No Name Woman

For the similarly titled film, see The Woman with No Name.

No Name Woman is a short story by Chinese-American author Maxine Hong Kingston, who is also Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. The story was originally published in 1975 as the first of five stories included in a book by Kingston called The Woman Warrior.

Plot summary

Kingston's mother narrates a story about Kingston's dead aunt and how the villagers in China attacked the family's house. Kingston begins to add life to her mother's story and explore who her aunt was and what her motivations were. Kingston goes on to apply these ideas to her childhood as a Chinese American. It touches on themes such as Secrecy and Feminism.

Character list

Maxine's Aunt (the "no-name woman"): A young woman in China who is married off just before her husband and his brothers leave for America. When she becomes pregnant long after her husband has left, the townspeople ransack her family's home, humiliating the entire family. When it is time for her to give birth, she must do so alone in the barn. Although the baby is born healthy, it is a girl; realizing how limited the infant's prospects are, the Aunt takes the baby and jumps in the well, drowning them both. Her family now pretends she never existed.

Maxine (narrator): Maxine is still a young girl, still coming to terms with adolescence and the transition into womanhood, in terms of not only the physical and emotional changes brought on by puberty, but also of the societal expectations placed on Chinese girls and the discrepancy between Chinese and American ideas of womanhood. She is terror-stricken by her mother's story and keeps silent about it for years, but at the same time fantasizes about what her nameless aunt must have feeling, noticing problems with the story that suggest a more complicated picture than what her mother is telling her. Over the years, she wonders if the aunt had fallen in love with the other man, if she was forced into a sexual relationship, or if she was just a woman who enjoyed and wanted sex.

Maxine’s Mother: Maxine's mother tells her the story of her father's alleged sister, claiming that her father and his family won't even acknowledge her existence. The mother uses the story to instill in Maxine a fear of breaking societal norms and of bringing shame to her family. But Maxine realizes that her mother may not be telling the full story: she speaks as though she had seen the events, but she never explains why the Aunt was still living with her own family when custom dictated that she stay with her husband's family. Was her mother really there, was she simply repeating a story she had heard, or was she making up the entire story as a cautionary tale?

See also

Novels portal

• The Woman Warrior
• Asian American literature
• Chinese American literature

References

• Mitchell, Carol. “‘Talking-Story’ in The Woman Warrior: An Analysis of the Use of Folklore.” Kentucky Folklore Record. 27.1-2 (January–June 1981) 5-12. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed Jeffrey W. Hunter and Polly Vedder. Vol 121. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. 5-12 Literature Resources from Gale. Gale. Collin College, McKinney, TX. 15 Apr. 2008 <http://go.galegroup.com>.
• Petit, Angela. "'Words so strong': Maxine Hong Kingston's "No Name Woman" introduces students to the power of words." Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 46.6 (Mar. 2003): 482. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Collin College, McKinney, TX. 21 Apr. 2008 <http://search.ebscohost.com>.
• Schueller, Malini. “‘Questioning Race and Gender Definitions: Dialogic Subversions in The Woman Warrior.” Criticism. 31.4 (Fall 1989) 421-437. Rpt. Ii Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed Jeffrey W. Hunter and Polly Vedder. Vol 121. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000. 421-437. Literature Resources from Gale. Gale. Collin College, McKinney, TX. 15 Apr. 2008 <http://go.galegroup.com >.
• Kingston, Maxine Hong. “No Name Woman.” 1975. Making Literature Matter. Ed. John Schilb and John Clifford. 3rd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006. 1154-1163.