Excerpt from THE CHINESE LADY by Bo Wang:
The year Margaret went to Canton, William allowed it only because of Julia. He and the Carnes brothers had decided to bring a Chinese lady back this time to take center stage in a grand exhibition of oriental goods. Apparently, the sight of an authentic Chinese lady taking tea amidst a display of the Carneses’ imported porcelain, ivory, and silks would drive the ladies of New York into a frenzy of covetousness. But there was the matter of keeping everything respectable.
“I suggested to the Carneses that you come along as chaperone,” William said over breakfast. “When we get back to New York, I said, the Chinese lady can stay with us, instead of at a boardinghouse. Nobody will be able to criticize, I said, with my Meg involved.”
“A Chinese lady!” Margaret said. “What am I supposed to do with her?”
“She’ll be company for you,” William said.
“I don’t know how she can be,” Margaret said. “I don’t speak Chinese.”
“She may speak a little pidgin. And you can teach her English. Isn’t that what you did before I saved you? Poor little Miss Haskell! The overworked governess.”
“I was a schoolteacher,” Margaret said with dignity. “The only woman to hold the post.”
“And very unhappy you were too,” William said, because he insisted on believing that any woman making her own way in the world was to be pitied. It was useless to try to convince him otherwise. He would indulge her and call her a brave, silly puss. Then indulging her always seemed to bring out the amorousness in her husband, and it was awful to have to go back to bed and feign shy rapture at eight o’clock in the morning.
Margaret had presided over the Salem schoolhouse for two whole years before she’d met William at the Siddons’ Christmas party. There, young Captain Obear had been in a splendid new coat. He’d been one of the prizes on the marriage mart: just thirty with all his own teeth and legs not bandied despite years at sea, and spoken of having great prospects, for he owned the ship he sailed. He’d crossed the room almost immediately to bend over her hand. She’d heard the hushed exclamations of the other guests that this paragon should single out the schoolmarm in her plain poplin dress seated among the wallflowers and perpetually sneezing into her handkerchief (the vestiges of a cold). But his discernment had made a good impression on her. Here was a man who was not duped by fine feathers or captivated by glossy curls. Here, finally, was a man who appreciated her distinctive air and intelligent countenance—who sought in a woman superiority of character!
William had intoxicated her with stories of his journeys to the Far East: the great factories lined up along Canton Harbor, the pungent smells and bizarre sights of the markets, the slant-eyed coolies who carried tremendous loads on their yoked shoulders, the gentlewomen with their tiny, miraculous feet upon whom no Christian man had ever laid eyes because they were as walled up in their great courtyards as maidens in a castle tower.
She had believed, once, that he would take her with him on such grand adventures. When he’d proposed, he’d said: “There’s no better wife for a captain than another captain’s daughter. You have got mettle!” Joy bloomed. Her impression of him had been right. William wanted a wife with mettle! Surely he was warning her that she would need to brave the travails of long weeks at sea, the impudent consideration of heathen eyes, the conversation of rough men in his employ.
Well, she had not been cowed! Hadn’t she brought even the rowdiest of Salem schoolboys to heel? She would surprise and awe William with her skill with the compass and chronometer, learned at her father’s knee; her knowledge of the stars mapping out the night sky; and her compassion for the ignorant souls who proliferated in foreign lands. The prospect had brought tears to her eyes. Her tears had undone William’s self-restraint. He had taken her then and there upon the threadbare sofa in her little cottage behind the schoolhouse. Well! There had been no question of not marrying him after that.
She had not considered the time they would spend together in domesticity. Once she realized William spent a month or two ashore between each journey, she had fondly imagined they would converse about weighty topics like abolition, she would advise him in his business affairs, and he would advise her on the many causes in which she took an interest—they would advance each other.
But a William no longer courting was interested in only One Thing.
When she woke in the morning, there he was beside her, hands roving, lips murmuring nonsense in her ear. When she got dressed, there he was behind her, offering to do up her buttons. More often than not, he’d scarcely have gotten halfway up the column before he began unhooking them again. When she brushed her hair before the mirror, his face materialized in the glass above her own. He took the brush from her, saying huskily, “Let me.” And when the brush snagged under his clumsy ministrations and she cried out in pain, he apologized profusely and cradled her head, his remorse quickly turned into amorousness, and he bore her back to bed. Once, she made the mistake of reminding him she had been a schoolteacher before marriage. Instead of registering that she was
perfectly self-sufficient, as she’d meant for him to do, William had promptly offered up his walking stick and pale bottom, saying roguishly, “My stern little schoolmarm! I’ll bet you caned errant schoolboys!”
