The Many Daughters of Afong Moy

Dorothy is preparing for the next monsoon in a post-climate-crisis Seattle. Her partner, Louis, has broken his promise to wait for her in the car as she hunts for supplies in a picked-over grocery store. She finds pumpernickel, canned clams, tofu, and decaf coffee and heads out into the slowly escalating storm. On her way home, she meets a kind police officer who picks up the bags she accidentally dropped (he remarks that tofu is his “favorite”) and wonders if they know each other. They don’t, and Dorothy finally makes it home to the high-rise apartment she shares with Louis and their daughter, Annabel (whom Dorothy calls Baby Bel).

Louis chastises Dorothy for walking rather than taking the subway and for her purchases. She recalls a time he joked about her being “crazy” and thinks about how he sees her: the once impressive Poet Laureate of Seattle who can no longer hold down her job at a university. She has received several diagnoses over the course of her lifetime, including borderline personality disorder and anxiety, but none of them seem to fit. Dorothy reflects on her ideal suicide—dropping pages of Anne Sexton out a window before following them herself. Then, she remembers her main reason for living: Annabel. Dorothy finds her daughter drawing pictures of ships and airplanes instead of following the directions of the Spanish-learning art program on her tablet. The plane has a pilot—a Flying Tiger—and the ship includes a little boy whom Annabel says is looking for her.

Afong Wong is the first female Chinese immigrant to the United States. Due to her bound feet, her skill with chopsticks, and her unique appearance in the white world of 19th-century New England, a married couple named the Hanningtons are exploiting her for stage performances. They refuse her food before her performance, book her into cheap and seedy boarding houses, and rewrite her history and culture as they see fit, creating stories about her bound feet that emphasize its supposedly “cruel,” “strange,” and “ungodly” nature (36).

One night, there is a new and young Cantonese interpreter backstage who tells Afong that her family has not forgotten her. Afong reflects on her childhood in China, where she fell in love with Yao Han, a poet and scholar who was the son of one of her family’s servants. She wanted to marry him but knew he would never be able to afford a dowry and that her father would never accept a proposal that didn’t benefit him financially. In fact, her father immediately spent the bride price Dei Yu gave him despite knowing Afong would be Dei Yu’s third wife and would enjoy little power or prestige in the household. When Dei Yu unexpectedly died, Afong had to marry his ghost and enter his household as a widow. Dei Yu’s second wife made Afong complete a cleansing ritual before exiling her to America on the grounds that Afong might sleep with Dei Yu’s male relatives.

Back in the present, Afong hopes she can earn enough money to one day return to China and reunite with Yao Han. She walks offstage and into a crowd of men, including doctors to examine her feet. In China, the only man who would see a woman’s bound feet is her husband. Afong does not consent to this “medical” examination and even explicitly refuses. Nevertheless, the doctors have paid the Hanningtons, and her shoes are removed in a struggle that causes her to pass out.

Dorothy removes Annabel’s shoes as high-speed winds shake their tower apartment. She remembers how similar her childhood drawings were to Annabel’s, flying tigers and all, and then indulges in fond memories of time spent in Myanmar before dating Louis.

Greta has just won GeekWire’s App of the Year for Syren, a dating app designed to give women more agency and safety in dating. However, rather than celebrating with her coworkers after the ceremony, she goes home to enjoy her mother’s nian gao, a fried rice cake and Greta’s favorite dessert. Her parents have just returned from a trip to China, and Greta soon learns that her marital status was the reason for their trip. Despite creating an algorithm for a dating app, Greta does not date much, and her parents went to the Shanghai Marriage Market to change that. At first, Greta is not willing to entertain the possibility of meeting any men her parents and their hired matchmaker have found for her, but then she sees the file of her parents’ top suitor, Sam. She agrees to a lunch date with him the following day that her mother has prearranged.

Dorothy sends Annabel to preschool with a container of fried nian gao and learns that her daughter is behaving in a way that the teachers and other students find disturbing. During naptime, Annabel will fall into a trance, be unresponsive, and come to crying and exhausted. The school asks for Dorothy’s help.

