no name woman analysis essay

• The Woman Warrior

Maxine Hong Kingston

• Literature Notes
• No Name Woman
• Book Summary
• About The Woman Warrior
• Character List
• Summary and Analysis
• White Tigers
• At the Western Palace
• A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe
• Maxine Hong Kingston Biography
• Critical Essays
• The Theme of the Voiceless Woman in The Woman Warrior
• The Woman Warrior in its Historical Context
• The Woman Warrior in the Chinese Literary Context
• Full Glossary for The Woman Warrior
• Essay Questions
• Cite this Literature Note

Summary and Analysis No Name Woman

Maxine Hong Kingston begins her search for a personal identity with the story of an aunt, to whom this first chapter's title refers. Ironically, the first thing we read is Kingston's mother's warning Kingston, "You must not tell anyone . . . what I am about to tell you. In China your father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped into the family well. We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born." Of course, keeping silent is exactly what Kingston is not doing. Because she is most concerned with exploring how her Chinese cultural history can be reconciled with her emerging sense of herself as an American, Kingston must uncover just what this Chinese cultural history is, and one way of doing so is by listening to, and then altering, her mother's stories about the family's Chinese past.

Throughout The Woman Warrior , Kingston will refer to her mother's historical tales as "talk-stories," culturally based, primarily oral stories whose general purpose is didactic. For example, here in "No Name Woman," Kingston says of her mother, who, we later learn, is named Brave Orchid, "Whenever she had to warn us about life, my mother told stories that ran like this one [about No Name Woman], a story to grow up on. She tested our strength to establish realities." Similar to a folktale, a talk-story often involves the fantastic and fuses realistic events with magical qualities. Because of this realistic-magical aspect, a talk-story can be as confusing to its audience — Kingston and her readers — as it can be inspiring.

Brave Orchid's story of No Name Woman provides one valuable inroad into Kingston's discovering her cultural history. Brave Orchid relates how on the night when Kingston's aunt gave birth to an illegitimate child, the people of the Chinese village in which the aunt and her family lived ransacked the family's house, killed all of their livestock, and destroyed their crops. Shunned by her family, the aunt gave birth in a pigsty, alone. The next morning, Brave Orchid went to gather water from the family's well, where she discovered that No Name Woman had committed suicide by throwing herself and her child down into the well.

Explaining that the aunt had become pregnant by a man whose identity the aunt never disclosed, Brave Orchid also relates that at the time — 1924 — the aunt's husband was working in America. Due to failing crops and a poor domestic economy, many of the men from the ancestral village in China were forced to leave their farms to seek work, traveling as far as America, which the Chinese nicknamed "Gold Mountain" because the original Chinese immigrants initially perceived it as a bountiful land where a good living could be made working in the gold-mining industry.

Brave Orchid's story about Kingston's aunt is a cautionary tale meant to discourage the young Kingston from engaging in premarital sex; hopefully, the fear of humiliation, ostracism, and death will serve sufficiently as a deterrent for sexual promiscuity. Brave Orchid explains to her daughter about the aunt, "Now that you have started to menstruate, what happened to her could happen to you. Don't humiliate us. . . . The villagers are watchful." Here, Brave Orchid's phrase "The villagers are watchful" transcends time and geography: No Name Woman severely crippled her family's social standing in the Chinese village; similarly, Brave Orchid warns her daughter not to embarrass her family, which was among many others that emigrated from their village in China and settled in Stockton, California. Kingston notes of her mother, "Whenever she had to warn us about life, my mother told stories that ran like this one, a story to grow up on." Brave Orchid uses the "talk-story" of No Name Woman to pass on codes of proper conduct and values to her daughter.

Kingston, however, does not fully understand the story's importance when she first hears it. Because she is confused by its many details, she rewrites Brave Orchid's original tale, creating the impetus for why No Name Woman acts as she does in Brave Orchid's version. Kingston knows that her mother is concerned that she not have premarital sex because her mother directly states that that is the reason for telling the story. But what Kingston does not know, at least not until the memoir's final chapter, is that her mother hopes to strengthen her daughter emotionally and psychologically by giving her a sense of who she is and where she came from. In "No Name Woman," Kingston writes, "Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhood fits into solid America." China is "invisible," an intangible place that Kingston only hears about; America is "solid," not only because she physically lives in it, but because she interacts daily with other Americans and necessarily wants to fit in. How to reconcile this conflict between these two disparate cultures becomes her thesis, the problem she attempts — and ultimately succeeds — to solve.

The young Kingston has difficulty making sense of her mother's story and fails to receive direct, unambiguous responses to her questions and concerns. Her struggle to understand how knowing the history of her aunt who committed suicide will help her conduct herself properly — according to her mother's traditional Chinese code of beliefs — is reflected in the questions she asks directly to Chinese Americans: "Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?" How, Kingston asks, can she decipher what is real and what is fiction in her mother's stories when her mother herself will not tell her? The larger issue, then, becomes how Kingston will integrate such talk-stories into her own personal life as she grows from childhood to womanhood, and just how relevant these tales of life in China are to a first-generation Chinese American with Chinese-born parents. To her American sensibilities, the stories are confusing because they are based on a Chinese context.

Because her mother's messages are difficult to adopt or apply to her immediate American reality, Kingston, after relating Brave Orchid's telling of No Name Woman's story, rewrites the tale from her own American perspective. She uses her own style of "talk-story" to guess the reasons for her aunt's actions. Ironically, although at the time she probably would not have recognized it, nor perhaps have wanted to, Kingston's rewriting her mother's talk-story as her own indicates an important element in her reconciling her Chinese past and her American present: She learns to talk-story by having listened to her mother. In this way, a continuity is established between her mother, who represents the cultural traditions of China, and herself as a first-generation Chinese American. Kingston will finally acknowledge this succession of generations when, at the end of "Shaman," she compares herself favorably to her mother and proudly recognizes their many similarities: "I am really a Dragon, as she is a Dragon, both of us born in dragon years. I am practically a first daughter of a first daughter."

Kingston rewrites No Name Woman's story based on her own understanding of the patriarchal nature of traditional Chinese society, in which women were conditioned to do as they were told, without question. Because of the close-knit community in which No Name Woman lived, Kingston contends that her aunt's sexual partner "was not a stranger because the village housed no strangers." Ironically, Kingston reasons, the same patriarchal society that subjugated women to subservient roles bears responsibility for No Name Woman's adultery. Because No Name Woman was conditioned to do everything that she was ordered to do, she was unable to gather the personal strength necessary to repel the man's sexual advances. This inability emphasizes what Kingston argues is the great disparity between how women and men were supposed to act: "Women in the old China did not choose. Some man had commanded her to lie with him and be his secret evil. . . . She obeyed him; she always did as she was told." Even more damning of this double standard in "old China" is Kingston's assertion that this man who basically raped No Name Woman was the same villager who organized the raid against No Name Woman's family. Kingston's version of Brave Orchid's original talk-story emphasizes how a dutifully submissive woman is victimized by a man's abusive manipulation of a gender-based social code.

Kingston also exposes the unfair discrimination against women in traditional Chinese society when she discusses how sons are celebrated more than daughters. She imagines that her aunt's illegitimate child must have been a girl: "It was probably a girl; there is some hope of forgiveness for boys." Only a mad person, as her grandfather is described to have been, would prefer a female child over a male. Sons were venerated because they could pass on the family name, thereby ensuring a family's stability and longevity; in contrast, daughters, who were given away by their parents at marriage, primarily functioned only as bearers of sons for their husbands' families. Such was the traditional code and operation of a patrilineal society that enforced its patriarchal ideology by imposing restrictions on women's positions and conduct. Improper actions, such as No Name Woman's, were considered a breach of this code and could lead to severe consequences, including death. Because Kingston's aunt had an adulterous affair and, even worse, probably produced a female child from the sexual union, she threatened what Kingston terms the "roundness" — the harmony and the wholeness — of her family and the larger community. This prized circularity was so enmeshed in everyday life — symbolically, in "the round moon cakes and round doorways, the round tables of graduated sizes that fit one roundness inside another, round windows and rice bowls" — that the slightest ripple, the tiniest threat, to social stability was believed by the villagers to be an outright attack on an entire way of life and therefore must be completely annihilated.

