takes a while to reconcile memory with present reality, which sometimes causes disorientation. Like waking up from a dream and you’re unsure where the subconscious ends and the real world begins.”

“But… I saw a young woman… a girl. She was pregnant. I think she was dying. There was a homeless man. Blood everywhere. She was in terrible pain.” Dorothy tried to remember, but her recollection of the woman in the alley began to blur. “Who was she? She seemed so familiar.” Dorothy sipped her tea. She felt tingling as the hairs on the back of her neck began to stand on end. “Was that me?”

Dr. Shedhorn gently put her hand on Dorothy’s arm.

“They’re all you.”





Act II





11 Afong




(1836)

Afong woke in a boardinghouse.

She knew by the house rules posted on the back of her door.

She stared out the window, looking up at the crescent moon, remembering how her original managers, the Carnes cousins, always paid for an extra hotel room. Her life with the Hanningtons had been markedly different. Her first night in their care, Mrs. Hannington put her in what she described as a home for all-female boarders, which Afong later realized was a brothel. The strange place smelled like perfume, dried flowers, and vinegar. The women all wore thick layers of makeup and stared at her as though she were competition, and the men looked at her for other reasons altogether.

Since that evening she had seen her share of strange rented rooms. From the Irish boardinghouses where women often offered up their children as collateral. To the negro boardinghouses, which were not as bad as she had been led to believe. Other people described the houses as hotbeds of filth and of vile degradation, but Afong found them clean, the residents pleasant and courteous. She enjoyed their company because none of them judged her. Instead they marveled at her clothing. They offered sympathy and good humor toward her bound feet and queer predicament. Perhaps that was because there were negro guests who also had deformed feet and legs. Though Afong suspected that, like her, their deformities were caused by someone else.

As Afong heard people laughing in the hallway, carrying on in the room next door, she surmised that she was in a sociable boardinghouse. The type of place where residents could send out for beer. They could joke and fraternize. Afong preferred these places to the serious boardinghouses that favored respectable boarders. Afong learned that meant white and preferably nondrinking. At those establishments playing cards were not allowed, reading in bed was forbidden, and smoking was an evictable offense. The rooms were nicer, cleaner, and more decorous. But the last time Afong stayed at one she barely saw her room. Instead, after her performance, she was sent to the basement laundry, where she worked until sunrise.

Afong heard people closing their doors as she sat up and rubbed her eyes. She lit a candle and poured a cup of water from a pitcher on the nightstand. Her hands shook as she sipped. Her head reeled. She reached up and felt a swollen knot above her left ear as she vaguely remembered briefly waking up in a moving carriage with Mrs. Hannington, who said, “You were getting so restless, girl, one of the doctors gave you a few drops of Hoffman’s Anodyne.” Mrs. Hannington pantomimed pouring liquid on a handkerchief then placing it over her nose and mouth.

“You breathe it in.”

“I… do not… understand?” Afong mumbled in Cantonese. She scrunched her nose at the acrid burning in her nostrils, in her mouth, the sour taste when she swallowed.

“Spirits of ether, dear. They gave you some medicine to help you relax. It’s like sweet dreams in a bottle. I should be so lucky.”

Afong closed her eyes and recalled bits and pieces of the backstage examination. Doctors removing her footwear, tossing aside her red lotus shoes. They cut through the outer bandages. She remembered pleading, “Ng hou,” again and again, but the men did not understand, and even if they did she doubted they would have stopped, because they removed the inner wrapping along with her pantalets. She had vague memories of being surrounded by bearded men, of being scared, feeling cold metal and rough hands as they touched her body, her thighs, used calipers on her legs, her calves. They measured her head and her facial features. The men ignored the sour smell of dead skin, damp and decomposing, and poked and prodded her feet and toes, which now ached and were swollen, throbbing in pain. Afong realized that the doctors must have tried to straighten her feet. In the process, they broke bones that had already been fractured several times before. All while speaking in and out of a language she vaguely recognized as Latin, squabbling over whether she should be considered Mongolian or Ethiopian. The doctors argued, citing the Bible, and Adam and Eve, and how to most of them, Afong was obviously an inferior creature descended of neither.

She also had another memory, of being hit upside the head.

She assumed that she had done something wrong and was punished by Mr. Hannington, though now as she tried to remember she realized the world turned sideways and it was her head hitting the stage floor. She must have stumbled, fainted, passed out from the ether. She remembered the cool, dusty wooden floor, looking up at the lights as though she were staring at the sun. Then hands reached out. The Chinese man in the golden waistcoat came into view as he picked her up, carried her away. She remembered how warm he felt. How he smelled like Burmese soap.