While walking through downtown Seattle, Dorothy runs into the kind police officer from a few nights ago. He asks how the tofu was, but Dorothy does not talk to him. She keeps walking and is given a medallion of the Buddha by an unhoused person. Dorothy catches the subway and runs into her friend and former colleague, Graham, who invites Dorothy over for dinner. Dorothy remembers that Graham never liked Louis and feels supported. Finally, Dorothy arrives at an experimental treatment center to try a new therapy grounded in epigenesis. She doesn’t know much about it—just that it’s meant to treat intergenerational trauma that has been passed down genetically. Louis has discouraged her from spending money on such a “breathtakingly foolish” treatment, but as she opens the door to the center, she recalls a line from Wendell Berry: “I come into the peace of wild things” (64).

Zoe attends Summerhill, an experimental British boarding school where she has a crush on her favorite teacher, Mrs. Alyce Bidwell. Summerhill gives its students a lot of autonomy, so Zoe decides to pick up a book Mrs. Bidwell left for her at the library instead of attending class. When she arrives, a boy who insists on being called Guto has the book and refuses to give it to Zoe until she kisses him. Although Zoe pointedly calls him his given name, Augustus, she agrees to the demand, thinking, “If I just give him what he wants, he’ll go away” (71). Guto grabs the back of her head and forces Zoe to kiss him for as long as possible. Zoe has never enjoyed kissing boys, but this less-than-consensual exchange is her worst experience yet. Finally, Guto hands Zoe the book: a collection of Sappho’s poetry.

Two days later, Summerhill holds one of its weekly meetings. Typically, the school uses these meetings to settle community issues via the democratic process: one person, one vote, regardless of age or rank and with no veto. However, as government itself is currently the school’s object of study, the headmaster proposes trying an alternative system of government for a week as an experiment. After a vote, the school settles on fascism as that system.

That evening, Zoe is reading Sappho and writing her own sapphic verse when its subject, Mrs. Bidwell, joins her. Zoe has the urge to kiss her teacher, but Mrs. Bidwell returns home after merely touching Zoe’s hand.

Faye is out for drinks with Lois when she thinks she sees John Garland, alive and well. She follows the figure to a chapel but ruins the newspaper picture of herself, which she had been contemplating while drinking, in the rain. Once at the chapel, a monk named Shi shows her a temporary morgue they’ve set up, necessitated by the war. John Garland’s body is there, and Shi comforts Faye by discussing the Buddhist theology of the interconnectedness of life. Faye remarks that she didn’t really know him, and Shi suggests that she might be “griev[ing] that which was [...] never allowed to be” (85). Faye, who has never been very religious, asks Shi what he is doing by pouring water into teacups set next to each body, and he explains that he is praying that the deceased souls will forget their former lives. Faye questions whether she would want to forget her life, and Shi responds that only someone who has attained enlightenment can bear to retain their ancestral memories.

Lai King has skipped school to watch a ship from China be unloaded in San Francisco. Her indulgent father joins her and explains how the ship keeps its cargo cool during the voyage. Listening to this, Lai King recalls other seemingly fantastical things her father has told her, including the story of his birth: He was found in an alley after his mother (presumably Afong Moy) died in childbirth.

Things take a dark turn when two deathly sick stowaways and several rats are discovered. The whole area dissolves into a frenzy as people run to avoid the bubonic plague. Lai King’s father rushes her home. Discussing the situation, Lai King’s mother wants to hunker down in their home in Chinatown, but her father suggests going to a Chinese mission instead. However, when they reach the edges of Chinatown, they find officials setting up a quarantine perimeter and only allowing white people to leave, so Lai King and her parents are forced to return home.

Dr. Shedhorn explains epigenesis to Dorothy as they prepare for Dorothy’s first treatment session. According to her research, traumas can be passed down on a cellular level, and Dr. Shedhorn has developed a protein treatment to help her patients access the memories and traumas of previous generations. This appeals to Dorothy, but she is nervous that Louis will judge the experimental treatment or use it as leverage against her. Dorothy has nearly changed her mind about receiving the treatment when the injection Dr. Shedhorn gives her kicks in, causing her to slip into the past. She has a vision of Afong Wong in the street surrounded by refuse, her dress stained with blood; the only person who pays any attention to her is an unhoused man. When Dorothy wakes up, she explains what she saw to Dr. Shedhorn and asks whether the woman, who was apparently dying in childbirth, was Dorothy herself. Dr. Shedhorn responds, “They’re all you” (105).