No Name Woman is attacked because her action — adultery, confirmed by pregnancy — threatens socially accepted behavior tacitly enforced through centuries of tradition. "In the village structure," Kingston notes, "spirits shimmered among the live creatures, balanced and held in equilibrium by time and land." When No Name Woman's family banishes her from the family, she runs out into the fields surrounding the house and falls to the ground, "her own land no more." Her family no longer considers her among the "live creatures, balanced and held in equilibrium by time and land." What these shimmering "spirits" are is not entirely clear, but their presence implies that both the living and the nonliving actively and forcefully protect the many traditions that stabilize the society. In No Name Woman's case, her illegitimate child violates the immense value placed on a traditional family and is, for the family, another mouth to feed. Ironically, the aunt's and her child's fates are almost whimsically determined by the time in which this story takes place; Kingston surmises, "If my aunt had betrayed the family at a time of large grain yields and peace, when many boys were born, and wings were being built on many houses, perhaps she might have escaped such severe punishment. . . . Adultery, perhaps only a mistake during the good times, became a crime when the village needed food." Remember, too, that we are told that the aunt had returned from her husband's family to live with her own. Perhaps she was thrown out because she was another mouth to feed during her husband's absence.

No Name Woman's family is implicated in her "crime" and therefore must suffer the ransacking of their house. According to Chinese custom, because the family was responsible for the daughter's wrongdoing, they should have prevented the adultery in the first place. Kingston's aunt is doubly punished by witnessing her family's being made to suffer. The family knows and must accept that it will be attacked for No Name Woman's transgression of the community's social code of how women should behave, which explains its reported passivity and resignation to the ransacking.

Kingston speculates further that her aunt may have taken some pride in her personal appearance and expressed her individuality. Any such display would have been a contravention to the established proper conduct in which young men and women learned to "efface their sexual color and present plain miens." Perhaps the aunt was seeking some affection or even romance: "She dreamed of a lover for the fifteen days of New Year's. . . . And sure enough she cursed the year, the family, the village, and herself." Traditionally, the Chinese New Year is a fifteen-day celebration beginning either in late January or early February. Because people's actions, activities, and practices during the celebration set the pattern for the entire new year, the new year must begin auspiciously.

Kingston wants to believe that her aunt had at least some positive control of her own destination rather than being merely a victim. In this less feasible scenario that Kingston feels it necessary to create, her aunt is more than just a victim who is married to a stranger, estranged immediately, raped, then ostracized by her family and community, and finally left with no choice but to commit suicide. Unfortunately, though, Kingston must acknowledge that the aunt killed both herself and her newborn baby, which leaves us very little room to doubt the horrific events contained in Brave Orchid's telling of No Name Woman's story. However, Kingston would like to think — perhaps she finds it emotionally necessary to believe — that Brave Orchid fabricated many of the story's details according to the emphasis that she intended to impress on Kingston.

Although Kingston tries to make sense of what her mother tells her, she remains unsure about the reliability of the facts surrounding her aunt's suicide, as are we. The confusion and ambivalence she feels as the author, who was once the listener, parallel ours. Her mother talked-story orally; she talks-story in print. Brave Orchid may have believed that the story would prevent her daughter from having sexual relations outside marriage and thereby bringing shame upon the family, but the daughter interprets the story according to values she can relate to, namely individualism and a strong, nurturing sense of womanhood.

One of the ways that this individualism and womanhood are defined is through language, or, at least for No Name Woman, the lack of it. Overall in the memoir, there is a movement from silence in the first line of the first chapter — "You must not tell anyone" — to language in the last line of the last chapter — "It translated well." For Kingston, silence — the absence of language — equals voicelessness, which in turn means the loss of identity as a woman, a Chinese American, an adult, all of which are what she is trying to find. However, she is very aware of the emotional risks she is taking by asserting her independence from her own Chinese community. When her aunt violated her community's standards of acceptable behavior, "the villagers punished her for acting as if she could have a private life, secret and apart from them."

Silence both begins and ends "No Name Woman," which balances Kingston's mother's opening sentence with Kingston's own thoughts about how fearfully powerful silence can be: "The Chinese are always very frightened of the drowned one, whose weeping ghost, wet hair hanging and skin bloated, waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute." Here, Kingston fears for herself: If she remains silent and fails to find her own personal voice, she risks becoming a "substitute" for her aunt, who remained silent her entire life. Unwittingly — perhaps — Kingston's mother increases her daughter's anxiety when she admonishes her never to repeat No Name Woman's story: "Don't tell anyone you had an aunt."

But telling everyone that she had an aunt is exactly what Kingston does, and for a very complex reason. If Kingston's purpose in writing The Woman Warrior is to solidify her identity as a female Chinese American, then for her to remain silent about her aunt is tantamount to her rejecting her own sense of self. She cannot deny a voice for her aunt — "my aunt, my forerunner" — without denying one for herself, which is why she reinterprets Brave Orchid's talk-story by creating a more individualized life for her aunt, who, she imagines, used a "secret voice, a separate attentiveness," much like she herself does throughout the memoir. "Unless I see her life branching into mine," Kingston writes of No Name Woman, "she gives me no ancestral help."

As with all of the female protagonists in her mother's talk-stories, Kingston's reworking of the No Name Woman tale emphasizes the similarities between her aunt and herself. For example, describing how her aunt "combed individuality" into her hair, Kingston imagines that first she "brushed her hair back from her forehead," then "looped a piece of thread, knotted into a circle between her index fingers and thumbs," around any loose hairs across her front hairline, and finally "pulled the thread away from her skin, ripping the hairs out neatly." Significantly, Kingston then writes, "My mother did the same to me and my sisters and herself," which draws a parallel between her aunt and herself. Even more important in this ritual of how No Name Woman pulls out any loose hairs is the complex knot that she uses, which Kingston describes as "a pair of shadow geese biting." The making of this complicated knot foreshadows the last chapter, "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe," in which Kingston relates the story of ancient Chinese knot-makers, who tied string into intricate designs, one of which was so complicated that it blinded the knot-maker. "If I had lived in China," Kingston speculates, "I would have been an outlaw knot-maker," which is an indirect reference to No Name Woman.

Although Kingston honors her aunt by retelling No Name Woman's story in The Woman Warrior , she blames herself for having kept silent about this woman for more than twenty years. She writes, "But there is more to this silence: they want me to participate in her punishment. And I have." Here, the short sentence "And I have" emphasizes the guilt Kingston still feels for having neglected No Name Woman's memory for as long as she has. Having told a family secret, she fears recrimination from her parents and, ironically, worries that her aunt haunts her because she is displeased that Kingston has revealed her story. "I do not think she always means me well," Kingston writes about her aunt. "I am telling on her, and she was a spite suicide, drowning herself in the drinking water." However, Kingston also reveals that it was necessary, both for her own sense of self and to honor her aunt's memory, to countermand Brave Orchid's wish that she keep No Name Woman's story a secret: "The [aunt's] real punishment was not the raid swiftly inflicted by the villagers, but the family's deliberately forgetting her. Her betrayal so maddened them, they saw to it that she would suffer forever, even after death." Although Kingston never learns what her aunt's real name is, she alleviates her ancestor's long suffering by giving her the only name she can: No Name Woman.

contracts labor contracts, specifying the length and wages of work; by 1924, when Kingston's male relatives left China to work in other countries, the United States had severely limited the number of male Chinese emigrants allowed into the country. Only men who met a strict set of criteria were allowed to enter, but their wives, sons, and daughters were not allowed to come with them.

