No name woman

No Name Woman is a short story by Maxine Hong Kingston. The story was originally published in 1975 as the first of five stories included in a book by Kingston called The Woman Warrior.

Character list

Maxine Hong Kingston
Kingston’s Mother
Kingston's Aunt

Plot summary

The story, told from Kingston’s point of view, begins with her mother warning her not to tell anyone the story she is about to tell about her aunt. The aunt killed herself by jumping into the family’s well and her father’s entire family pretends as if she was never born.
The mother goes on to briefly tell the story of the no name woman. The story she tells takes place in 1924 in China just a few days after a celebration of several rushed weddings. Many men in the town were leaving and the weddings were an assurance that the men would send money home and eventually come back. The aunt was one of the women that got married that day, but years after her husband had left, she got pregnant.
When the time finally came that the baby was coming, the villagers raided the family’s home. The angry villagers destroyed the entire house and departed. Her mother states that the aunt gave birth to her baby that night in the pigsty and the next morning she found her and the baby drowned in the family well, an apparent suicide.
The mother then reiterates to Kingston she cannot let her father know what she told her, and he would deny it nonetheless. She also gives Kingston another warning, because she has begun to menstruate, that this could happen to her as well. Kingston states that her mother always told stories like this to give a warning about life.
She then goes on to tell about her life as a Chinese-American and also attempts to unravel the story about her no name aunt back in China by filling in her own remaining details.
Kingston begins by saying that her aunt could not have wanted to give up everything for sex. She must have been forced into this adultery and forced to keep it a secret. She even wonders if he was included in the raid on the family and if he was the one who organized the raid once she told him she was pregnant. She compares the aunt’s husband with the man who must have forced her into this relationship. They both gave orders and she did what they said.
Kingston speaks about how often people in the China were often labeled as outcasts. The outcasts would even have to sit at different tables to eat and were fed only leftovers. She wonders why her aunt was sent to live back with her parents by her in-laws, as it was custom in China for a daughter in-law to live with them.
Kingston continues with an elaborate fictional story about her aunt’s adultery. How it could have easily started out with a gentle look of a man and her growing loneliness from a husband gone for months or years. She thinks she must have continued to keep her beautiful appearance, although most married women did not. Kingston wonders if her vanity was possibly encouraged by her family, being the only daughter and beloved by all.
Kingston speaks of the loud demeanor of the Chinese, yelling from room to room and across the fields. The only silent people were the sick, but her aunt kept silent about the man who had impregnated her. He could have easily been someone in the house or someone in the village. Either way, as she sees it, they were all related in the Chinese culture. She even brings this tradition with her to America, silently calling the boys of her classes “brother”. She believes the villagers had punished her aunt for having a private life, apart from theirs.
Kingston wonders if possibly the current economic strain on the region caused more of a problem. The men had been forced to leave to find work, people were dying, there were wars, and floods. Adultery became a serious crime when the village was in need of food, but possibly only a mistake when times were good.
She imagines after the villagers left, the aunt was shunned by her family and ran from the house to the pigsty. The aunt would then feel the birth coming on and equated it to her punishment. Kingston believes her aunt would then believe to see there could be no future for this child, without a family line. She awoke in the morning and brought the baby to the well to drown with her. Probably a girl, Kingston writes, because a boy could be forgiven.
Kingston then moves back into the story that her mother was telling her. Her mother again warns her not to speak of this because the no name woman had never been born. She sees the punishment, not so much of the villager’s assault, but as the attempt of the family to deliberately forget her. Kingston felt she had been forced to continue to punish the aunt, by keeping this in silence.
It took twenty years from the time she heard this story to retell it and never asked about it again. After all, Kingston writes, it was a spiteful suicide, by drowning herself in the family’s water and contaminating it. She concludes with speaking about the ghost of her aunt and how she still haunts her.

Critical analysis

Carol Mitchell writes, “the story was briefly told by the mother and focused on the horrors of the raid and the condemnation to oblivion without giving any details about the kind of woman the aunt was or what her motivations might have been.” She sees the story as two-fold, it made Kingston fear being attracted to boys and decides that “being sisterly makes more since” and more importantly, Kingston “realizes that the real punishment for the aunt was being forgotten” since “the support of the family is necessary not only in life but in death as well.” In the end, “it makes no difference whether the no name aunt was really her aunt”, either way the story “had a real impact upon her development as a woman.”
Malini Schueller states she believes “Kingston begins with the story of No Name Woman to suggest that all myths and legends are contingent upon some cultural necessity.” She also sees how “there is a logical improbability of her mother having witnessed the attack when she and the aunt were not living in the same household”, but “such an uncertainty allows her the freedom to continue the process of recreating the myth.”
Angela Petit, a professor at the University of Texas El Paso, wrote an article on how the story could be used it in the classroom. She notes the story “helps students to realize that words can order the world around us and form realities of their own.”

Major themes

Cultural views of suicide

Secrecy

Feminism

Ghosts

ee also

The Woman Warrior

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 .
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 .
Schueller, Malini. “‘Questioning Race and Gender Definitions: Dialogic Subversions in The Woman Warrior.” Criticism. 31.4 (Fall 1989) 421-437. Rpt. In 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 .
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.