The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

This novel clearly demonstrates the differences between history and historical fiction. Afong Moy was an actual person; however, the historical record on her is limited to a passenger list that records her leaving China, advertisements for her stage work with the Crane brothers, a record of her living in a “poorhouse” after her stage work concluded, and new advertisements of “Afong Moy Nanchoy” performing for a short while a few years later. Historian Nancy E. Davis has worked to understand her life by consulting these and additional sources about 19th-century Guangzhou (which the novel calls Canton) and Chinese Americans, but such sources are relatively scarce. Davis’s book The Chinese Lady: Afong Moy in Early America considers Afong’s life from multiple angles.

Though Ford stays true to the sources whenever possible, he is not limited in the same way. He gives Afong an entire family history based on the facts that her feet were bound and Canton was facing financial decline. The fact that Afong had bound feet—a painful process that involved bending back the toes and part of the metatarsals—meant that she was of relatively high status, which would also have meant any marriage would have required a bride price.