Bali an Indonesian island, approximately 1500 miles southeast of Vietnam, and directly east of Java; during the early-twentieth century, Chinese emigrants on Bali probably worked mainly for Dutch-owned private plantations.

bunds here, low walls of dirt, used to enclose water in which rice is grown.

loom a hand-operated apparatus used to weave cloth.

earthenware jugs containers made from either clay or heavy soil; once the material is sculpted into form, the container is cooked over flames and then set to cool.

acrid foul-smelling.

birth in the pigsty Giving birth in a pigsty reflects the superstitious belief that if a mother gives birth in a house and is proud of her baby, evil or envious gods might take the child from its mother; frequently, newborn babies were called pigs to trick the gods into thinking that the babies were ugly or deformed and, therefore, not worth stealing.

Oh, You Beautiful Doll a 1949 musical film about a songwriter who whimsically rewrites a serious composer's songs as popular tunes; Betty Grable did not appear in the film as Kingston suggests.

Betty Grable (1916-73) An American actress and film star, she was the most popular pin-up girl of World War II; she costarred with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in The Gay Divorcee (1934) and later appeared in such films as The Pin-up Girl (1944) and Moon Over Miami (1941).

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon Directed by the legendary John Ford, this 1949 Western film starred John Wayne in one of his greatest performances, as a cavalry commander who delays his retirement because of an impending war with Apaches.

John Wayne (1907-79) American actor known for his ruggedness as a self-styled individualist in Western films.

gizzard lining refers to the thickly lined gizzard, found mainly in birds; located directly behind the stomach, the gizzard holds ingested gravel or some other grit-like material that birds must use to digest their food.

prodigal wastefully extravagant.

tractably easily led; malleable.

proxy a stand-in, or substitute; although the rooster that No Name Woman's soon-to-be-husband sends to her is intended to be a goodwill gesture, that he sends a rooster rather than meeting her himself indicates traditional China's low regard for women.

commensal tradition a way of life in which one group of people gain something from another, unaffected group of people; Kingston condemns how Chinese families punish wrongdoers by treating the offenders as pariahs, forced to eat leftovers at an "outcast table."

samurais Ancient Japanese warriors, the samurais originated in eleventh-century Japan to enforce the laws of the imperial government, whose power was waning; their cultural dominance ended around 1700.

geishas a Japanese class of indentured women who entertain men; usually, a young girl is sold by her parents to a geisha organization, which then trains her in the duties of being a geisha.

synonym two words that have the same, or similar, meaning; Kingston writes that in China, marriage is synonymous to "taking a daughter-in-law" because after the wedding, the husband and wife live with his family, never with hers.

blunt-cut to cut hair to an even, sharply defined length around the entire head; the term "blunt-cut" implies a woman's de-feminizing her appearance.

bob a short-clipped haircut.

shadow geese refers to the art of contorting the hands to form different shapes, usually animals, which appear as shadows on a wall or other flat surfaces when the hands are illuminated from behind.

depilatory hair-removing.

to have our feet bound Beginning during the T'ang dynasty (618-906), feet-binding was an accepted cultural practice in which a female's feet were severely constricted to retard normal growth. Parents wrapped their daughters' feet with toes extended downward, stretching the instep and inhibiting the shaping of the arch. Although feet-binding was a socially elite practice that signaled a man's wealth and social position because he could afford for his wives and daughters not to work, the female's feet would become so deformed that the woman no longer could walk without being physically supported by servants. This inhumane custom ended in 1911, when the dynastic form of government was replaced with a republic.

almanac typically, an annual reference book used to predict the future; predictions are based on the positions and movements of the stars.

peroxide a chemical solution used as a disinfectant to kill germs.

whorls spirals; Kingston compares women who carried many objects on their backs to snails' coiled shells.

greatcoat an overcoat.

efface to erase or eliminate.

miens appearances.

pigeon-toed feet turned inward, in the shape of an inverted "V."

incest sex between blood-related kin.

atavism characteristics that reappear over time; Kingston likens herself to her aunt, No Name Woman: Both women share "an atavism deeper than fear," an unnamable anxiety about relationships with men.

brides' prices payments made to brides' families by grooms, as a gesture that brides will be treated well by their husbands.

dowries any material wealth that brides bring to their husbands at marriage.

maelstrom an incredibly violent and threatening storm, or situation.

moon cakes round pastries eaten during full moon of the eighth month of the lunar year.

talismans objects believed to hold magical powers; for example, a person who carries a rabbit's foot will be lucky.

fatalism a belief system whose adherents believe that all events are predetermined; a person cannot make personal choices because freewill does not exist.

culpability deserving of blame; guiltiness.

gall generally, resentment, or bitterness; because No Name Woman unknowingly goes into labor immediately after her family disowns her and kicks her out of the house, she fears that the pain racking her body is physically caused by her family's throwing her out.

agoraphobia a fear of open spaces or public places.

flayed here, stripped of all protective emotions; left completely vulnerable.

spirit money fake money that a deceased person's relatives burn to bribe the gods not to harass the deceased person's spirit.

incense here, a pleasant odor.

Chairman Mao Mao Zedong (1893-1976), founder of the Chinese Communist Party (1921), and the first chairman (1949-1959) of the People's Republic of China; even after his retirement as chairman, he retained control of the Chinese Communist Party, which in turn controlled the country.

origamied from the Japanese art of origami, which entails folding paper into different shapes without cutting or using adhesives.

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The Woman Warrior

by Maxine Kingston

The woman warrior summary and analysis of chapter 1: no name woman.

The book is a collection of Maxine Hong Kingston's memoirs, so it is technically a work of nonfiction. But the author is careful never to mention her name in the narrative. This is presumably because the book, while grounded in truth, does not maintain a clear boundary between reality and fantasy. In light of these facts, we shall call the narrator of this book "the narrator," not "Hong Kingston," reserving the latter name for the author.

The book begins with the voice of the narrator’s mother saying, “You must not tell anyone…” She tells her daughter a dark family secret; in China, her husband’s sister drowned herself in their well. After that, the family kept secret not only the suicide, but also the sister-in-law’s very existence. She goes on to recount this sister’s birth. In 1924, her father, husband, and brothers-in-law left to seek fortune in California, “the Gold Mountain.” Like most of the men in their village, they sought money elsewhere because the village crops were suffering. The mother stayed behind with the other women, living with her sister-in-law. Some time later, she noticed that her sister-in-law was pregnant. Neither she nor anyone else in the village discussed it; the sister-in-law’s husband had been gone for years, so her pregnancy was disgraceful to the village.

On the night that the sister-in-law was to give birth, the villagers stormed their house, dressed to scare. After slaughtering the animals, they swarmed the house and destroyed everything they could find. They stole what they had not ruined before leaving. That night, the sister-in-law gave birth amid the mess from the raid. The next morning, the narrator’s mother found her and her newborn baby drowned in the family well. At the end of the story, we learn its intended moral. The mother tells 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.” She is warning her daughter against promiscuity and against shaming her family.

Now we hear the narrator’s voice. She explains that her mother usually invoked stories from her homeland of China to teach life lessons. The narrator and her generation, by contrast, were first-generation Chinese-Americans. They had to navigate two cultures in order to form a unique identity. Because the narrator is forbidden to ask about her aunt, she fills in the gaps in the story with her imagination. In her first version of the story, she says her aunt was a rape victim because “women in the old China did not choose [with whom to have sex].” She vilifies not only the rapist but all the village men because, she asserts, they victimized women as a rule: “The other man was not, after all, much different from her husband. They both gave orders; she followed. ‘If you tell your family, I’ll beat you. I’ll kill you. Be here again next week.” To make matters worse, the aunt would not have been able to hide from her rapist because the village was small; he may have been a vendor she had to visit daily. Her fear must have been constant and inescapable. The narrator considers the ways in which Chinese culture alienates those who have erred. Her own parents used to talk about an “outcast table,” where family members who had shamed the family had to eat alone.

The narrator puts aside her rape theory to imagine her aunt as a freely sexual woman, who groomed herself carefully in order to attract attention from men. She pictures her aunt drawing stares from all the village men, longing for a lover, and dying in silence to protect her baby’s father. Her actions would have threatened the village’s tradition of pairing couples from birth in order to ensure stability and conformity. The aunt’s adultery was a deviation, but it was considered “a crime” because the village was going through hard times. By giving birth to an illegitimate child—an outcast—the aunt had robbed the village of a legitimate person who would grow up to “feed the old and the dead” and “look after the family.”

