No Name Woman

Harley Brown
Ms. Margo Williams
ENG 111 (D26)
29 January 2015 Summary & Analysis of Maxine Hong Kingston’s “No Name Woman”
Kingston, a first generation Chinese-American woman, shares the saddening story (No Name Woman) of her aunt to explore the community/gender roles, as well as the cultural morals and motifs of her ancestors. So, who is this “No Name Woman?” Kingston learned from her mother about a “forgotten” aunt of hers. Kingston’s mother was a woman “powered by Necessity” and only told her the story of her aunt in order to help her daughter avoid a similar fate. The anonymous aunt was isolated and shunned by her village when she became pregnant out of wed-lock… everybody knew, but nobody verbally acknowledged it until the night the baby was predestined to arrive. The villagers bombarded the family home that night, damaging their property, killing their livestock and stealing the non-tarnished goods. The unnamed aunt quietly escaped and relocated to a pigsty where she later birthed a baby girl. Dissimilar from present day, the love and warmth a newborn commonly brings, was not present. The villagers further disdained her, aggressing her feeling of abandonment that ultimately resulted in her spiteful suicide by “drowning herself in the drinking water”. Throughout the “No Name Women”, Kingston speculates often and even struggles with her own cultural identity and understanding of “what is Chinese?”
The purpose of Kingston’s inclusion of No Name Woman in her more elaborate piece: Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1976), was not only to give remembrance to her aunt after “fifty years of neglect” but also to establish her cultural identity as both an American and Chinese woman. Kingston “alone” assumed responsibility and gave her mistreated aunt the acknowledgement and respect she never had by devoting “pages of paper to her” as she acclaims in her final statements. Unstated, she shares the story of said “No Name Woman” in the search for her own identity. Raised in America, she understandably struggles to balance and intertwine her American and Chinese customs and ideology. No Name Woman explores her ancestry on a personal basis that she can recognize while simultaneously displaying a stark parallel between China and familiar countries.
While anyone could read and interpret No Name Woman, the section was intended to correlate with other multi-cultural persons like Kingston. Kingston’s struggle to identify with her Chinese ancestry can relate to many alike. She asks herself “What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?” to represent her disconnection from her Chinese identity. America is a melting pot full of multi-cultural persons who experience the same disconnection that Kingston feels. Kingston in No Name Woman is a spokesperson for the multi-cultural minority feeling lost in their home. The tone Kingston creates in No Name Woman is analytical. She recalls the story her mother told her about her aunt precisely and philosophizes upon it. She often creates original scenarios of what she thinks happened, for example when she theorizes about the unknown inseminator: “…Some man had commanded her to lie with him and be his secret evil. I wonder whether he masked himself when he joined the raid on her family.” Kingston takes what scarce information she is given by her mother, analyzes it and creates a much broader concept for her audience to speculate upon.