Each community often develops a system of control to maintain social order. Some communities instill this order by legal codes, and other communities use moral or social codes to keep their communities in check. In the autobiographical essay "No Name Woman," by Maxine Kingston, Kingston's aunt disrupts her tight knit community by having an illegitimate child as a result of an affair. Her traditional Chinese community ran by superstition finds it necessary to punish her and brand her a nameless face to ensure the village's stability. Any means of unsettling this stability would disrupt the social order and threaten the community, and would not be tolerated. The village uses fear of shame and the community's strong presence in one another's lives, as means to control their tight knit community. Kingston opens her essay with her mother telling her of a family secret: "`you must not tell anyone,' my mother said `what I am about to tell you'" (27). Kingston's mother opening the story is significant because her voice portrays the voice of traditional Chinese society. Her mother opening is also significant because her mother emphasizes how everything shameful must be kept silent. Her mother states that Kingston should not tell anyone because what she is about to tell her daughter, has brought shame upon the family. Kingston's mother tells the story of an aunt who had caused shame upon the entire family by having an illegitimate child, and later committed suicide. She finishes by saying "`we say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born...What happened to her could happen to you. Don't humiliate us...The villagers are watchful,'" (27). Kingston's mother establishes that the whole f... ... middle of paper ... ... bestowed upon them. The Chinese belief is that they must use fear of shame and be involved in each other's lives as a system of control for their tight knit community. This system helps not only to shape Kingston's aunt's community, however also shows how they resolve conflicts of moral and ethical descent. It entails for everyone to follow these rules or else suffer the consequences of being a burdensome "ghost" and bringing shame and danger to the community. Kingston makes a bold statement, by breaking the silence-breaking tradition and telling us-the public, her aunt's shameful, forbidden story. She steps out of the role that her Chinese society had prescribed for her. She breaks the silence of her family and of her community; she breaks the unwritten rules of the system of control, which her society has chosen for her, a person of Chinese ethnicity.
The story tells that the girl did not speak for three years in school. During the three years, she covered her school art paintings with black paint. She painted black over houses and flowers and suns and she made a layer of chalk on top when she drew on the blackboard. This black paint shows the symbolism of wanting to cover up and hide herself from the challenges of her new life. The artwork represented her inner self and the black the covering she felt was necessary in her current world. Note that the blindness and the darkness were like the artwork she drew (her true self) and painted over each with black paint. She imagined pulling the curtain or opening the door to what was beneath. Kingston described fear feeling and strong emotions through the painting. It was deep, dark and helpfulness. To the Americans at school who only saw the black, she was being stubborn, depressed, psychotic maybe, or developmentally challenged. Moreover, in the American school, she did not know that she was supposed to talk. When she realised that she had to talk in school to pass kindergarten she became more miserable. Reading out loud was easier because she didn’t have to make up the words. Simple words like “I” were hard because in Chinese “I” had seven strokes but only 3 strokes in English. It was a hard concept to understand. She was punished for not saying them right which added to her insecurities. The girl liked the Negro students because they treated her well and thought she spoke well. They protected her from mean Japanese kids who hit her and chased her and called her
The story was titled by “No Name Woman” which seem to mean the aunt is nameless. However, namelessness refers to something that is an unknown or materials whose name was not entitled. The woman is the aunt of the author, the sister of the households who used to live with the family.
An Asian-American writer growing up in a tight and traditional Chinese community in California, Kingston is placed by her background and time period to be at the unique nexus of an aged, stale social institution and a youthful, boisterous one. She has had to face life as an alien to the culture of the land she grew up in, as well as a last witness of some scattered and unspeakably tragic old ideals. She saw the sufferings and has suffered herself; but instead of living life demurely in the dark corner of the family room like she was expected to, Kingston became the first woman warrior to voice the plight of the mute females in both Chinese and American societies. The seemingly immeasurable and indeed unconquerable gap between the two fundamentally divided cultures comes together in herself and her largely autobiographical work The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts.
Imagination is a quality that everyone has, but only some are capable of using. Maxine Hong Kingston wrote “No Name Woman” using a great deal of her imagination. She uses this imagination to give a story to a person whose name has been forgotten. A person whose entire life was erased from the family’s history. Her story was not written to amuse or entertain, but rather to share her aunts’ story, a story that no one else would ever share. The use of imagination in Kingston’s creative nonfiction is the foundation of the story. It fills the gaps of reality while creating a perfect path to show respect to Kingston’s aunt, and simultaneously explains her disagreement with the women in her culture.
The “prodigal” aunt in Maxine Hong Kingston’s essay No Name Woman, was shunned from her family and ultimately ended up taking her life and her bastard child’s, as a result of public shaming. Instead of being heralded as a heroine and champion of women’s rights, the aunt’s legacy is one of shame and embarrassment that has been passed down through generations. While this story’s roots are Chinese, the issue at hand is multi-cultural. Women suffer from gender inequality worldwide.
Maxine has a family and feels like part of it; yet she knows that the standards of being part of her Chinese family are totally different to what she views as her own standards of life, which she has decided to live by.