The narrator imagines the end of her aunt’s life. Her family cursed her after the raid, yelling, “Ghost! Dead ghost! Ghost! You’ve never been born.” She gave birth alone in a pigsty, her newborn child a “little ghost,” an outcast like its mother. The protagonist explains that her aunt showed her child love and mercy by drowning it along with her. She could have simply abandoned her baby, but “mothers who love their children take them along.” The aunt knew that her child would grow up to be a pariah and wanted to spare it the shame that had killed her, made her a ghost, even before she died. Moreover, the baby was probably a girl. Had it been a boy, the preferred sex, her aunt might have had hope for its future and left it in the care of the village.

The narrator notes that by following her mother’s orders never to mention her aunt, she has been complicit in her aunt’s unfair punishment. She says that even in the ghost world, her aunt must be an outcast. She pictures her lonely, scrounging leftover offerings that other ghosts’ relatives leave them. To the narrator, writing about her aunt is a kind of penance for participating in her continuing castigation. Sometimes she fears that her aunt’s ghost is malevolent, striving to harm her for exposing her shame to readers.

“No Name Woman” introduces us to some of the book’s major themes. The first of these is silence. With the opening words of the book, “You must not tell anyone.” the narrator’s mother inducts her into a long tradition of keeping things secret. As the narrator explains, keeping silence is not passive; it can involve willing oneself to forget something or someone. Because the narrator does as she is told and keeps the silence about her aunt, she too shames her aunt and denies her the right to be remembered. She feels so complicit just for keeping the silence that she is afraid her aunt’s ghost wants to harm her. In the book’s final chapter, “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” we see just how much the code of silence torments the narrator; she takes out her frustration by taunting and assaulting a reticent classmate.

The second theme Hong Kingston introduces in “No Name Woman” is that of female power. In one sense the aunt is a powerless character, so powerless that she is given no name and no right to have existed. In another sense, she is too powerful to be named or remembered. Besides, as a woman, the aunt had the biological power to bring a baby into the world, and she had the social power to let her pregnancy affect the whole village. The villagers considered her baby not only an annoyance but an actual threat to their security. In hard times, this illegitimate “ghost” would spend its life as a dead weight, draining their resources and disturbing their traditions. The narrator explains that in the village community, individual power and not just female power frightened the villagers: “The villagers punished [the aunt] for acting as if she could have a private life, secret and apart from them.”

No one knows the power of giving birth better than the narrator’s mother, who has given birth to eight children as well as delivered countless others. She tells her daughter not to get pregnant out of wedlock and end up a “ghost” like her aunt. The narrator tells us, “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.” First-generation Chinese-Americans, she says, must try to incorporate their parents’ “old Chinese” wisdom into their American lives. Despite the need for translation between generations, the narrator likely did not have to do much to apply her aunt’s story to her own life. It would have been the mid-1950s when her mother told her the story, a time before second-wave feminism, when “old Chinese” and American views on pregnancy out of wedlock were actually not so different from today’s American society.

The villagers never tried to find the man who got the aunt pregnant. The narrator even suggests that he helped raid her house. The double standard works in both countries. Whereas men are expected to seek adventure and throw tradition to the wind, women are expected to stay home and keep tradition: “The heavy, deep-rooted women were to maintain the past against the flood, safe for returning.” Hong Kingston uses imagery of women like trees holding strong against a flood of modernization. They are treated as the weaker sex but are expected to be the ones with moral strength.

The word “ghost” has several different meanings in the narrative. A ghost can be a disembodied spirit, an outcast, a non-Chinese person, or the memory of a person who died. In America , ghosts are non-Chinese people, “White Ghosts” or the slightly less intimidating “Black Ghosts.” They are ghosts to the immigrant Chinese people because their customs are hard to understand. In America, memories of the dead can also haunt people, such as Brave Orchid ’s first two children, “no name” aunt, and later, Moon Orchid . In China, all kinds of ghosts are abundant. The narrator explains, “In the village structure, spirits shimmered among the live creatures.” “No name” aunt is a ghost during her lifetime because she is an outcast. The narrator claims that her aunt’s ghost—her spirit—is haunting her. By this, she can mean either her aunt’s spirit or simply the memory of her.

The narrator does not usually cast ghosts in a positive light, and she sets this tone when she talks about her aunt’s ghost. She supposes it is angry with her for breaking the silence and exposing her shame for all to see. The fact that the narrator’s family tries so hard to forget the aunt proves that her ghost torments them, too. They keep her spirit away by continually denying that she ever existed. That ghosts can sometimes be vengeful does not mean that they are not helpful. The narrator calls her aunt “my forerunner” and explains, “Unless I see her life branching into mine, she gives me no ancestral help.” The narrator is not so much afraid of her aunt’s ghost as she is reverent of it. She defends her aunt for at least escaping, if not taking a stand against, the sexist traditions that took away her right to her identity.

The Woman Warrior Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Woman Warrior is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

The narrator constantly dearches for the sign of a bird.

What is the story of the crane boxer?

In the chapter, White Tigers, the narrator tells a story about the woman who invented white crane boxing. Legend says that the woman was a fighter, trained by “an order of fighting monks.” One morning, she tried to use her fighting pole to move a...

Describe a meal scene.

In the novel, Brave Orchid is determined to make her children brave eaters. In order to do this, she would keep serving them the same piece of food meal after meal until they ate it.

Study Guide for The Woman Warrior

The Woman Warrior study guide contains a biography of Maxine Kingston, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Woman Warrior
• The Woman Warrior Summary
• Character List

Essays for The Woman Warrior

The Woman Warrior essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Woman Warrior by Maxine Kingston.

• Becoming a Warrior Amidst Cultural Confusion
• The Past and the Present in Kingston's "Woman Warrior" and Sylvia Plath's Poetry
• Breaking the Silence
• The Woman Warrior in "Shaman" and "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens"
• The Problem With Legacies: Analysis of Chapter One, The Warrior Woman

Lesson Plan for The Woman Warrior

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to The Woman Warrior
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• The Woman Warrior Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for The Woman Warrior

• Introduction
• Plot summary
• Language and narrative voice

• English Literature
• Short Stories
• Literary Terms
• Web Stories

No Name Woman Essay Summary By Maxine Hong Kingston’s

Table of Contents

Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir “The Woman Warrior” was released in 1976. “No Name Woman,” one of the book’s most notable chapters, tells the tale of Kingston’s aunt, who was shunned and removed from the family history because of what was thought to be an act of adultery in her Chinese town.

No Name Woman Essay By Maxine Hong Kingston’s- In “No Name Woman,” Kingston investigates issues relating to gender, cultural identity, and the impact of silence. As Kingston’s mother tells her the tale of her unnamed aunt at the beginning of the chapter, she warns her not to divulge the woman’s existence to anybody. 

The unidentified aunt, often known as “No Name Woman,” is portrayed as an enigmatic character whose acts go against the norms and expectations that are traditionally placed on Chinese women.

No Name Woman Essay By Maxine Hong Kingston’s- According to the tale, No Name Woman gets pregnant when her husband is gone, which led many to believe that she had an extramarital relationship. The town executes a harsh penalty by plundering and destroying her family’s home because of rigid cultural norms and a desire to avoid social embarrassment. No Name Woman is ultimately pushed to kill herself and her unborn child.

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No Name Woman Essay By Maxine Hong Kingston’s- Through this story, Kingston explores how her community’s silence and the weight of cultural expectations affect her. She muses on the significance of No Name Woman’s tale, which serves as a metaphor for the perils of breaking social conventions and the effects of residing in a society that places a premium on reputation.

Kingston also explores her own Chinese-American identity and the tensions she feels between her culture and the individualistic norms of American society. Kingston aims to recover her aunt’s voice and shed light on the oppressive forces that silenced her by uncovering the tale of her forgotten aunt.

