Epilogue

The author uses the theory of parsimony to explain Afong Moy’s final years. The epilogue relays the changes occurring in the later nineteenth-century marketing, public perception, and use of “oriental” goods with the opening of Japan in 1854. The author considers the lives of other Asian immigrants such as Chang and Eng Bunker (called the Siamese Twins) and several known Chinese women who came after Afong Moy. The epilogue addresses the position of the Chinese immigrant in the nineteenth century with the passage of the 1884 Chinese Exclusion Act. A comparison of the “Made in China” goods of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries with those of the earlier trade provides an understanding of China’s place in the golden chain of global commerce.