...in her essay “No Name Woman”. The Chinese tradition of story telling is kept by Kingston in her books. Becoming Americanized allowed these women the freedom to show their rebellious side and make their own choices. Rebelling against the ideals of their culture but at the same time preserving some of the heritage they grew up with. Both woman overcame many obstacles and broke free of old cultural ways which allowed them an identity in a new culture. But most importantly they were able to find identity while preserving cultural heritage.
I am touched by An-mei’s mother’s perseverance and determination to go to her dying mother. An-mei’s aunt “quickly looked away”, “did not call her by name” and “offer her tea”, which is the Chinese traditional way of treating visitors. Even the servant looked down on her as she “hurried away with a displeased look”. Despite the aunt’s protest, “Too late, too late”, it “did not stop my mother”. In spite of the humiliation and disrespect given by the aunt and servant, An-mei’s mother did not leave as she tolerated all this for the sake of Popo, her own mother.
One has to accept their heritage and take pride in their heritage for other people to respect them. The mothers in the novel try to teach this lesson to their children. The minute our train leaves the Hong Kong border and enters Shenzhen, China, I feel different. I can feel the skin on my forehead tingling, my blood rushing through a new course, my bones aching with familiar old pain. And I think, my mother was right.
This is evident in the persistence of elderly characters, such as Grandmother Poh-Poh, who instigate the old Chinese culture to avoid the younger children from following different traditions. As well, the Chinese Canadians look to the Vancouver heritage community known as Chinatown to maintain their identity using on their historical past, beliefs, and traditions. The novel uniquely “encodes stories about their origins, its inhabitants, and the broader society in which they are set,” (S. Source 1) to teach for future generations. In conclusion, this influential novel discusses the ability for many characters to sustain one sole
Kingston uses the story of her aunt to show the gender roles in China. Women had to take and respect gender roles that they were given. Women roles they had to follow were getting married, obey men, be a mother, and provide food. Women had to get married. Kingston states, “When the family found a young man in the next village to be her husband…she would be the first wife, an advantage secure now” (623). This quote shows how women had to get married, which is a role women in China had to follow. Moreover, marriage is a very important step in women lives. The marriage of a couple in the village where Kingston’s aunt lived was very important because any thing an individual would do would affect the village and create social disorder. Men dominated women physically and mentally. In paragraph eighteen, “they both gav...
The patriarchal repression of Chinese women is illustrated by Kingston's story of No Name Woman, whose adulterous pregnancy is punished when the villagers raid the family home. Cast out by her humiliated family, she births the baby and then drowns herself and her child. Her family exile her from memory by acting as if "she had never been born" (3) -- indeed, when the narrator's mother tells the story, she prefaces it with a strict injunction to secrecy so as not to upset the narrator's father, who "denies her" (3). By denying No Name Woman a name and place in history, leaving her "forever hungry," (16) the patriarchy exerts the ultimate repression in its attempt to banish the transgressor from history. Yet her ghost continues to exist in a liminal space, remaining on the fringes of memory as a cautionary tale passed down by women, but is denied full existence by the men who "do not want to hear her name" (15).
Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men contains many fables and parables from the Chinese Culture. In "On Mortality" Kingston reveals the story of human mortality and the reason for this mortality. The story focuses largely on human emotions and reactions towards the situations that people find themselves in. It also raises questions about the role of women in the Chinese culture and the attitudes of the culture towards them.
Kingston’s mother takes many different approaches to reach out to her daughter and explain how important it is to remain abstinent. First, she tells the story of the “No Name Woman”, who is Maxine’s forgotten aunt, “’ Now that you have started to menstruate, what happened to her can happen to you. Don’t humiliate us. You wouldn’t like to be forgotten as if you had never been born”’ (5), said Maxine’s mother. Kingston’s aunt was murdered for being involved in this situation. The shame of what Kingston’s aunt brought to the family led them to forget about her. This particular talk-story is a cautionary tale to deter Kingston from having premarital sex and to instill in her fear of death and humiliation if she violates the lesson her mother explained to her. Kingston is able to get pregnant but with the lecture her mother advises her with keeps her obedient. Brave Orchid tells her this story to open her eyes to the ways of Chinese culture. The entire family is affected by one’s actions. She says, “‘Don’t humiliate us’” (5) because the whole village knew about the pregnant aunt and ravaged the family’s land and home because of it. Maxine tries asking her mother in-depth questions about this situation, but her m...
Although she got pregnant by someone other than her husband they did not look at the good and joyful moments the child could bring. Having a baby can be stressful, especially being that the village was not doing so great. The baby could have brought guilt, anger, depression, and loneliness to the aunt, family, and village lifestyle because having a baby from someone other than your husband was a disgrace to the village, based on the orientalism of women. Society expected the women to do certain things in the village and to behave a particular way. The author suggests that if her aunt got raped and the rapist was not different from her husband by exploiting "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." 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 who they had sex with." She vilifies not only the rapist but all the village men because, she asserts, they victimized women as a rule. The Chinese culture erred the aunt because of her keeping silent, but her fear had to constant and inescapable. This made matters worse because the village was very small and the rapist could have been someone who the aunt dealt with on a daily basis. Maxine suggests that "he may have been a vendor