No Name Woman Essay By Maxine Hong Kingston’s- In “No Name Woman,” Kingston uses vivid and lyrical language to generate empathy in the reader and to portray the emotional impact of her aunt’s narrative. 

The chapter offers a compelling examination of the difficulties associated with forming a cultural identity, the predicament of oppressed women, and the significance of recovering individual and social histories.

No Name Woman Essay By Maxine Hong Kingston’s- Overall, “No Name Woman” is an important chapter in “The Woman Warrior” that explores issues related to gender, cultural identity, and the negative effects of silence. Kingston’s examination of her aunt’s narrative questions prevailing societal conventions and urges readers to consider the power relationships that influence and limit women’s lives.

AboutMaxine Hong Kingston

Maxine Hong Kingston is a highly acclaimed Chinese-American writer and activist. She was born on October 27, 1940, in Stockton, California. Kingston’s works explore themes of cultural identity, gender, and the immigrant experience, often drawing upon her Chinese heritage and her own experiences growing up in a Chinese-American household.

No Name Woman Essay By Maxine Hong Kingston’s- One of her most renowned works is “The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts,” published in 1976. This memoir, which blends autobiography with folklore and mythology, became a bestseller and received critical acclaim for its exploration of the Chinese-American experience and the challenges faced by women within that context.

Maxine Hong Kingston has also written other notable books, including “China Men” (1980), a companion volume to “The Woman Warrior” that focuses on the experiences of Chinese-American men in the United States, and “Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book” (1989), a novel set in the 1960s countercultural movement.

No Name Woman Essay By Maxine Hong Kingston’s- Throughout her career, Kingston has received numerous awards and honors for her literary contributions. She has been recognized with the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Humanities Medal, and the National Medal of Arts, among others. Her works have had a significant impact on Asian-American literature and feminist discourse, as she tackles issues of cultural heritage, identity, and gender in a compelling and thought-provoking manner.

In addition to her writing, Maxine Hong Kingston has been an active advocate for social justice and human rights. She has been involved in various activism movements, including the anti-war movement and feminist causes.

No Name Woman Essay By Maxine Hong Kingston’s- Maxine Hong Kingston’s works continue to be studied and celebrated for their profound insights into the complexities of cultural identity, gender, and the immigrant experience. Her literary contributions have left a lasting impact on the literary world and have opened up conversations about diverse voices and the intersectionality of identity.

“No Name Woman” is a compelling and thought-provoking chapter in Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir, “The Woman Warrior.” Through the retelling of her forgotten aunt’s story, Kingston delves into complex themes of gender, cultural identity, and the power of silence. The chapter serves as a powerful critique of societal expectations and the oppressive forces that silence women’s voices.

No Name Woman Essay By Maxine Hong Kingston’s- By shedding light on her aunt’s tragic fate and the consequences of deviating from cultural norms, Kingston challenges traditional values and invites readers to question the power dynamics that shape women’s lives. Through vivid and evocative language, she captures the emotional impact of her aunt’s story and creates a sense of empathy in the reader.

No Name Woman Essay By Maxine Hong Kingston’s- Furthermore, “No Name Woman” also explores Kingston’s own journey of reconciling her Chinese heritage with the individualistic values of American society. It highlights the conflicts and tensions she experiences in navigating her cultural identity, and it serves as a catalyst for her to reclaim her aunt’s voice and history.

No Name Woman Essay By Maxine Hong Kingston’s- Overall, “No Name Woman” is a poignant chapter that resonates with readers and encourages reflection on issues of gender, cultural expectations, and the importance of reclaiming silenced narratives. Kingston’s memoir is a powerful testament to the significance of personal and collective histories, and it prompts us to consider the impact of cultural forces on individual lives.

Q: What is the significance of the title “No Name Woman”? 

A: The title “No Name Woman” emphasizes the erasure and silencing of Kingston’s aunt from her family’s history and from society at large. By denying her a name, she is stripped of her individual identity and reduced to a symbol of shame and secrecy. The title also highlights the anonymity and invisibility that many women in patriarchal societies face when their actions challenge societal expectations.

Q: How does “No Name Woman” reflect the theme of cultural identity? 

A: “No Name Woman” explores the complexities of cultural identity through the lens of Kingston’s Chinese-American heritage. The story of her aunt serves as a reminder of the cultural norms and expectations that shape the lives of Chinese women, contrasting with the individualistic values of American society. Kingston grapples with the conflicts and tensions between these two cultural identities, seeking to reconcile them and find her own voice.

Q: What is the role of silence in “No Name Woman”? 

A: Silence plays a significant role in “No Name Woman” as it represents both the power of cultural norms and the suppression of women’s voices. The secrecy and silence surrounding Kingston’s aunt’s story perpetuate the cycle of shame and erasure, ultimately leading to her tragic fate. Through her writing, Kingston challenges the oppressive nature of silence and seeks to give voice to the silenced women in her family and culture.

Q: How does “No Name Woman” relate to broader feminist themes? 

A: “No Name Woman” addresses feminist themes by examining the limitations and expectations placed on women in patriarchal societies. It highlights the double standards and oppressive practices that deny women autonomy and subject them to harsh judgments and punishments. Kingston’s exploration of her aunt’s story serves as a call to challenge and dismantle these gendered power dynamics and to reclaim women’s voices and histories.

Q: What impact does “No Name Woman” have on the reader? 

A: “No Name Woman” leaves a profound impact on the reader by eliciting empathy, provoking reflection, and raising awareness of the injustices faced by silenced women. The chapter prompts readers to question societal norms and power structures, and it encourages a deeper understanding of the complexities of cultural identity and gender dynamics. Ultimately, it inspires readers to consider the importance of reclaiming silenced narratives and amplifying marginalized voices.

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Rebellion in “No Name Woman” by Maxine Kingston Essay

The story of a woman with no name is supposed to be kept secret; the very fact that this story is related in a published memoir is a rebellious act. A powerful beginning, the “No Name Woman” mocks all attempts to silence the voices of women who rebelled – either passively or actively – against the sadistic patriarchal Chinese society of the 1930s that subjugated them. Rethinking and remastering her mother’s talk-stories, the author bears witness to the oppression of women’s bodies, minds, and spirits that they managed to withstand.

Bodily oppression is probably the easiest and most obvious means of subjugation a society can practice, yet the author portrays a brave and self-defying response from the No Name Woman. As a woman reconsidering the story of her aunt, she creates fantasies depicting whatever could possibly happen to her aunt, what she had suffered for and why. In one such fantasy, the author is creating an image of rape: “The other man was not, after all, much different from her husband. They both gave orders…” (Kingston 26). Such imagery and the wording serves to represent the lack of control over their bodies which were regarded as sources of physical pleasure and machines for producing children. The uncontrollability is also evident in other fantasies where the woman is in pain from labor, starvation or beatings. However, in a more optimistic fantasy involving the unnamed woman’s affair, she follows her bodily passion – an act of rebellion wherein she rejects the societal control and dispenses with her body as she chooses to.

If bodily control brings physical pain, the oppression of the mind brings angst, insecurity, and humiliation, which makes it another effective means of subjugation women had to experience. Women were in the state of constant surveillance, which is a scary truth best illustrated by a short yet agoraphobic phrase: “Villagers are watchful” (Kingston 24). A parallel with the notorious Big Brother can be easily drawn here, as can be the dystopian expectations and obligations Chinese society imposed on women as workers – and little else. Doing what was expected of them, women knew that a single wrong step would be noticed at once by the watchdog villagers, and that would mean inevitable disgrace. Following one’s feelings as the author’s aunt did was an abomination, especially if it involved adultery. Yet, the nameless fantasy aunt not only follows her feelings, she also decorates herself to appear attractive to the one she supposedly loves in a society where most women looked like “great sea-snails” (Kingston 27). If anything, it is a barefaced mockery of the standards of a society where women are shamed for wanting to be beautiful.

