Afong Moy, the first documented Chinese woman to come to the United States, realizes the men who separated her from her family want to profit off the peculiarities of her bound feet

Director Maegan Houang reimagines a shocking yet overlooked moment in Asian American history in a gripping new short film. Astonishing Little Feet reaches back across long and difficult histories of racist and capitalist commodification of marginalised immigrants (marked by silences and violent erasures, more often than not) to represent the defining moment of sixteen-year-old Afong Moy’s arrival in the United States.

Considered the first documented Chinese woman to arrive in the United States (and likely North America), Afong Moy was brought to New York in the 1830s by American merchants to advertise their Chinese import business.

Astonishing Little Feet is a fictionalised dramatisation of the devastating moments where the young girl begins to contend with the extent of her own dehumanisation, by an audience of predominantly white male colonisers. She is repeatedly objectified - her “story”, her language, her mannerisms (as she is forced to perform them), her body, then her feet - till she is both hypervisible and entirely invisible. The violence of the encounter exposes how racist exploitation is located within capitalism’s historical expansion in a specific moment in history, inextricable from structures of gender and sexual exploitation that persist...

Continue Reading: www.nowness.asia/series/nowness-shorts/astonishing…
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