During the ensuing acrobatics, Margaret had gritted her teeth and told herself: “Only a few weeks before we set sail!” A body could bear anything for a few weeks. She fixed her mind on imagining all the configurations of good she could do on that journey, all the people whose lives she would improve.
A month after their nuptials, William sailed off alone. After kissing her goodbye, he presented her with a box of ribbons. “Trim yourself a hat, my girl,” he said, chucking her under the chin as though she were a child. “I’ll dream of seeing you in it upon my return.”
By “mettle,” Margaret soon realized, her new husband had meant the fortitude to say farewell over and over, to wait alone at hearth and home for ten months at time, and to welcome him back each time without reproach. He was not at all a man of great integrity who had seen in her a depth of intellect and empathy but a lecher who had seen a sick wallflower and been inflamed by the idea of a shy and invalid wife to protect.
William didn’t mind when she begged him, weeping, to take her. He interpreted her frustrated pleas as proof that she would miss him, that she relied upon his manly strength. He swelled with pity and fondness, a combination that always converted into ardor, and in the enthusiastic gymnastics over her body that inevitably followed, he panted things like, “Poor Meg! My poor, darling girl!”
Margaret had resigned herself to her fate. The best course of action was to keep William hale so she might not become an impoverished widow so shortly after having been an impoverished orphan. Upon his going, she packed his pockets with limes to ward off scurvy and put her mother’s prayerbook in his trunk. Upon his homecoming, she laid the table with his favorite dishes. Whatever her disappointment in him, he should have no cause to complain that his wife was anything less than sterling.
And now, after seven long years of marriage, William was asking her to come with him to China! She thanked God. She blessed dear William, who was not so stuffy and small-minded after all. She blessed the impetuous Carnes brothers, for only they would think to bring a Chinawoman here. It didn’t matter whether the Chinese lady spoke pidgin or gibberish. To woo this lady from the bosom of her family and to keep her respectable in the eyes of New York’s Puritanical middle class, William and the Carneses needed the propriety of having a gentlewoman aboard. They needed her, Margaret! This foreign lady was her passage into the Great World.
Excerpt from THE CHINESE LADY by Bo Wang. Published by HarperVia. Copyright © 2026 HarperCollins.
THE CHINESE LADY by Bo Wang
Narrator: Bahni Turpin, Jeena Yi, Cassandra Campbell
A Novel
As rich in detail and emotion as Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and Lisa See’s Lady Tan’s Circle of Women, but with an exciting structure that reinvents the genre, Bo Wang’s gorgeous and immersive debut historical novel immortalizes the life of the first Chinese woman to be brought to the United States in the 1800s.
Little Sparrow, Julia, Afong Moy, Madame Moy, The Chinese Lady, were her many names . . . but her true name has been lost to time.
In 1834 Afong Moy was brought to New York by two merchants as a live exhibit. Rising to fame as the first Chinese female in the United States, she became an oddity among curios as Americans marveled at the opportunity to observe her astonishing little feet, broken and bound to resemble lotuses.
As the story moves from 1820s Canton to P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, to Gold Rush San Francisco, three women introduce us to her many names. Her mother calls her Little Sparrow and sells her to a captain who sails her to New York. The captain’s wife names her Julia and “graciously” treats her as her own. And when she is shunted off to P.T Barnum, her fellow human exhibitions call her China. Eventually arriving in San Francisco’s Chinatown, she will at long last claim her name and her own story.
Combining archival research and brilliantly imaginative storytelling, Bo Wang masterfully fills in history’s gaps to weave a powerful narrative of survival in the face of hardship, tragedy, and betrayal. Told through the eyes of those around her; mirroring her life as an object on display, until we finally see the world through her own eyes.
Historical | Fiction Literary [ HarperVia, On Sale: September 8, 2026, Hardcover / e-Book / audiobook, ISBN: 9780063467736 / eISBN: 9780063467750 ]
The Strength of a Painful Journey: Imagining the Chinese Lady
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About Bo Wang
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. A graduate of Sycamore Public Schools, Bo holds an A.B. in history and literature from Harvard College. She now lives in Boston with her family. The Chinese Lady is her debut novel.
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