After her body and mind were so atrociously broken, the No Name Woman has little to rely on but her spirit of a human being standing alone against the evil. By taking control of their bodies and squeezing them into the frames of faulty expectations, the society was trying to pump the idea of their uselessness into women’s heads – and thus take over their willpower, as the following illustrates: “To be a woman, to have a daughter in starvation time was a waste enough” (Kingston 25). It can be argued that by taking her own and her child’s lives the woman was trying to escape the disgrace and further punishment, which makes it a display of weakness. This, however, is not the case as the act of ending one’s life is something that takes much courage. At that, her suicide is the last and probably the most powerful rebellious act, the climax of her misery and the evidence of her might. Realizing that she was doomed as well as her child (who possible turned out to be a daughter), she showed the world and the stagnant society that she was, after all, the one in control.

A story within a story, the memoir speculates on the issue of subjugation and rebellion – which, as it were, turns out to be a success in the long run. Indeed, the logical conclusion to the No Name Woman’s life would be complete forgetfulness, as her relatives hoped. The author’s mother, on the other hand, regarded her experience as a tell-tale warning against disgraceful behaviors. Still, the message that a girl and further – a woman gets from her aunt’s story is quite the opposite to what was intended: “Attraction eludes control so stubbornly that whole societies designed to organize relationships among people cannot keep order” (Kingston 28). Seeing the inconsistency of the oppressive society’s ways, the author admires her forerunner’s courage and regards her rebellion as a pattern to follow rather than a scarecrow to shun.

Half a century had to pass before the No Name Woman’s story was told. The author muses that she is the only one tending to that ghost of a woman. Yet, dead and broken as she might be, she lived a life of a rebel whose courage and willpower was invincible even with the whole world against her.

Kingston, Maxine. “No Name Woman.” The Blair Reader: Exploring Issues and Ideas . Eds.

Laurie G. Kirszner and Stephen R. Mandell. Eighth edition. New York: Pearson, 2011. 23-33. Print.

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IvyPanda . 2020. "Rebellion in “No Name Woman” by Maxine Kingston." August 9, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/rebellion-in-no-name-woman-by-maxine-kingston/.

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Bibliography

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The Woman Warrior

Maxine hong kingston, everything you need for every book you read., no name woman quotes in the woman warrior.

“You must not tell anyone,” my mother said, “what I am about to tell you. In China your father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped into the family well. We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born.

It could very well have been, however, that my aunt did not take subtle enjoyment of her friend, but, a wild woman, kept rollicking company…

In the village structure, spirits shimmered among the live creatures, balanced and held in equilibrium by time and land. But one human being flaring up into violence could open up a black hole, a maelstrom that pulled in the sky. 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.” Misallying couples snapped off the future, which was to be embodied in true offspring. The villagers punished her for acting as if she could have a private life, secret and apart from them.

My aunt haunts me—her ghost drawn to me because now, after fifty years of neglect, I alone devote pages of paper to her, though not origamied into houses and clothes. I do not think she always means me well. I am telling on her, and she was a spite suicide, drowning herself in the drinking water.

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She Has Never Been Born: Textual Crypts in “No Name Woman”

Written By Jared Lynch

In the introduction to her book Gothic Hauntings: Melancholy Crypts and Textual Ghosts , Christine Berthin discusses the findings of French psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. They explain that when haunting is transgenerational, it “takes the shape of a secret transmitted within a family or a community without being stated because it is associated with repressed guilt, shame or is the result of a trauma that has not been worked through” (4). When the ghost is transferred, it becomes “a lost object to the unconscious of the child, the living subject or ‘phantom carrier’” (4). This transgenerational concept of haunting is evident in Maxine Hong Kingston’s chilling essay “No Name Woman” in which Kingston learns from her mother that her father had a sister who had committed suicide after bringing shame to her family. Kingston’s mother tells her, “‘We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born’” (2704). This transference of the No Name Woman’s story from mother to daughter marks the inheritance and continuation of a repressed specter, and Kingston becomes a “phantom carrier.”

Kingston’s aunt became pregnant, despite the fact that her husband had been gone for years. Her actions disrupted tradition and brought shame to her family who, disgraced by her infidelities, dismissed her existence entirely. In their minds she was already dead, and they said to her, “You’ve killed us. Ghost! Dead ghost! Ghost! You’ve never been born” (2710). Her family denied her presence, but they kept her, forcing her to take meals at the “out-cast” table where “the Chinese family…hung on to the offenders and fed them leftovers” (2707). Throughout the remainder of her life she was a walking, breathing ghost, despite the presence of the life growing inside her. On the night the child was to be born, the villagers raided the house and slaughtered their stock, smearing the blood of the animals on the doors and walls. Kingston’s mother reflects, “‘We stood together in the middle of our house…and looked straight ahead’” (2705). Later that night, after the villagers had left, her aunt gave birth to the child in the pigsty. The next morning Kingston’s mother discovered the bodies of her aunt and her child in the bottom of the family well. She tells Kingston, “‘Don’t let your father know I told you. He denies her’” (2705). After her death the No Name Woman loses her placement in the physical world entirely, until she inherits a “phantom carrier.”

The author perpetuates this concept of haunting by internalizing and embodying the spirit in her essay. The spirit is housed in the pages, and through reading “No Name Woman,” the reader also becomes a “phantom carrier,” continuing the existence of the ghost. Berthin writes, “the phantom, or unconsciously inherited secret, lodged in the ego of a subject or protagonist as in a crypt, remains untold but distorts the text of the ‘phantom carrier’s’ life with alternative and lateral meanings” (5). The physicality of the essay provides a crypt for the phantom to inhabit. She is a physical entity once again that cannot be ignored, incarcerated in a cyclical redundancy of resurgence, truly embodying the essence of haunting and resurfaced repression.

In her life, Kingston’s aunt marked a disruption in the linearity of her family’s timeline, and, after her suicide, they drove away her memory, refusing her a home even in death. Kingston writes that her aunt’s ghost is “drawn to me because now, after fifty years of neglect, I alone devote pages of paper to her” (2712). The disruption has surfaced, and the reader participates in continuing the resurfacing of the No Name Woman. Through inhabiting the essay, the ghost wanders across the retelling of events in her life that led to her sorrowful death. The author, the words, and the reader provide her with life in a melancholy posthumous existence. Kingston again acknowledges her presence at the end of the essay writing, “I do not think she always means me well. I am telling on her, and she was a spite suicide” (2712). Although the author has provided the ghost with physicality, and therefore empowered her, she has forced the No Name Woman to reside in eternal torment, where she continues to be a “spite suicide” until the physicality of her crypt is destroyed, and the words are no more, or until there are no more eyes to read the words, never drifting far from her watery grave.

Works Cited

Berthin, Christine. Gothic Hauntings: Melancholy Crypts and Textual Ghosts. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007.

Kingston, Maxine Hong.  “No Name Woman.”  From  The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts  (1976).  The Heath Anthology of American Literature, vol. E.  5th ed . Ed. Paul Lauter, et al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.  2704-12.  Print.

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No Name Woman Analysis

Literary analysis of no name woman short story the chinese society has a tendency to maintain the cultures of their homeland despite the changing times. however, the dynamism of the modern world catches up with the reactionary nature of a society forcing them to mould into the workings of the new world. such was in the case of maxine hong kingston’s key character in the story titled “no name woman”. the “no-name woman” mentioned in the story went through a life tragedy that saw to the end of her life. this instance pushed her to the wall to the point where she saw that taking her own life was the only solution to her problems. the difficult circumstances that plagued her revealed a lot about her; this is so despite the fact that the narrator knew little of her unnamed aunt. the actions the unnamed aunt took showed that she was a selfless and yielding person. the no name woman by maxine hong kingston.

The unnamed main character of the story agreed to be joined in matrimonial companionship without a choice showing that was yielding to customs and traditions. The interests of the woman were to find love as the narrator explains how love blooms out of other subtleties, and rarely out of arranged marriages. These inadvertent forced marriages together with the uncertainty of ever knowing one’s spouse since they will be far away most of the time made marriage a nightmare. The acceptance to join such a union that leaves her in solitude showed how yielding the character was.

