No Name Woman by Maxine Hong Kingston

A Report by Celeste Suamen and Krizea Marie Duron

The narrator's mother warned her not to tell anyone about what she was about to say to her. The mother
revealed to her that she had actually an aunt—her father's sister in China. This nameless aunt jumped into a
family well killing herself. Not only was the suicide became a dark family secret but so was the very existence
of this nameless aunt.

The narrator's mother recalled that in 1924, after their village had seventeen "hurry-up weddings", her
husband, her brothers-in-law and her sister-in-law's new husband sailed for America, the Gold Mountain.
Living with her sister-in-law, the narrator's mother noticed that her sister-in-law was pregnant despite her
husband had been gone for years. No one said anything until the night the baby was to be born.

The villagers raided their house. After slaughtering their stock, they broke in the house and destroyed
everything they could find, smearing the animals' blood on the doors and walls. They stole what they had not
damaged. Later that night, the sister-in-law gave birth in the pigsty. The next day, the narrator’s mother found
her and the baby drowned in the family well.

The story was meant to be a cautionary tale. The mother told her daughter, “Now that you have started to
menstruate, what happened to her could happen to you. Don’t humiliate us. You wouldn’t like to be forgotten
as if you had never been born. The villagers are watchful.”

On the other hand, the narrator explained that her mother usually told stories from her homeland of China
to teach life lessons. As a first-generation Chinese-American, the narrator had to figure out how to reconcile
two contrasting cultures—one from the "invisible" China, the other from "solid America".

The narrator then used her imagination to think of what could have led to what happened to her nameless
aunt. She came up with different scenarios. First was that her aunt was raped because “women in the old China
did not choose.” This other man "was not a stranger because the village housed no strangers." He was not
different from her husband as both gave orders to which she followed. The narrator imagined the aunt to be
afraid as she could not have avoided this other man considering the size of the village. The other man himself
could have been the one who organized the raid. The narrator surmised that her aunt must have eaten in an
"outcast table". It was a Chinese tradition where wrongdoers were to eat alone, considering food is precious.

The narrator then thought that her aunt must have "dreamed of a lover" and eventually end up dying
protecting her lover. Working on her appearance, she attracted all the village men including somebody in her
own household. Her actions would have threatened the villagers of pairing couples from birth for stability and
conformity. The aunt’s adultery was considered “a crime” because the village was going through rough times
when the villagers needed time.
 After the raid, the family cursed her, yelling, “Ghost! Dead ghost! Ghost! You’ve never been born.” She
gave birth alone in a pigsty to a “little ghost." The narrator supposed her aunt loved the child by drowning it
along with her. She could have abandoned her baby, but “mothers who love their children take them along.”

The narrator finally realized that the real punishment her aunt suffered was not the raid by the villagers
but the "family's deliberately forgetting her." Even after death, her aunt had to beg food from other ghosts. To
make up for her aunt who haunts her, the narrator through her writing finally told anyone about her.

The focus in this essay is finding identity by the narrator who when she was a girl was told of stories from
China yet she was living her reality in America. The narrator expressed,“Those of us in the first American
generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in
solid America.”

There are several themes embodied in the essay. First is silence. The narrator’s mother told her not to tell
anyone. The narrator felt her aunt "does not always mean well" because she had also been complicit of keeping
silent about her aunt for years. She had contributed to forgetting her like she never existed at all until she
finally wrote about her. Next theme is the power of being a woman, particularly in a Chinese community. The
aunt was powerless that she is given no name and no right to have existed. On the contrary, the aunt had the
biological power to bring a child into the world, and she had the social power to let her pregnancy rattle the
entire Chinese village. Another theme is family. “A family must be whole.” The “roundness” of certain objects,
refers to the wholeness of the family and the close-knit community. The act of the aunt disturbed this
“roundness”. “The frightened villagers, who depended on one another to maintain the real, went to my aunt to
show her a personal, physical representation of the break she had made in the “roundness”.”

Literary devices used include Simile. “Women looked like great sea snails—the corded wood, babies and
laundry they carried were the whorls on their backs.” Then there is the use of Allegory, Imagery, and
Symbolism. Roundness as described of moon cakes, doorways, windows and rice bowls to indicate the
wholeness of family and the village. A ghost may either refer to a disembodied spirit, an outcast, a non-Chinese
person, or the memory of a person who died. The narrator explains, “In the village structure, spirits shimmered
among the live creatures." There is the idea of one's life, forcibly forgotten, as a ghost story to serve as
cautionary tale or to haunt the narrator in more ways than one. Then there is the offering of paper replicas to
the dead. To make up for participating in forgetting her nameless aunt, the narrator devoted “pages of paper to
her, though not origamied into houses and clothes.”

The narrator is writing about her personal life integrating the memory of her aunt and her own
imagination and reflection. This is her "talk story". (Saffa, 1991) Her writing is honest and heartfelt. “Coming
to the United States from China has been especially hard because the two cultures are so dissimilar. Kingston
doesn't bother to dwell on the discrimination the Chinese have faced here; that's a given. Instead she zooms in
on the differences.” (Yardley, 2007)
Author's Biography

First generation Chinese American writer Maxine Hong Kingston was born on October 27, 1940 in Stockton,
California. She earned her bachelor’s degree in 1962 from the University of California, Berkeley. She is one of
eight children of Tom, a teacher, who arrived in the United States in 1925 and Ying Lan Hong, a midwife, who
emigrated from China in 1940. Her writings reflect the cultural experiences of the Asian immigrant community
in America. Her first book, "The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts" featured a blending
of traditional memoir and myth—and invoked a feling of magical realism. It won a National Book Critics
Circle Award in 1976. Her other works include China Men (1980); two novels namely Tripmaster Monkey,
His Fake Book (1989) and Hawaii One Summer (1998); the autobiographical The Fifth Book of Peace (2003);
and I Love a Broad Margin to My Life (2011). She has received many honors, including the National Book
Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, the PEN West Award for Fiction,
two National Endowment for the Arts Writers Award, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in
Literature, and a National Humanities Medal. In 2013, she received the National Medal of Arts from President
Barack Obama. She has been married to actor Earll Kingston since 1962; they had one son. (Maxine Hong
Kingston Biography, 2016)

Bibliography

Maxine Hong Kingston Biography. (2016, October 27). Retrieved May 6, 2018, from The Biography.com
website: https://www.biography.com/people/maxine-hong-kingston-37925

Saffa, J. (Director). (1991). Maxine Hong Kingston: Talking Story [Motion Picture].

Yardley, J. (2007, June 19). 'Woman Warrior,' A Memoir That Shook the Genre. Retrieved May 6, 2018,
from http://www.washingtonpost.com website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2007/06/18/AR2007061801713.html