The Chinese culture demanded women to be submissive to men and their orders making her to be yielding to other people’s requests. The narrator looks at the various reasons a woman would cheat on her husband, and amongst them is the coercion into promiscuity. Furthermore, this might have prevented her from revealing the identity of the lover who was responsible for her pregnancy; he might have compelled not to do so. This shows how yielding the aunt was as she had been bred to act in such a manner. The result of this was the consequent blame on her for all the vices that her act implied. She accepted the blame for the act without revealing the intricacies that led to the occurrence of this predicament from everyone: family, friends and neighbors. This shows society has molded her into a submissive and yielding person.

The fact that the narrator’s aunt did not reveal the identity of the man responsible for her pregnancy showed how selfless she was. She could have shared the burden and shame of having an illegitimate child. This could have given her a chance to explain whatever circumstance that led to the eventuality; however, she chose to keep her lips sealed. This showed she was willing to suffer for both her and her secret love, proving her selflessness.

The committing of suicide by the aunt together with the killing of her newborn baby also had some element of selflessness in it. If she left her baby behind, it would have had the difficulty of being viewed as an outcast. The Chinese family set aside the outcasts and related with them minimally. This would have affected her child’s life in all aspects, and thus taking its life together with hers showed that she considered the child’s future too. Therefore, she was indeed selfless.

Summary of “No Name Woman”

Conclusively, the unnamed aunt was a person with no limits to how submissive and selfless she could be as illustrated by her matrimonial commitment to a lonesome marriage. In addition, taking the full blame for actions that she did not partake in alone showed she was selfless enough not to put other people in trouble. Her culture demanded her to be submissive, and this came with the unquestioned giving into any situation despite her own interests. These instances prove that she was yielding and selfless in nature.

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The Summary of The No Name Woman

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Home Essay Examples Literature The Woman Warrior

The Woman Warrior: Analysis Of No Name Woman

• Category Literature
• Subcategory Book
• Topic The Woman Warrior

The Woman Warrior: Memoir of Girlhood Among Ghosts is a memoir written by Chinese-American author Maxine Hong Kingston that focuses on female characters from various backgrounds, tales, and traditions. The events of the book unfold in a non-chronological order, with stories taking place either in China or America. Despite the distance and the two opposing lands, The Woman Warrior is Kingston’s own biographic tale that addresses her experience as a hyphenated Chinese-American identity as she grows up in America. It portrays a female coming of age story against the backdrop of the misogyny of the Chinese heritage (Ahokas 106)

In the first chapter of the memoir that is titled No Name Woman, Kingston narrates the unfortunate life and death of her father’s youngest sister whose existence was erased upon being impregnated by a man who was not her husband and giving birth to illegitimate child. After giving birth to her child in a pigsty, she drowned herself in the village’s well together with her new-born baby. This story is actually told by her mother who in return warns her not to tell it to anybody else and to pretend as if she has never heard of it before and to never speak of her aunt especially in the presence of her father.

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In many ways, the story of her aunt has several underlying meanings and motifs that echo throughout the whole narrative of this memoir. It acts as a preface for Kingston’s memoir, an anecdote.

Firstly, aligning the context with the title, one of the most prominent significance of her aunt’s story towards the whole text is the undoubted strength of woman as a fighter and a lover—a true warrior in a world with a misogynistic backdrop. In a world where females are silenced and victimized, her aunt took upon her own self to decide her own fate—committing suicide. Despite its morbidity, Kingston’s aunt’s power of deciding her own fate echoes throughout the text. In the next mythical-woven chapter The White Tiger, Kingston merges her voice with Mulan’s—a female warrior from China who trains for years to finally take upon her father’s position as a general in war and chooses to return home as a wife and mother after fulfilling her filial duties—fighting as a warrior and returning home as a lover. The warrior figure is also incorporated into Shaman, a chapter that centres upon Kingston’s mother, Brave Orchid as upon herself to revenge the whole village, but taking her beloved child with her. Brave Orchid confronting the sitting ghost, and Kingston confronting her mom, her aunt confront.

Another crucial preoccupation that is asserted throughout the text is the invention of the author’s self. Through the talk stories, she “remomerates and reconstructs . . . [her] child’s and later [her] teenager’s and adult woman’s yearnings, hopes, dreams.” (Suciu 5) From someone whose morals and achievements are based off of talk stories ranging from cultural myths or historical accounts, Kingston in the end accepts herself as a fully grown, complete individual. The significance of this with the opening chapter is that instead of just retelling another talk story, she reimagines and reinvents the life of her aunt. Through the little details of her infidelity, she conjures up multiple perspectives and fictional possibilities of what could have actually happened to her aunt.

The story of her aunt starts off with the descriptive accounts of her mother and later followed by her own interpretations and reimaginations. This structure is actually parallel to the whole context of her memoir. The memoir starts off with talk stories— from the tale of the supposedly non-existent aunt to the mythical tale of the female warrior Fa Mulan who disguises herself as a man to carry out her filial duties towards her father. The next part is another talk story focusing on her mother, Brave Orchid and her years as a medical student and practitioner in China. Even in the following chapter where the story focuses on Moon Orchid and her unsuccessful attempt in taking her Americanized husband, Kingston retells this story as heard from her brother.

However, in most part of the last chapter, Kingston tells her own story. Kingston progresses from “rewrit[ing] her mother’s talk stories” (Bolaki 39) to writing her own.

Not only she illustrates her aunt as a rebellious figure, her very action of immortalizing her aunt’s tale and existence onto paper is an act of rebellion itself. Through her imaginative rebirthing of her aunt, Kingston betrays her mother, her family, and her Chinese tradition (Johnston 139) that imposes silence.

In the first chapter of the memoir, she highlights the toxic tradition of silence that is practised by the Chinese people. Upon telling Kingston the story of her aunt, Kingston’s mother made it clear how she had noticed the baby bump on her aunt’s stomach but proceeded to pretend as if it was nothing. The villagers as well, considering that there were no strangers among them and that they are closely there must have seen her body growing over the month but “[n]o one said anything.” Surprisingly, it never occurred among any of them to actually ask or to seek for the truth. What harm is there in asking?

Unlike Kingston who tells the story of her aunt as a means of giving justice, Kingston’s mother tells this story to her as a means of caution. However, to Kingston’s claim, it is done out of necessity as the story of her aunt serves as a warning to teenage Kingston who had just started to menstruate. If Kingston were to engage in the game of silence and pretend, she too would have participated in the family’s life-long punishment towards the aunt.

Her rebellion also develops gradually. When she first heard the story of her aunt, she “cannot ask” (Kingston 9) what her aunt was wearing despite her curiosity because it would mean breaking the silence. However, in the last chapter, she eventually speaks out to her mother about the many things that she has always wanted to ask and to clarify. This is another proof that

Kingston was also confronting and breaking harmful stereotypes in (Ahokas 104)

Lastly, the story of her aunt highlights how the foreign Chinese culture still holds her feet within the familiar American soil.

With such a strong opening chapter, Kingston deliberately shows her stance that flows effortlessly until the end. She rebelled throughout her writings, doing what she can to provide justice for those faced with injustice and to provide voice for those who are unheard. The Woman Warrior’s first chapter clearly provides a foreground for the entire content of the book—that is of a strong female character who will rebel and fight against these written or unwritten rules that traditions are imposing on women. Kingston’s rebellious nature runs a free course throughout the whole text. She takes up this huge treacherous act upon her back and carries it as a responsibility. Deliberately breaking the silence of her aunt, she fulfils her commitment as a writer and as a fighter who at the same time, strives as a lover who celebrates the heritage of her culture regardless of its perfection.

Works Cited

• Bolaki, Stella. “‘It Translated Well’: The Promise and the Perils of Translation in Maxine Hong Kingston’s ‘The Woman Warrior.’” MELUS, vol. 34, no. 4, 2009, pp. 39–60. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20618099.
• Johnston, Sue Ann. ‘Empowerment Through Mythological Imaginings in Woman Warrior.’ Biography, vol. 16 no. 2, 1993, p. 136-146. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/bio.2010.0369.
• Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York: Vintage International, 1976.
• LI, DAVID LEIWEI. “The Naming of a Chinese American ‘I’: Cross-Cultural Sign/Ifications in ‘The Woman Warrior.’” Criticism, vol. 30, no. 4, 1988, pp. 497–515. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23112091.
• Miller, Margaret. ‘Threads of Identity in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior.’ Biography, vol. 6 no. 1, 1983, p. 13-33. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/bio.2010.0678
• Suciu, Andreia Irina: Voices and voicing in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The woman warrior. Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary, (10) 1. (2014)

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Alice Randall Made Country History. Black Women Are Helping Tell Hers.

In “My Black Country,” the musician and author who cracked a Nashville color barrier is telling her story — and hearing her songs reimagined.

By Grayson Haver Currin

Reporting from Nashville

The country singer Rissi Palmer could not understand why Alice Randall was emailing her.

By fall 2020, when Palmer received the message, Randall was a Nashville institution, not only the first Black woman to write a chart-topping country hit but also a novelist whose books undermined entrenched racial hierarchies. Palmer herself was no slouch: “ Country Girl ,” her 2007 anthem of rural camaraderie, had been the first song by a Black woman to infiltrate country’s charts in two decades. She had just started “Color Me Country,” a podcast exploring the genre’s nonwhite roots and branches.

But 11 years earlier, Palmer had fled Nashville, hamstrung by contract disputes, with “my tail between my legs,” she recalled recently in a video interview from her North Carolina kitchen.

Randall, however, was very interested in Palmer — and her history. Working as a writer-in-residence at Vanderbilt University, she had urged the school’s Heard Libraries to acquire Palmer’s archives: notebooks, sketches, a dress worn during her Grand Ole Opry debut.

“I’ve been in this business since I was 19. I made the charts when I was 26. I’ve had these items the whole time,” said Palmer, 42. “No one has ever called me and said they had value, until Alice. There are more important people, but she saw value in me.”

Randall also saw something of herself — and a glimpse of gradual progress — in Palmer. After breaking a Nashville color barrier when her treatise about being an overworked mother, “XXX’s and OOO’s (An American Girl),” became a 1994 hit for Trisha Yearwood, Randall quit writing country songs.

“My songs were only going to work if I sang them, or if we found the Black woman who could,” Randall said on a recent afternoon over heaping meat-and-three plates at Arnold’s, a Nashville mainstay that opened in 1982, a year before she arrived. Every few minutes, someone else — a former congressperson, a prominent downtown investor, the restaurant’s scion — stopped to shake hands. “But I didn’t think we would find the star, and my characters were being erased.”

Just as one of the world’s biggest stars, Beyoncé, makes her own long-gestating country turn , Randall’s people have been restored on a new compilation, “My Black Country,” which arrives April 12. A dozen Black women — Palmer , Rhiannon Giddens , Allison Russell — reimagine Randall’s best-known songs in their own voices, for their own lives. In a corresponding memoir, releasing April 9, Randall weaves her country career into a corrective genre history that reorients its Black past, present and future.

“I had never heard my own songs sound in real life like they sounded in my imagination,” Randall, 64, said of the album’s sessions, grinning broadly behind tears. “That was a Sankofa moment, a Juneteenth moment — good news at long last.”

For years, Randall’s daughter, the writer and scholar Caroline Randall Williams, had encouraged her mother to publish a memoir. She had lived, after all, a remarkable life: Born in Detroit to parents who fled penury and racism in Alabama and Ohio, Randall witnessed the rise of Motown. Her father, a silk-suited tough guy who ran a laundromat and reportedly knew the Bible and “Macbeth” by heart, was a titan of the city’s Black community, a friend of Anna Gordy who dazzled his daughter with her feats.

Randall rubbed childhood elbows with the prodigal Stevie Wonder and sparkled stage-side in a homemade dress when the Supremes debuted at the Copacabana. After her parents split, her mother moved her to Washington, D.C., where Randall was “a Black girl in an overgrown Southern town,” she writes, attending private school alongside white bohemians. She and her mother later moved in with a man on a farm outside of the city. Soon after Randall started high school, he raped her. A John Prine cassette helped saved her life, allowing her to pour out “some of everything haunting me into it.” She escaped to Harvard. And that was all before she moved to Nashville, started a publishing company, met her first husband through working on the set of a Johnny Cash music video, became a mother and wrote best-selling novels.

“Most of her life was in those novels, turned around and sideways,” Williams said, framed by books in the sprawling home her mother bought two decades ago, where Williams is raising her own family. “But she is an intensely discreet person who shares what she’s willing to share, not one word more.”

In 2018, though, Randall was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. The time to share a more direct, personal history of her primary scenes — Detroit, in the 2020 novel “Black Bottom Saints,” and Nashville, in “My Black Country”— had come. “I asked myself, ‘If I have five years left to live, what am I going to do?’” Randall said. “I’m going to love this family, take trips with my friends and tell these two stories.”

Randall’s Nashville was one of perseverance, back doors and unlikely allies. Soon after she arrived, the only Black woman she saw in the music licensing agency Ascap’s massive Music Row headquarters was Shirley Washington, who greeted visitors with a coffee or Coca-Cola. She sneaked Randall into the boardroom to write and gave her intel about who to meet and where to shop. The self-portrait that emerges is one of relentless work: booze-free nights studying other songwriters at the Bluebird Cafe, building a company to pitch songs to stars, a writing practice that bordered on the sacred.

“When I first got here, I would wake up in the middle of the night, write down all the songs on the radio and study them. There was no way I could afford them all,” Randall said. “I didn’t have any musical skills, so I had to use my literary analysis. I had to find my authority.”

Randall has always been a world-builder. At age 3, in Detroit, her first song demanded her father not leave her for the bar (he took her). “My Black Country,” both the album and the book, suggests a widening path Randall helped create. Its producer, Ebonie Smith, studied the recorded versions of Randall’s songs, which were often Trojan horses for getting progressive ideas onto country radio, and encouraged the performers to find their own ways into the texts. Adia Victoria ’s “Went for a Ride,” an entendre-rich tale of a beautiful Black cowboy, ripples with exquisite ache. Williams transforms “XXX’s and OOO’s,” the hit written in part about her, into a spoken-word taunt.

In the book, Randall posits Los Angeles as the capital of Black country and widens the genre’s lens to encompass Swamp Dogg and the Pointer Sisters. Most striking, though, is her First Family of Black Country, a lineage she argues is anchored by the early Grand Ole Opry star DeFord Bailey and the pianist and songwriter Lil Hardin Armstrong, extending through Ray Charles and Charley Pride to the likes of Palmer and Lil Nas X. It is a sharp rejoinder to the standard country origin story, where the sound spills from pre-Depression sessions by acts including the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers in Bristol, Tenn .

“I was injured by that mythology, and I am interested in creating counter-narratives,” Randall said. She bounded among topics — Barbie dolls, transcontinental train travel, the influence of Donna Summer on Dolly Parton and drag culture — before gliding back toward this unifying thesis. “It took 41 years of doing this and teaching to understand that if you tell people just that much, it transforms them. You can make a different First Family. I want to start the discussion.”

Now, of course, there is another branch on the family tree: Beyoncé. Randall long heard rumors about the star’s latest direction, and watching the Super Bowl with friends when news of “Cowboy Carter” broke, they shared an epiphany: “Oh my God. This changes your life.” For decades, Randall had waved the banner of Black women in country; on the eve of a project that reintroduced her Black country characters, she now had backup.

The next day, Randall listened through laptop speakers and transcribed Beyoncé’s new songs. She made notes: the singing cowboy tradition, looking for God, the conceptual underpinnings of “sweet redemption.”

“I typed the lyrics to study because that’s what I did when I got here,” she said, waving the annotated sheets and smiling. “I had to bring my authority.”

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